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Smiling through the tears – Camp Comfort helps kids grow from grief to gladness

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On the zipline

Last weekend, as on most summer days, the Rocky Mountain Village Easter Seals Camp at Empire Junction was alive with children’s shouts and laughter.

Dozens of kids between the ages of 6 and 12 spent two glorious days hiking Clear Creek Canyon’s green heights, singing time-tested campfire songs, eating hearty camp chow and bunking down with new friends on rustic camp beds. To grown-up eyes, it all looked wonderfully innocent, carefree and life-affirming – a Norman Rockwell picture of idyllic childhood memories.

But there was plenty on last weekend’s camp schedule besides horseback riding and watercolors. For instance, each camper was asked to describe how they felt when their secure little worlds exploded.

“In my shoulders I felt afraid,” said a pony-tailed angel named Emily, who lost her dad to cancer last year. Maybe 8 years old, Emily wore pink socks and an over-sized pink sweatshirt. Like the eight others in her “Chipmunks” group, she’d tried to plot the course of her personal tsunami on an outline of her thin 4-foot frame traced on an Emily-sized piece of paper. She spoke clearly, but seemed unsure of whether she wanted to giggle or to cry.

“In my arms I felt sleepy,” Emily continued. “In my mouth I wanted to yell.”

One at a time, the other children in Rocky Mountain Village’s picturesque Genesee Hall took their turn, sometimes confidently, sometimes quietly, sometimes tearfully, reliving the darkest hour of their darkest day. The small audience listened with sincere interest. It was ground they knew well.

“In my stomach I felt worried.”

“I felt cold in my legs.”

“My heart is where I felt lonely.”

After half an hour of intense personal revelation, the Chipmunks packed up their tracings, put on their shoes and ran chattering out the door. It was time to try the camp’s zip-line, and serious matters blew instantly away in the clean mountain breeze. That’s how it goes at Camp Comfort.

“Probably the most striking thing about kids is that, unlike adults, they can alternate their grief,” explained Camp Comfort co-director Wendy Snow, a social worker with the Mount Evans Hospice. “They can spend an hour talking and crying about the death of a parent or sibling, then turn right around and go fishing, and really have fun doing it. They’re amazing.”

For that matter, Camp Comfort is amazing. Now in its 13th year, the Mount Evans Hospice program is one of precious few in the country specifically designed to help children deal with grief. Today, the program runs two weekends a summer and is attracting favorable notice from coast to coast. In theory, the camp costs $150 per weekend per child but, in practice, virtually no one is ever turned away.

“Sally Wandling is the person who really got Camp Comfort started, and she used to say that children are the forgotten grievers,” Snow said. “It’s true. When a parent’s spouse dies, they’re often overwhelmed by their own grief and all the other stuff that comes after a death, and the child’s grief gets forgotten. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just what happens.”

To supplement the natural restorative powers of fresh air, lush forests and soaring vistas, each camper is issued a short workbook to fill out. Called “Healing My Heart,” it not only gives surviving parents a crucial road-map to what’s on their child’s mind, it’s often a grieving child’s first opportunity to assess their own situation.

“It makes them think about what’s happened, and how it’s affected them,” said Snow’s co-director, Barb Lamperski. “Kids don’t really know how to talk about their grief, and in schools they don’t have anyone to talk to who will ask the questions and listen to the answers. At Camp Comfort, they get to talk to other kids who’re going through what they’re going through. It makes losing a loved one seem more normal and less scary.”

Down at the fishing dock, where a handful of volunteers from Evergreen Trout Unlimited were hosting their customary and decidedly low-impact fishing clinic, Littleton twins Jeff and Joe, who lost their mom rather suddenly to illness, looked perfectly normal and didn’t seem scared at all. Tall, red-haired and 13, the brothers took turns casting into a well-stocked trout pond. After only a few throws, Joe hooked a spirited 10-inch rainbow, proudly admired it for a moment or two, and then released it back into the water.

“I like all the activities, and I really liked the zip-line,” said Joe, his soft smile at once genuine and tentative. “You get to do a lot of stuff you don’t normally do. It’s fun.”

“It was pretty tough at first,” admitted Jeff. “When you have to tell your story, it’s really tough to talk about. But once you get through it and you hear everybody else’s stories, it’s nice to know that other kids have gone through the same thing.”

At Camp Comfort, that willingness to speak frankly about tragic loss and suffocating grief can be disconcerting, even shocking, to the uninitiated. But if the campers are candid about their broken hearts, they don’t dwell on them. Pain is merely an overfull piece of baggage they share in common, and sharing its weight between them lightens the load for all. But it could be hard to hear, just the same.

“The rules all changed, and everything was different. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I was sad, but it kind of felt nice that people who didn’t used to like me were nicer to me.”

