Reproduced with permission of Herald News.

By CAROLYN FEIBEL

Proudly Stubbornly Overcoming

Retreat helps physically challenged campers reinvigorate their worn spirits

Bob Canty, a former ironworker from West Milford, remembers the days when he was strong and nimble. He walked fearlessly on the girdered exoskeletons of half-built office buildings in Newark. He hoisted iron floor grating; he carried glass picture windows in his arms.

"When I first started, they didn't have no ladders," Canty says. "You had to put your feet in the beam and climb up it just like a monkey."

Not long after Canty was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1981, a co-worker accused him of drinking on the job. "I was rolling around, not walking straight," Canty, now 58, recalls. "I'd have to rest and kneel down." The boss defended him, but that was his last construction job.

Canty lost his energy, his coordination, and his livelihood to the disease. Eventually he lost the ability to walk. Today he is paralyzed from the neck down. He lives in Preakness Hospital in Wayne, where he is cared for by a succession of aides and nurses.

"It's rough, but I take it a day at a time," Canty says. "And I ask Jesus to help me."

Canty rarely leaves the hospital. Since he lost the use of his arms, he cannot even pilot his motorized wheelchair along the halls. Reading is difficult and tiring. Visitors are few, and his wife is battling cancer. Canty lives for August. That's when he goes to the Poconos, to attend a camp for disabled adults from North Jersey.

Christian Overcomers, a Garfield-based nonprofit, sponsors about 50 campers at a time for sessions in July, August, and October at Spruce Lake Retreat in Canadensis, Pa. Canty has been a camper for 13 years. It is the best week of his year.

The adult campers, who suffer from multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and other disabling diseases, call themselves "overcomers." Stubbornly, proudly, they find ways to have "normal" camp activities. They play tee-ball, swim, pelt one another with water balloons and don wigs for the talent show. Each camper is paired with a volunteer responsible for his or her care. In quiet cabins sheltered by fragrant pines, the volunteers live, sleep and pray side-by-side with the campers, forging friendships that extend throughout the year.

The camp often has a bigger emotional impact on the volunteers, says Debbie Neilley, the program director for Christian Overcomers. "People think they're going to come up and 'bless the handicapped.' But they're the ones that get blessed."

Dominick Apollo has been Bob Canty's volunteer for the past six years. During the year, Apollo, 41, is the pastor of the First Reformed Church of the Palisades in Fort Lee. He says that even the most challenging tasks, like changing diapers or bathing campers, has a spiritual component.

"That's the service of it," he says. "To do that for another human being you have to be totally outside yourself. To do it as a service to the Lord. Biblically speaking, one of the major messages of Christ was to die to yourself so others can receive."

On Tuesday night, after the campers have smashed a piñata to smithereens and eagerly scooped the last piece of candy from the floor, Apollo steers Canty's wheelchair out of the recreation hall and onto a wooded path. The humid air throbs with the cries of hidden cicadas. It is close to 11 p.m.. Canty, a big-boned man with light red hair and blue eyes, is exhausted but joyous. Today, he went swimming for the first time in 17 years. He can't stop talking about it.

"The best time I had today was I went in the pool with Dom. We had four people slide me in," Canty says.

Spruce Lake recently installed a hydraulic lift to lower disabled campers into the water. For Bob, the experience of being submerged, of floating outside under a blue sky, was revelatory. For years, he has known only sponge baths and once-a-week showers. "I felt like a new man," he says.

Apollo eases the wheelchair over the doorstep of the room he shares with Canty. The motorized wheelchair weighs more than 300 pounds and is decorated with New York Jets stickers. Apollo glides it against the wall and shuts the door. He gently takes off Canty's Yankee cap and his glasses. He wheels over a Hoyer lift, a sort of mini-crane for cradling and lifting a disabled person into bed.

Canty is already sitting on the black mesh fabric sling. Apollo hooks the four corners of the sling onto the lift, then turns a hand crank. Canty offers instructions: "Wait, my arm is caught . . . Watch the feet." Although he is paralyzed, he can feel every possible jostle or pinch. Slowly, his body rises from the chair until he hangs, gently swaying, a few feet off the ground.

Apollo pushes the lift over the bed and lowers Canty slowly onto the mattress. His legs, once agile as a monkey's, twitch a little, then go limp. His thick arms flop uselessly. Above the bed, a photograph of sunset-tinged pine trees offers an inspiration: "We stand more firmly when we learn to lean on God."

While Apollo bustles about, adjusting pillows and sheets, Canty tells one of his favorite stories about living in West Milford. It is a story about a bear that wandered out of the mountains. It is also a story about Canty's powerlessness.

"I was sleeping on the ramp towards the sun. The garbage cans were on the side of me. I woke up and there was a bear on top of the garbage can. The (health) aide shut the door. And I screamed and hollered! I couldn't drive out of there. He would run after me."

Canty hollered so much, the bear ran away. The story is also about Canty's power.

