Rick's Camping Trip (1998)

Falling into the Stream: Rick’s Third-Grade Camping Trip.
1998

David B. Schwartz

I saw her when she fell. She had climbed tentatively up the steep embankment to where the other children were lined up excitedly for their turn on the swing. They would tightly grasp the rope I had suspended from the pulley, then launch themselves off the edge, whizzing down the suspended rope over the streamlet below to the bank where I stood. Screaming in happy excitement, they would fly down to where I waited.

It was clear that she was going to have a more difficult time doing this than some of her other peers; no doubt that is why she had held back. But she didn’t stay away; she had the courage to come over from the campsite and get herself to the top. Her classmates crowded around her showing her how to hold the rope, how to push off, encouraging her. She kicked herself free of the edge, rode down a few feet in the air, and then she fell. She wasn’t holding onto the rope tightly enough, and she fell like a stone to the rocks below, levering face-down into the water and the rocks. I saw it as if in slow motion, fifteen feet beyond my grasp; she lay inert in the stones and frigid water.

I and Rick, her old first-grade teacher and the camp leader, sprung into the creek at the same time, lifting her and helping her to the dry ground, as she gasped air and started to cry. We checked her over carefully; her arm, her forehead; miraculously, she seemed all right, just frightened and cold and wet and shaken. As we sat her down on a dry spot of mossy earth and I put my jacket over her, Rick knelt down beside her. He didn’t merely pat her on the shoulder or the head; he enveloped her in his arms. Rick is a big man and his arms are strong. He had no doubt held her when she was little. His hug was a familiar one. She cried and shook. He was speaking to her softly. He didn’t let her go. I noticed that he was not only reassuring her, but he was praising her - she had fallen so well! She really knew how to fall without hurting herself! And this was true. She easily could have broken her arm or cracked her head falling from such a height, but she had managed to protect herself. Rick held her for a long, long, time. His daughter clambered down from the hillside and put her arms around her friend too. And then I came over and put my hands on her shoulders as well. The other children made little noises of concern while the grownups took care of her, wondering if she was all right.

Only when she had gathered herself and was all right again did Rick unwrap his arms and help her upright, commending her into the care of a friend to walk her back to the campsite. Word of her fall had reached the camp before she did, and a parent met her to make sure that she hadn’t sustained a concussion, taking her over to another parent who was a physician to carefully examine her. She was all right. Someone else got her dry clothes, got her a cup of hot chocolate, and seated her by the fire to warm up. In a little while, she was all right again. She was just a little sore.


In this simple story I caught a glimpse of something remarkable. For this is not how these stories usually go. Often, instead, they go like this: the child, already painfully aware that attempts like this usually don’t go well for her, falls the same way. But instead of the soft voices of concern of her classmates, there is the cruel judgment of one’s peers for someone weaker, or not as accomplished, or merely different. The teacher picks her up, but she is merely dusted off, settled, perhaps offered a few tissues, and enjoined not to cry. It may be very subtle, but the child does not miss that she is not in some way accomplished, desirable, or loved.

I will sit in my office this week and conduct psychotherapy with adults who are struggling with deep depression, or debilitating anxiety, or other painful problems in their lives. In the course of our careful work, I may eventually hear such a story as this; the story that didn’t go the right way. It will not be this story alone, perhaps, but will be a series of them, taking place over the years, that will cement a conviction that they are clumsy, different, not really quite loveable. When they tell me the story of how they fell, again, and how everyone laughed, once again, they will start to cry softly.

Standing there in the woods watching Rick hold that little girl and whisper to her of her success in falling correctly, I realized, somewhat awestruck, that I was seeing such a traumatic incident smoothed out, erased before my eyes at its very moment of origin.

Rick has been teaching first-grade children at Londonderry school for twenty-five years. In that time, he has taken groups of children to the same campground perhaps that many times. One of his former students, Chip, now in college, showed up with his sleeping bag to help out. He remembered the same hikes, the same games, the same way Rick was with the children as he was today. And he remembered the caring, loving, atmosphere of Londonderry with which Rick and his co-founder Rhoda inoculated every child who grew up in that school, every teacher who taught there, every parent who went along on a camping trip. It was not an accident that the children did not laugh when their classmate fell. That does not happen at Londonderry, and every new generation of pre-schoolers learns why.

Later, talking to Rick, I was asking about the caring community that he and Rhoda and the other teachers and parents and students had built over the years. Londonderry was not what the “outside world” was like, he readily agreed. This was a rare experience for many. But to experience the possibilities of being in a place where one was safe, and loved, and secure, whether a young child or a parent with their own grown-up realities, was to see that living this way together was not an impossible thing. Somewhere, in there, one might develop a taste, even a hunger, for living together in this way. And they might well carry this vision into the world in which love and caring are not held in such high importance.

For the children especially, though, like this young girl, the results would be deepest. For her, she would probably never really be aware of the fact that her teacher, with greater skill than a psychotherapist, had simply wiped away what might otherwise be a searing emotional experience that could cause her to be guarded and self-protected her whole life. She might never be aware that he had probably done this countless times during her childhood. She might not recall that other teachers and countless community members over the years had followed Rick’s example, and Rhoda’s, and those who had learned from them. It would be in what was not in memory that the greatest gifts would be recorded. She could simply be free.