“It’s nice when people say you look just like them.”

One of the most important amenities Camp Comfort offers its guests is a ready-made buddy. At check-in on Friday evening, each child was assigned a dedicated guide and companion to help orient them to camp life, listen to whatever needed listening to, and generally behave as a good buddy should.

“Leaving home after a parent dies can be scary, and we want the kids to feel safe and secure and to know that we’re going to take good care of them,” Snow explained. “The buddies are theirs for the weekend, and their only job is to devote all of their attention to the child and do whatever they want to do. Buddies are all volunteers, and they aren’t counselors, per se. They’re here to be the child’s friend.”

And that’s exactly what they looked like. Walking side-by-side and sometimes hand-in-hand, little people and their big people were everywhere seen smiling and chatting like old chums. Jeff’s old chum happened to be Golden resident Pat O’Connell, who’s finishing up his 6th year as a Camp Comfort buddy. While O’Connell freely admitted that a free weekend at camp is its own reward, he wasn’t in it for the s’mores.

“I had a friend who passed away many years ago, and another friend said I should do Camp Comfort,” explained Pat, standing just out of range of Jeff’s flailing hook. “It’s a good perspective re-set. It really makes you re-focus on what’s important.”

Across the way, the Owls assembled in the art cabin to paint colorful pictures of everyone in their lives who still loved and cared for them. With just two days to reach diverse wounded psyches, Camp Comfort takes a layered approach that seeks as much to engage as to educate. Once the markers come out, kids who could hardly utter a sound in the feelings workshop become eloquent in bright blues and reds and yellows.

“Children express themselves in different ways,” Snow said, “so we reach out to them in different ways.”

Somewhere down the valley, beyond the aspen groves to the east, a sudden eruption of squeals and hollering down the valley indicated where the “Eagle” group was trying out Rocky Mountain Village’s combination climbing tower and zip-line platform. One by one, the fledglings climbed about 25 feet to that high aerie, hooked onto a stout metal cable and took wing. Within the space of 100 yards, screams of utter terror became screams of ecstatic triumph and ended as the kind of joyous, non-specific screams that nobody over 18 can truly comprehend. But is pure exhilaration and childish delight really pertinent to Camp Comfort’s worthy mission? Absolutely.

“If this was just a grief camp where everybody sat around and cried, nobody would come, and it wouldn’t do the kids any good,” said Snow, as another shrieking meteor zzzinged overhead. “Fun is a great way to deal with grief, because it gets you out of your down-and-out mood. And it’s a good lesson for the kids that it’s okay to have fun even if you’re sad. It’s okay to feel happy.”

If smiles and good cheer are anything to go by, Camp Comfort works. Nearly 50 young children, each with a very good reason to feel angry, depressed and bitter, went home after last weekend’s adventure far stronger and healthier than when they arrived.

“The other day a mom called me,” Snow said. “She told me her son hadn’t cried since his father had died, but when she picked him up from camp he started talking about his dad and crying as soon as he got in the car. They talked about him and cried the whole way home. She was just so glad and relieved. What happens here is so important, and so wonderful.”

If Snow has a filing cabinet full of success stories to warm her during the winter months, the story that most closely concerns Evergreen resident Bill Lathrop is his buddy Trevor’s. Trevor was just 10 years old when his big brother, Tyler, was struck and killed by a motorist while riding his bicycle near his Arvada home two years ago.

“It happened on the last day of school,” Trevor said.

Last weekend was Trevor’s second tour at Camp Comfort, the same as Bill.

“The first year was really hard, but it’s easier this year,” said Trevor, softly but steadily. “I like having a buddy, and because I was here before I can help the new kids. It’s a little scary, at first.

“I wasn’t really sure I wanted to come here the first time, but now I’m glad I did. It really helped. I feel a lot better.”

The scourge of spurge – Naturalists battling for future of Idledale Lake

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A Work of Purest Bushwah

Since 2011, hampered by flagging public interest and too few willing hands, the Idledale Naturalists Audubon Society (TINAS) has been locked in a losing battle against an aggressive enemy. Now, 16 years later, the group is marshalling a last-ditch, do-or-die campaign to reclaim Idledale’s natural places from determined and resilient invaders.

“We’re calling it ‘Weed-Free in ‘23,’ and it’s long overdue,” says Hilltop resident Herb Grassley, who took over as the society’s noxious weed coordinator in 2021. “We’ve already lost Idledale Lake, Marmot Meadow is on the brink, and we’re losing hundreds more acres of open space every year.”

For more than five decades, TINAS has been leading the charge against the tide of noxious weed species flooding the mountain area. A mere 20 years ago, the group could count on up to 100 volunteers a year to participate in its annual Community Weed Day at Idledale Lake. Many hands make light work, and one morning each summer generally sufficed to control such noisome trespassers as diffuse knapweed and musk thistle, thus preserving the lakeshores for beneficial, wildlife-friendly native grasses and flowering shrubs. That all started to change in 2011.

