There’s no place like Camp Harkness.
It’s not just the setting, though its location on 102 verdant acres on Long Island Sound is certainly stunning.
No, it’s the people who spending their summers working as counselors, lifeguards, and cooks there, all for the benefit of the 34,000 disabled people a year who visit.
“It’s the only place like it that I know,” said Cecelia Roberts, a nurse who has worked at the camp every summer since 1977.
There are two aspects to Camp Harkness: the camps that cost between $300 and $700 and the parts that are open for people who just want to use the beach.
Several organizations, including United Cerebral Palsy and ARC of Southeastern Connecticut, run week-long vacation camp programs at the site with its four “villages” of cabins and bungalows.
Campers arrive on Sundays and stay through Friday, days during which they can garden and take part in basketball and legendary kickball games.
There are also boating classes, cooking, a bonfire or two, and day trips to the mall. Every Tuesday evening there is a dance, and every Wednesday a carnival.
And, of course, there’s the beach.
Vicki Severin, the camp director, said the beaches are all wheelchair-accessible, and the camp has a fleet of chairs with all-terrain tires for easy mobility on the sand.
Severin said many who aren’t taking part in a camp program often come to just go to the beach.
“There’s freedom here for the people that come,” she said. “For instance, if you bring an autistic child to a regular beach, some people might stare; here everyone understands.”
It’s the beach that drew lifeguard Megan Vandenbosch, a Waterford native who is now a teacher in New Hampshire, to Camp Harkness.
She was looking for work the summer before she went to college, when a friend told her there was a lifeguard opening at the camp.
That was eight years ago.
“I love it here,” Vandenbosch said. “Just seeing everyone here enjoying their vacation...it’s a really cool place.”
Vandenbosch said working at the camp changed the direction of her career; when she got to Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, she decided to study special education.
Bonnie Sullivan, Camp Harkness assistant director, said that working at the camp can be life-changing.
“It’s amazing how much it can change your life,” she said. “You grow up and get a better idea of what’s important in life.”
Sullivan, who was helping to scoop ice cream at the Wednesday carnival, said she just likes watching the campers enjoy themselves.
Ann Marie Wellman has been coming to the camp since she was 5 years old.
“I was a camper, a counselor, and now a director,” Wellman said.
Wellman has slight cerebral palsy, but now helps others with the condition to enjoy themselves during their week-long stays.
Wellman is also a wellspring of Camp Harkness lore.
“We used to camp out and tell each that Mr. and Mrs. Harkness would come by to eat our toes,” she laughed.
Also, Wellman relayed the tall tale of the Silver Saint.
Apparently, there was a counselor who waded out to rescue a camper from the Sound during a horrific storm. The camper made it, the counselor, unfortunately, did not.
“But we said he came back as the Silver Saint,” Wellman said. “We would paint rocks and blankets silver [to keep the myth going].”
Wellman, who now lives in Merrimack, N.H., also got married at the camp.
Camp Harkness was originally part of the Harkness family’s summer home. In the 1920s, the philanthropic Mary Harkness would invite children with polio to summer there. The state inherited the property in 1952 and put it under the auspices of the Department of Environmental Protection—later, in 1977, the Department of Mental Retardation, and still later to be called the Department of Developmental Services, which assumed control of the property.
While Camp Harkness originally started as a destination for children, Severin said the number of kids that
attend has decreased in recent years.
“Children are more main-streamed these days,” she noted.
Wellman said that some of the main-streamed children are “missing out” on a great camp experience at the park.
Even the person who works the gate at the park’s entrance comes back every year.
Nina Maryeski, a theater student at Laval University in Quebec City, said this is her 10th summer at Camp Harkness.
“It’s the smiles you see on the campers,” said Maryeski, whose parents live nearby in Waterford.
Maryeski said her mother stopped by on carnival night to say hello.
She added, “My mother looked around and told me, ‘This is the nicest thing [she’s] ever seen.’”