Taking back control in summer of '96

I was a homesick kid and sleepaway camp was my Mt. Everest. Here's how I survived the climb

- KATIE DAUBS

Reporter Katie Daubs, middle, attends acting camp near her home in rural Lambton County in 1996. The camp didn't make my fears of death go away, Daubs writes, but it taught me how to take some control back.

My parents still talk about the goodbye — how I ran after their car, sobbing.

They knew I’d have fun at theatre camp in the summer of 1996, and I wanted that too. I wore a grey beret over my permed hair, my nails were painted lime green, but I wasn’t as confident as my sartorial exuberance suggested. Truth was, I hadn’t executed a successful sleepover in months, and here I was, at 10 years old, about to spend nearly a week away from home.

Aversion to adventure was new for me. I had been a fairly lighthearted kid until earlier that year, when a boy at my school died.

He was in Grade 8. He didn’t intimidate me like most of the older kids did, with their No Fear T-shirts and brooding coolness. He was kind. I can still picture his smile. When I looked up his grave for this story, there it was, etched into stone, sending me back to January ’96.