When I was asked to write about the Fresh Air Fund — the Star’s annual campaign to help disadvantaged and special needs kids attend summer camp — my first instinct was to think big: kids should go to camp to build fires and make forts, to become true survivors in the woods. But when I thought back to my own childhood summers at an overnight camp near Huntsville Ont., none of these things stood out as particularly important.
Sure, we went on camping trips and learned to portage canoes, or if you couldn’t manage a canoe — then paddles and life jackets (surprisingly more difficult to carry than an 80-pound boat and 10 times more annoying). But these outdoor survival skills, while invaluable, aren’t necessarily what make camp memorable. The small things do. It isn’t building a fire that makes camp what it is. It’s sitting around one and scaring the crap out of each other. In other words, it’s ghost stories.
The camp ghost story that kept me up at night was called “Jacques the Axe Man.” This is the Cole’s Notes version:
Sometime around 1900, somewhere in the forests of Quebec, a lumberjack named Jacques is involved in a terrible accident. He’s cutting down a gigantic tree when he loses his footing and falls down; the tree collapses on top of him, disfiguring half his body and half his face, à la Two Face of Batman fame. Jacques is so angry and bitter about his partial disfigurement he paddles his way one handed to Algonquin Park where for the rest of his life he proceeds to hunt down and murder camp kids on a canoe trip. And what do you know: he has a fondness for turning his axe on campers while they’re relieving themselves on the kaibo — a wooden, open-air outhouse, exactly the type of outhouse that exists in Algonquin Park, where we camped.
The story is inane (why would a psychopath based in Quebec schlep all the way to Ontario to slay his victims?) But it scared us half to death. In fact, one of my friends was so frightened by the tale of Jacques that rather than risk life and limb on the kaibo near our campsite, where the lumberjack, now roughly 102 years old, was supposedly lurking, she decided to play it safe and relieve herself at the doorstep of the tent we shared.
The next morning I nearly stepped in her excrement. And yet, the Jacques the Axeman incident is my favourite memory from camp. Not the nearly stepping in poop part, but everything that came before it: sitting by a fire and taking in a silly ghost story with my peers, feeling scared and safe all at once.
Scared and safe: that’s the magic of the camp experience. It doesn’t just endow kids with practical skills, such as tying knots or building fires. It endows them with emotional strength through teamwork. You don’t have to overcome your fear of the monster under the bed alone; you can do so in a group, giggling and screaming until the sun comes up. Camp allows kids to turn their fears of the unknown and unthinkable into something fun and constructive.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the best swimmer or the most in demand artist of boondoggle bracelets: everyone is equal and equally petrified before a great ghost story.
And even if you’re not afraid of ghosts or psychopathic lumberjacks, but rather, of being away from home for the first time in your life, you don’t have to overcome that fear on your own. At camp, you can do so with the support of your cabin-mates, who are hopefully so much fun, they help you forget that your house and parents even exist.
This summer marks the Toronto Star’s 117th Fresh Air Fund campaign, a tradition that works with 102 camps to enable thousands of kids in the city to attend summer camp. Our fundraising goal is $650,000. With your help, we hope to achieve it. Because all kids, no matter their financial backgrounds, deserve an opportunity to be scared together, to overcome their fears together, and finally, to find independence together — one silly ghost story at a time.
Goal: $650,000
To date: $465,379
How to donate
With your gift, the Fresh Air Fund can help send 25,000 disadvantaged and special needs children to camp. The experience gives these children much more than relief from summer heat; it gives these children a break in life and memories to last a lifetime.
By cheque: Mail to the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund, One Yonge St., Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6
By credit card: Visa, MasterCard, AMEX or Discover, call 416-869-4847
Online: For instant donations, use our secure form at: thestar.com/freshairfund .
The Star does not authorize anyone to solicit on its behalf. Tax receipts will be issued in September.
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