•••

The next morning, he tells another story. It's about the beginning of his disease. Apollo lowers Canty into his wheelchair. As soon as Canty's feet touch the rests, his legs start shaking violently. The footrests rattle. Canty stares at his legs. Apollo quickly moves around in front of him and presses down on his knees, leaning hard with his weight.

"That's how you stop the spasms," Canty says. "That was the first symptom I had. When I visited the doctor. They said there's something wrong here.

"When he took my shoe off, he put his hand on the bottom of my foot and my leg started shaking." The doctor immediately admitted Canty to a hospital for testing and diagnosis. Apollo wheels the chair toward the bathroom. He removes Canty's shirt and wipes his upper body with a wet washcloth. He brushes his teeth for him, holding a cup for him to spit into. He lathers his face for a shave.

"So Bob, what are we going to do today?"

"We're going to shower today," Bob answers.

"Right, we've got to set that up," Apollo says.

"Today or tomorrow, it doesn't matter."

Apollo continues shaving.

Canty winces slightly, and a speckle of blood blooms on his chin.

"I got you again," Apollo says affectionately.

"Yeah, the chin is the tenderest spot."

Canty looks down. "What is that? Ten after eight?"

Because he can't use his arms, someone has duct-taped a wristwatch to the left armrest of the wheelchair. It's time for breakfast. Apollo continues to work, rolling on deodorant and dusting talcum powder over Canty's chest and arms. He buttons on a clean blue shirt and finishes with a spritz of his own cologne.

"Do your legs feel different from going in the pool?" Apollo asks.

"Yeah."

"Now?"

"They feel looser. I felt like a new man when I hit the water."

Apollo puts on Canty's glasses and a Dale Earnhardt cap. Canty likes car racing and boxing and bowling. In the 1980s, when his upper body was relatively unaffected, he used a motorized scooter to go to the stock car races in Middletown. Later, he had to get a wheelchair. Now he's pinning his hopes on having a "sip-n-puff" system installed on his chair. The system uses breath control for motion and steering. Canty is eager to have that control back. A year ago, he could pilot his own wheelchair. Now, he is completely dependent on the aides at Preakness.

At breakfast, Apollo feeds Canty bacon and waffles and juice. Later, they sit together in the recreation hall, listening to the camp pastor. "You may be crippled, but you are whole spiritually," he tells the campers, whose volunteers hold their hands and occasionally swat away flies or mosquitoes. "You can walk with the Lord daily, 24/7."

Canty dozes in his chair. The heat, and the many medications he takes, can make him drowsy. A nurse comes by to take his blood pressure. She tells Apollo he needs caffeine, and Apollo returns with a Mountain Dew and a straw.

Apollo used to be the camp pastor. That's how he first met Canty. "That's the easiest job here," he says. "Speaking is easy. What the volunteers do is the meat and potatoes." Apollo now prefers to work one-on-one with Canty for the week. Ministering to the handicapped has helped fortify his faith like nothing else.

"The word overcomers is a real word," Apollo says. "If anybody can complain about life and be bitter it's them. But they're not."

"The hope of heaven for them is a real hope," he continues. "When we talk about new bodies - for them, that's real."

•••

Many campers arrive from group homes and hospitals. They thirst for hugs and caresses and teasing pinches, for touch from people who are not paid to touch them. Here, no one flinches and pulls back from their bodies, no one looks away. At camp, bodies are bodies.

"Some people don't get a shower for a whole year. Only at camp," says Barbara Miedema, a volunteer from Pompton Plains. "For some of them, they don't have someone to hug or even touch them. They're just a body to be taken care of."

On Wednesday, there's a carnival followed by swimming and a chicken barbecue. There's water balloons and wheelchair soccer and a dunking booth. The campers can play and sweat and make a mess. They're not a burden to anyone. They just are.

The dunking booth is the highlight of the hot afternoon. The volunteers set a lawn chair against a telephone pole on which a water bucket has been suspended, eight feet up. A red-and-white bull's-eye is rigged to a drop-door holding up the bucket. The youngest volunteers, teenagers from New Jersey church youth groups, hurl tennis balls at the target until the bucket lets fall a cooling smack of water.

Many of the campers can't hold themselves in the lawn chair. They sit on the laps of volunteers, their bodies cramped by spastic cerebral palsy - wrists curled down so far that their hands touch the forearm, toes knotted and twisted over each other. The tennis balls miss and miss again, bouncing harmlessly against a canvas backboard.

Thunk. Thunk.

Bull's-eye.

When the water hits, they scream in delight and shock. At first, some campers hesitate. But the volunteers prod and reassure them. Campers who did it once clamor for another turn in the chair. Slowly, the wheelchairs creep closer. The dirt under the bucket turns into warm mud.

Canty watches from under a tree. He has just emerged from his shower, and he's enjoying the rare clean feeling, the cool shade, the squeals of other campers. He plans to go swimming again tomorrow. The water renews him. It renews the other campers, too.

Thunk. Thunk. A tennis ball lands in the damp grass. Another hits the mark. Water spills wastefully, ridiculously over another camper.

It is a baptism of sorts. A baptism into normality and frivolity and simple summer silliness.