Bradford, Bradford Woods

Everywhere we go/ people always ask us/ who we are/ and where we come from. So we tell them: we're from the Woods. Bradford, Bradford Woods. And if they can't here us, WE SING A LITTLE LOUDER!!!...

Okay, okay. I know it's too early to start doing the good-old-days thing about summer camp. Approximately three months too early, if you wanna get technical about it. But I have Spring fever. I have it so bad, I can feel it in my toes -- just itchin' to be bare in the grass, these toes -- and when I get Spring fever I think of summer as kind of a natural progression, you know, and I cannot think of summer without thinking of Camp Riley and Bradford Woods.

These woods are friends of mine, whose roots do twine, and twine, and twine ...

And so now you get to hear some stories, like: "This one time, at crip camp..."

No. Really. *Ahem*.

The first time I saw brochures for Camp Riley, I was ten years old, and I thought my mother was sending me to boarding school. Seriously. I really did. She threatened it all the time, telling me all about these places where parents sent their bad little girls to get "whipped into shape." The stories she concocted made boarding school sound a million times worse than living with her, and I believed them without question. At that age, it had not yet occurred to me that my mother could lie -- she was God; her word was Gospel; the end. If she said I was bad, then I was bad, even if I couldn't quite figure out how or why. If she said boarding school was a place where they beat kids three times a day and four times on Saturdays to get all the badness out of them, so it was. And thus I lived in never-ending fear of the threat of boarding school -- so much so that when my mother called me into the kitchen one long, golden summer afternoon and I came pounding through the house with my braid undone and grass stains on my shoes and saw the Riley brochures spread out on top of the deep freezer (out of the corner of my eye, before I'd even managed to reign in my momentum), my heart stopped dead in my chest, turned to stone, and crashed down onto my feet. I thought I was doomed: that's it, I was done, nice knowin' ya. It felt like I had been sentenced to die -- but as I'd come to find out, I was getting an opportunity to live.

How do you describe the safest place you've ever been? I was safer at camp than I had ever been in my own home, my own bed. It took a full week for that to sink in even the slightest bit -- that no one was going to beat my brains out of my head the second my feet hit the floor. In subsequent years, I knew I was safe the second we pulled into Bradford Woods, and it was like letting out a breath I'd been holding for eleven months. It always felt like coming home after a long, long journey and being surrounded by beloved things again. In Bradford Woods I was a different child: I scrambled out of bed every morning running full steam ahead; I couldn't wait to see, touch, do, everything. I shed timidity and shame and became loud, boisterous, and confident. "Natural leader," said the papers the cabin counselors had to fill out at the end of the 12-day sessions. "Tiffany has the ability to motivate everyone around her." I laughed. I sang ditties. I led ditties. At vespers and campfires in the amphitheater, I stood on stage:

Heya Mister, Hiya Mister, wanna buy some cookies?

At dinners, I'd start food fights that would end with empty wheelchairs scattered across the room and a whole gaggle of kids scrambling around on the floor, covered in Jell-o, crawling under the tables and shrieking with laughter. I did the table chants right along with the rest of them, pounding the wood with my fists and shouting:

We're table number one, number one, number one -- we're table number one, where's table two?!
Round the tables you must go -- you can't dance!


I learned so much about myself at camp, without even knowing it was happening. There were so many firsts: I climbed my first tree (yes, Riley is so freakin' cool that crippled kids climb trees -- on belay, of course) played my first game of no blood-no foul street ball in the parking lot behind the dining hall, rode my first horse, took a kayak across the lake by myself for the first -- and only -- time, and even had my first kiss. (It was a scandalous twelve-year old romance; his name was Daniel. We deliberately paced ourselves ahead of everyone else on the way home from the lake that night so he could kiss me at the Overlook. All our friends, of course, were totally in on the plan. The girls had even snitched a few extra treats from the dining hall freezer so we could stay up all night and I could tell them all about it. I had butterflies in my stomach for days, but I was widely regarded as wise and all-knowing after that.)

The most amazing thing about Riley wasn't that I finally fit in, that everyone around me knew what it was like to be stuck in a body that didn't do all the things I wanted it to do -- though that was pretty high on the list. I was raised in a small town; the only other disabled people I ever really saw were the two other kids who went to the swimming pool with me every week during gym time at school and the kids who happened to be at Methodist Hospital when I was there getting prodded, poked, x-rayed and otherwise examined. Riley, then, was like some spectacular alternate universe where I had always belonged; my home planet. And that would have been enough, but then I actually got to be a kid -- to act like a kid, think like a kid, play like a kid. The food fights, the skits and ditties, the stolen kiss at the Overlook -- those things were my childhood, which I got to experience 12 days at a time out of every year. I packed in as much as I could: late-night toilet-papering raids on neighboring cabins; illegal dessert raids to steal ice cream and gelatis from the infirmary freezer; being one of 12 or so girls packed onto the art studio porch tie-dying our bras and panties, or spread out on a beach blanket at dusk watching fireworks explode over the lake, or holding a contest to see who could eat the most fajitas in one sitting; fanned out on the Common playing Capture the Flag, sitting in the cabin great-room at night braiding each others hair and singing "Jack and Diane," or "Like a Prayer," or Piano Man," or maybe meticulously applying lipstick again and again as part of taking "How to be a Perfect Kisser" lessons from one of the girls who was a bit older. I remember a few nights having a water fight in the bathroom so incredibly, well, watery, that the drains in the floor couldn't keep up with the job and we slogged around ankle deep. (And when it started to recede, there was a competition to see whose wheelchair could hydroplane the furthest, but the counselors put a stop to that one.)

I said goodbye to Riley when I was seventeen. Technically I was eligible to attend for one more year, but I had plans to be long gone by then. I knew I'd start college the first summer session that popped up, the faster to get the hell out of Dodge. At the last closing campfire I ever attended, I got a very high honor: the Camp Riley Tom Kovacks Memorial Award, presented  each year to a graduating camper who had "expressed the most spirit and enthusiasm during his or her time at camp." It was in a beautiful mahogany frame -- thick parchment paper with gilded letters and the signatures of the camp director and activities coordinator. They put it in my hands, and I was awed: stunned that the girl who had no voice outside of Bradford Woods could truly be seen as someone worthy of such a thing and what it meant. When I had gazed at it rapturously for awhile, I left it in the care of one of my counselors and went off by myself to the darkness at the edge of the amphitheater. Banjo, the camp's Golden Retriever, found me there and sat down next to me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my face into his fur and cried, quietly. I was sad, and grateful, and gearing myself up for one more year of the fight that was my usual life. And Banjo sat there until I was done, huffing patiently.

I have not been back to Bradford Woods since. I would love to go -- they have Riley Reunions every summer, and attending one of those would feel like going back to my true home again. But they cost a certain amount of money, and then there's travel, and then the question of who I would take as my guest: people can't just drop their responsibilities and go jaunting off to BW with me for a week. But I hope I get to return someday, and stand at the Overlook, and watch a campfire roar at the amphitheater, and great the woods whose roots do twine, because Bradford, Bradford Woods has a piece of my heart.

Everywhere we go/people always ask us/who we are/and where we come from. So we tell them: we're from the Woods -- Bradford, Bradford Woods. And if they can't hear us/we stop singing.