There is a small, rather
uncreatively-named town called North East just around the top of the Chesapeake
Bay. Follow the road through and away toward Turkey Point Lighthouse, and
eventually on the right you'll find a sign for Sandy Hill Camp--not to be
confused with Sandy Cove, a few miles before other side of the peninsula.
Sandy Hill is a wonderful, magical, amazing place in the middle of
nowhere that somehow pulls everywhere into itself, like a
fantastic, world-rearranging magnet. And how besides fantasy do you
explain the phenomenon that is SHC? Hundreds of people have traveled here over
the years from all corners of the globe. In the past two summers that
I've called this place home, the counselors have represented all continents except
Antarctica (although I have no doubt that if polar bears were good with kids,
we'd have them too).
But diversity and culture shock and even
good training can't be the only requirements for such a transformative
experience. I've been certified as a canoeing instructor, a lifeguard, a
sailing instructor, an archery teacher, and a boat driver within two summers,
but who made me a burgeoning expert on my own mind, gave me glimpses of the
corners of my heart and personality that I'd never understood before?
What makes this place a family like no other, with transient members and strife
and no ties between us except this place, this land unto itself that is Sandy
Hill Camp? What calls all of us to this place, draws us as the Holy Grail
of our search for ourselves, to begin sketching out our life's goals, and makes
SHC the locus and defining moment of our quest to understand our own paths?
We are the counselors
of Sandy Hill Camp. We work all but 36 hours a week, sometimes more,
including nights where children cry and throw up and need to pee, and
thunderstorms that rage with lightning and wind and heat that smothers and
humidity that drowns and sun that burns. We work through the exhaustion
that comes, as Naomi puts it, from getting up at "stupid-o'clock in the
morning", fighting colds and flu because we teach and love hundreds of
children a week for weeks on end.
And we do love
those children. We are older siblings and parents and teachers and
friends and we love them. We comfort them and correct them and talk to
them and play with them and instruct them.
We tell them that beaversharks live in the bay and there is an old lady
who practices voodoo and lives in the swamp near the camp. We tell them
we are siblings with people from other countries and that Niall from One
Direction is at camp for the week. Those children believe that our camp
director can protect us from dark wizards because he is a magician and that we
know The Wiggles and that Justin Bieber has a summer home just down the bay.
They collect shells hoping they might be Venetian glass from pirate
ships long ago, and look for Chessie the Sea Monster when the boat turns in
circles. Even the older ones and the cynical ones and the smart ones who
don't really believe us have moments where they glimpse belief through their
doubt because it is all true. Because these myths and legends and
outright lies are all true in a way that is separate from facts and reality.
They are true by virtue of terror and doubt and delight that call forth
the Neverland that is camp, where children can create and remake and understand
themselves anew, because camp transcends the real world they live in.
It is in telling these stories and
loving these children and making this bubble that we can divorce
ourselves from our own reality, allow ourselves, newly-minted near-adults, to
become according to whim something as unlike or as like as the person we always
assumed we were. Because Sandy Hill creates a culture and a dynamic
estranged from the places we all journey away from, it becomes both a
conglomeration of and a wholly parallel universe to the world, be it South
Africa or New Zealand or Maryland or any of a hundred different locales.
It is this freedom from the constraints of reality and the expectations
of our heritage, places of origin, friends and family that allows us visceral feeling
and change regardless of who is watching and waiting to see what we do.
Sandy Hill is this Other Place, something out of a story or legend, and
so we can begin a journey that is something out of story or legend. Our journey
may lead us back safely to the place we started, not much changed but improved
for the trip and with new tales to tell, or it may bring us to newly discovered
qualities we'd never had call to use, nearly unrecognizable to those
who knew us before we set out.
