Camp

I am just amazed! I have been searching all morning for images of a Camp I used to be sentenced to as a kid and I can find no images anywhere on the INTERNET! I have looked everywhere I can think of but no luck. I have a couple of resources I want to use and we’ll see what happens.

Years ago a year or so after my accident, my parents were contacted by the Idaho Easter Seal society, who wanted to know if I would be interested in attending a camp for kids with disabilities located on Lake Coeur d’ Alene, The camp would be for two weeks and I would be flown to Worley Idaho where we would be driven the rest of the way to the campsite. The camp was staffed by physical and occupational therapy students from Washington State University and pre-OT and PT student from University of Idaho. Though it was never said an I only surmised decades later that the real reason for the camp was not all for the joy of the kids, which I am sure THAT was a major reason for the camp but also for a form of respite for the families of these kids with disabilities. What ever the reason I was heading out.

Remember , I inherited my disability, from a motor cycle accident when I was fifteen. I had gone through rehab and returned to school and I really did feel like Stranger in a Strange Land. I was already pretty cynical about life and even though I was excited about the prospects of this thing called camp I had to maintain my “tough” attitude by more then once insinuating I was fort everyone else’s benefit but mine. Two years post injury I had really only one other friend in a wheelchair that I had any real contact and he was more cynical then I. Eugene Diffendaffer was a work of art, a guy who I could only tolerate in small amounts but that is a story for another blog. This trip would expose me to a host of others in wheelchair, canes and other types of disabilities I had no experience with what so ever.

Camp? What the hell was camp anyway? I had never experienced any kind of camp. We were not “camp’ people. I had never experienced such a thing, I had heard of camps where rich kids were sent but this was not in MY universe. So, my first plane ride, ever was a board a mid-sized prop airliner. TV cameras and families at Boise International Air terminal rolled and more then one camera flashed as Easter Seal staffs separated us from our families and hustled us off to a corner of the terminal checked, some interviewed and get ready for the flight. This was more gimps in one place then I had ever seen—e4ven in rehab. There were lots of kids with Cerebral Palsy, blindies, and spinal bifidas and other disabilities way out my ability to categorize. If I remember right they just lifted us out of our chairs and carried us to our seats, strapped us in and we were gone.
(This is kinda fun…I will write more later on Camp Easter Seal especially when I get some images to go with the storey line). So this was a relatively big operation and cannot find any images of the event or place. I m going to open a Face Book group on the camp…soon. Stay tuned you’ll see and it will be glorious.