Jack Kerouac

"What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

my memory of a extraordinary camp

Almost ten years ago, I went to a week-long camp during two summers with some kids from my school. It wasn't an average camp; we went there to help mentally handicapped adults have a good time. It was really difficult for some people who didn't know what they were getting into. It was a life-changing experience, but ten years later, it feels so long ago, that it sometimes doesn't seem like it happened. An essay I read this morning brought everything back though. It's Henri Nouwen's "Adam's Peace." It's about when he got to know a mentally handicapped man named Adam. Henri went from teaching at Yale, Harvard, and other ivy-league schools, to working at L'Arche in Toronto. He learned more about life from Adam than anything else he was ever taught in school or elsewhere. It brought back so many memories of spending those two weeks with the people at that camp. The first two days were so difficult because what you came to expect was nothing at all like it was. It was so much more difficult than we ever thought it would be. It was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life. You came and did what you could, but I always felt like we couldn't do enough. I know they came to the camp every week, but they had different people caring for them each week. Of course the staff on hand was consistent, but it's hard to build up a relationship with someone and then have to leave at the end of the week. The most wonderful part about the whole time I spent there, was one look that the woman I was helping gave me. She was incapacitated and couldn't speak to me. But the whole week I talked with her, took her on walks in her wheelchair, fed her, and just sat with her watching the sunsets. At the end of the week, she looked right into my eyes. Without her saying anything, I knew that it was her way of communicating how much she appreciated the time I spent with her. In Henri Nouwen's essay, he describes that Adam taught him that the only way to find true peace, is to look not of this world. God is the only being that can give peace that transcends all things. I could definitely feel God at work at that camp, and I would go back in a heartbeat.