Riding staff member Sami Reiss, left, and assistant camp director Martha Hughes disinfect leashes for llamas at Keystone Camp in Brevard, N.C. The camp is practicing social distancing guidelines and other recommendations set forth by health agencies as a result of the pandemic. climb onto a ropes course strung between swaying green trees. Harper Phillips, a curly-haired 14-year-old from Nashville, slips as she tries to walk across a modified slackline.
This is summer camp in the age of the coronavirus: a giddy, high-stakes trust fall. After three months of anxiety and isolation, the girls at Keystone, which opened in North Carolina in 1916, are learning how to be kids again. They’re free to hug their friends, climb a rock wall, float on an inner tube down the French Broad River and sing at the top of their lungs. But it wasn’t easy to get here.
Lemel and her leadership team agonized over the state health department’s regulations for containing the virus. How many campers would be allowed to attend, and would that be enough to cover the camp’s $100,000 investment? Lemel’s family has run the camp for four generations, and this is Keystone’s 100th summer on its campus in Brevard. It stayed open through the polio epidemic of the 1950s and had shut down only once, in 1943, because of World War II rationing.
By the time I was allowed to visit — on the ninth day of camp — no one had exhibited signs of the virus. Still, Lemel wasn’t making any promises. “I can’t guarantee anything any year,” she said. “What I’m trying to do is mitigate communicable disease.”
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