“That’s the year we got a double-whammy,” Grassley says. “First, leafy spurge found its way up here from somewhere and started popping up all over the place, and then Dalmatian toadflax got a toehold on the hillside above the warming hut.”

Fighting the same fire on hundreds of fronts, the Humboldt County Weed and Pest Department could provide only minimal assistance, the forest service lacked the funding necessary to mount the all-out assault required to combat the threat, and the Idledale Parks and Recreation District lacked the infrastructure needed for effective action. That left TINAS standing on the front lines, virtually alone.

“We jumped right on it, but toadflax is a perennial that can grow back quickly from root fragments, and leafy spurge roots go down 15 feet, making them almost impossible to eradicate,” Grassley recalls. “Within two years, we were fighting them from the dam to Greystone Manor. It was disheartening for everybody, and I think people just gave up.”

 

The weed-choked shores of Idledale Lake

 

Over the next several years, various efforts to stem the toxic onslaught quickly dissolved amid institutional turf wars, funding controversies and bitter methodological controversies. Public interest in weed control reached its lowest ebb in 2011, the same year tamarisk first reared its ugly head in Idledale Lake’s western shallows.

Remarkably rugged and aggressive, the tamarisk’s habit of leaching salt into its surroundings quickly decimated the thick stands of cattails north of Idledale Lake Lodge. Within 5 years tamarisk had supplanted nearly all of the wetland plant species, leaving the broad expanse of water from the lodge to the warming house the thick, green algae soup it is today, and costing Idledale Water customers up to $50 a year in increased purification costs. Deprived of their accustomed fare, ducks and geese all but abandoned the lake, as anyone who’s visited those weed-choked shores recently will attest.

With increasingly fewer hands to tackle a rapidly growing problem, field bindweed daisy soon established itself around the Lake Lodge parking lot. A relentless opportunist, the invader required just two years to erase the native grasses and, by 2014, covered the lake’s picnic area in dense, unbroken mats. While not unattractive, the fast-growing weed is inedible to birds, hastening the area’s feathery exodus.

“I think newcomers to Idledale would probably be surprised to learn that Idledale Lake used to be popular with birdwatchers,” Grassley says. “These days, you might see a half-dozen kinds of birds there, on a good day.”

Perhaps most troubling, field bindweed offers both palatable food and excellent cover for rodents. Relatively safe beneath the plant’s pretty pink and white flowers, mouse and vole populations boomed. County authorities blame the surge for at least 8 documented cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome traced back to Idledale between 2017 and last year, as well as for the 2020 tularemia outbreak that sent four members of one local family to the hospital.

The end of Idledale Lake’s usefulness as a public amenity came two years ago, in 2021, when inoffensive-looking myrtle spurge completed its conquest of the lake’s southern shore. Crowding the trail and once-grassy peninsulas, myrtle spurge’s milky sap causes human skin to blister on contact and can be lethal to those with allergic sensitivities.

“When I was in high school, the track team used to train by running around the lake,” Grassley says. “Back then, the only thing you had to worry about was getting caught in somebody’s fishing line. Anymore, you’d almost have to be crazy to want to walk or fish at Idledale Lake.”

While hikers, joggers and mountain-bikers can still safely stretch their legs on Marmot Meadow’s extensive trail system, even that wild haven is succumbing to noxious invaders. At about the same time that field bindweed was crowning itself King of Idledale Lake, oxeye daisy was ascending the throne along Idledale Parkway. Despite dogged control efforts by Humboldt County Open Space, including yearly burnings, the durable perennial dominates approximately 75 percent of Marmot Meadow and adjacent Elk Glen.

A former ornamental that slipped the leash and is gaining ground throughout the foothill counties, oxeye daisy’s expansive root system and stunning reproductive capacities make it a formidable opponent. While pretty, however, the plant doesn’t appeal to deer and elk, which long ago moved on to greener pastures.

“The other day, my son asked me why they call it Marmot Meadow,” says Grassley, shaking his head, sadly. “I told him there used to be marmots in it all the time, but I don’t think he believed me.”

If the situation is dire, Grassley says it isn’t hopeless. Restoring Idledale Lake to its former splendor won’t be easy, but it can be done.

“If we’d had the support to deal with these threats while they were still small, the problems would have been manageable,” Grassley explains. “Now, we’re facing a huge challenge that can only be overcome by a serious commitment from the entire community.

“It might be years before the lake is back to what it was 20 years ago, but, if we do nothing, then one of the best parts of living in Idledale will really be gone for good.”

Used by permission of Evergreen Newspapers