Horse Camp

In the darkness of the early morning, I turned to my wife and asked, "Tell me again: why am I doing this?"

"Because she's your granddaughter," Jan Still-Lindeman answered.

At 6:30 a.m., this 73-year-old grandfather had been up two full hours, packing and doing chores. Now, the wife and I sped by car toward Atlanta's international airport where I would hook up with this granddaughter. Together, we'd board a plane bound for Buffalo, NY. Our final destination?  Java Center, NY, now just 45 minutes via automobile.

Melissa Adele Lindeman, age 14, was going to camp--a first camp away from her Miami (FL) home and family, numbering a mother, father, two younger sisters, and a playful pony that masquerades as a dog. This wasn't just any camp. It was a horse camp -- where young girls automatically fall in love with big, beautiful, solid-hoofed herbivorous mammals.

All across the United States, the camping ritual was being repeated as some 10 million young women and men traded the comforts of home for a summertime retreat where, for a considerable packet of family inheritance, they would learn a skill or a sport, lose weight, or simply enjoy the outdoors with new-found friends.

Our odyssey had begun last May 13, when an electronic message made absolutely certain there was but one answer a grandfather could return. "I have this crisis," began the oldest of six grandchildren. "I found Heaven on earth up in New York state. My Mom and Dad think it's too far. Their (sic) afraid of the flights; I'd have to switch planes in Atlanta. So my life rests in your hands, Grandpa. You and only you can save me. My fingers are shaking, and my eyes are watering as I type this."

Our trip to New York went without incident. By early afternoon Melissa- the-camper was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and swapping biographies with girls from Birmingham (AL) and Rye, NY. She also had been assigned a cabin, introduced to an outhouse and horse barns, where she soon would be shoveling horse debris.

The committed, energetic owner/operator of Sprucelands Camp, a remote corner in tree-shrouded, dusty, western New York State, is Eileen Thompson. She is as familiar around horses as she is adolescent campers and remains scrupulously factual as she explains, "We do not have fancy college dorms; we're a camp with rustic cabins."

The Army offered what I judged "rustic" barracks. Sprucelands, by comparison, is Spartan; yet Melissa saw only beauty, and returned a one-word answer summing up her adventure: "Awesome!"

"While the kids are learning," Eileen Thompson had told me, "Sprucelands stresses the beauty of relationships with friends and horses alike."

When next we saw our granddaughter, wife Jan and I thumbed through two packets of camp snapshots. Several portraits featured Aldy, a gelding identified as "My horse." Frankly, I grew jealous of the love accorded this animal, a veritable stranger.

The intergenerational contract, the one binding grandparents to grandchildren, is special and marked by devotion. I clearly remember entering the Jacksonville, FL hospital room shortly after my granddaughter's birth. Later, I began recording: "Melissa Moments."

I wrote of a T-shirt, "Here Comes Trouble" and continually discovered misplaced cheerios among couch cushions. I recorded how bedtime was the launching of a battle of wills, one my physician-son and his wife invariably lost.

One entry reads, "She giggles, she crawls, she's into merry mischief constantly and a smile sets off a collective meltdown. Indeed, it lights up entire rooms."

"It is in your power to bring out the best human qualities in your grandkids," writes Dr. Arthur Kornhaber, an authority on successful grandparenting. "Not surprisingly, most children are naturally sweet to devoted grandparents. It is with you that they learn to treasure the bliss that comes from being considerate and generous."

We grandparents, this psychiatrist teaches, must perform as family historians. We are a link to the past, and the preserver of family traditions. "Being a grandparent," he writes, "in many ways makes it possible to live the most joyous part of your life all over again."