Camp Dead Whale

Their eyes roll back into deep crevasses, white marbles float behind fluttering lashes and fluttering sound within the lobby at the Institute. Their necks stretch for recognition, for guidance and instructions, as they dance their heads for reassurances of control. They sit in chairs or stand against walls, white canes appended alongside these children who have been inflicted with disease or abnormalities at birth, are waiting in muted choir.

They are going on a trip and will take ferry across the inlet to an Island paradise, to mulct nature and consequences, to pilfer things meant only for the sighted and, until then, reserved only by divinity and for not one less perfect. Sabrina waits amongst them and her daddy smears away the wetness that has uncontrollably escaped his throat and providence. He wants to leave immediately and tell them there's been a big mistake, but Sabrina has already found a chair to sit in, a familiar comfort has chastened her within fluttering lashes and fluttering sounds within the lobby at the Institute for the Blind, a deviation assented by no one.

Some arrest in complete darkness, while Sabrina nervously shudders her head, monitoring her surroundings and the other teens registered for camp. She is wondering which girl will be her roomate, since the rooms are maintained for two guests each. Her daddy wonders, too, and if Sabrina will need to chaperone a white caned kid with white marbled eyes. He wants to flee and desperately questions Sabrina, "are you sure you want to go?" But she is too excited to take trip to the lodge, where she will dwell by the water and float and kayate down streams that snake into the salty taste of the ocean. She is so bloody brave his heart aches.

This damned conflict restrains him from utter sorrow, yet he knows deep down inside his fear this is where she belongs. He lets go and waves one last wave, as the bus pulls out into the busy streets of Vancouver, winding down romantic traffic toward the ferry docks, until Sabrina can no longer see him. She could never see him.

She telephones us the instant they land on the beach and are escorted to their quarters. Our cell phone we gave her is fully charged and we anticipate it's ring, but not as quickly as this, to the exact minute of the itinerary of events. She already sounds different. She sounds older, like confidence. Sabrina says she is safe and that we are not to worry about her, it's a beautiful place and she has friends just like her, "eyes just like me, mom", and there's a hot tub and my friends are Kayla and Duck Boy.

In the background I hear faint sounds "quack, quack" and am convinced she is amongst retards. Blind retards. I whisper one last time, "do you want to come home?" Nod once for yes, two for no. God damned no good for nothing telephones. I accept her silence as an embarrassing conversation she must let go, and "mom, don't be afraid".

Wake up call is 7:00am, to ready the day for adventure and new beginnings. They blast the stereo system into each room, boom-boom-boom, announcers with military overtones, and military threats. Or so she thinks. She doesn't want to wake this early, but reluctantly drags herself out of bed towards the smell of breakfast and toast and jam. It's almost like blind kids can smell the skin of bacon a mile away, even under the cover of wild flowers and drift wood and dead whales.

Sabrina will stuff her belly with enough sustenance to last the entire day, enduring ocean cold waters, and computer-aid labs, and roomate switches and glitches, until she is ready to telephone her parents good-night. Today was a good day and she is tired. Her eyes are tired.

The next phone call is more frantic, as she annoyingly reports that someone has stolen her pyjama bottoms. She's almost blaming me, angered about this turn of event and what should I do now and make things right and it's all my fault. I'm beginning to feel pissed off. She says the girl who switched rooms could have taken them, the girl who is completely blind. I'm calming Sabrina down by telling her it's possible the girl didn't know, after all, she's deaf. Sabrina is momentarily silenced, formulating my comment and how harebrained that seems, eventually concluding how foolish she is being. She is searching her room while we speak, while the new roommate listens in on our conversation, and I immediately understand the Freudian aspect of this phone call.

The fact Sabrina can call her parents, furthermore, the action of searching, is far more revealing and enviable driven to someone who cannot seek out a garment at all, notwithstanding dial a tiny cell phone. Sabrina is spreading her wings, demonstrating how much of a peacock she really is, and finally reports , "Oh, there they are". The fact that she's a slob didn't even figure into the equation, but I had my suspicions.

I'm feeling a bit sorry for the girl who moved out, since Sabrina ransacked through her luggage, shovelling out her belongings in search of pyjama bottoms. I now envision some teenaged girl tapping her cane along corridors, wearing missmatched apparelle, items previously neatly packed to aid in her daily wardrobe selection. But Sabrina is not familiar with these sort of protocols, having some sight has excluded her from a level of correctness only the visually impaired can dispute or repute. Sabrina has never considered herself visually impaired, she has never learned the ordinance of the blind.

She is almost thirteen years old and her lodge-mates are sixteen, seventeen, older and wiser. But Sabrina has better vision than most, better advantage than most. Not everything is brailled and she knows it, now. She has never been amongst her fellowship, has always been lesser than the sighted kids at her school, being teased having to use special soccer balls, or basketballs adapted with bells within them, to rely on other sensory perceptions to play the game, to enable her to be in the game at all. She realizes now she has many bells in her eyes which have, hands down, appointed her a leader, a luminary despite her youth and immaturity, Sabrina is someone to be reckoned with.

And she will use this time well because the week will soon be over and she will eventually return to the life she truly resides, the life of preconceptions. This week she will savour in all her taste and smells and touch, she will soak in every moment of being what it is like to be the sighted one, the bully, the moderator, the wounded, the weak. She will become Sabrina at twelve years old.

In the morning the staff will bang pots and pans and yell for the teens to awaken, the dawn of a new day is approaching, and in the confronting likeliness of her mommy, Sabrina yells from within the warmth of her blankets, "We're blind, not deaf!". I know she will be well in any circumstance, any situation, any darkness.

This kid is my kid and I'm not afraid anymore.