Tubing, riding - and everyone's on wheels

Ben Lyons is having a rough day. Yesterday, on his 15th birthday, everyone at camp made a big deal of him. But today, life is just hot, and ordinary.

His group - eight teenage campers, five professional and college-age staff members, and two teen volunteers - is working in the garden this morning, watering a small plot and finding rocks to decorate its border. The sun is beating down, and Ben is slumped forward in his wheelchair, head on the tray.

Around him, fellow campers sit by the garden, or head off with counselors to collect more rocks. Reine Wehbe and counselor Kym Vincent come back with a trayful, and Kym arranges them around the geraniums. Nearby, Felicia Blount, or "Fufu," takes tentative steps with the aid of a walker and a physical therapist. Meanwhile, Billy Cummings buzzes around the garden in his electric chair, insisting that the plot could benefit from a weed whacker.

It's another morning at the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton, Mass., whose six-week summer program serves 125 children with a range of physical and mental capabilities. While most campers are in wheelchairs and many have limited control of their muscles, they spend the summer doing everything from kayaking to arts and crafts.

That's the goal of the popular program, which fills up by early spring: to give kids who otherwise might not have access to it the experience of going to camp. It's an aim in keeping with the school's mission, inscribed at the crossroads of its elegant web of ramps and bridges: "That they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

As a counselor waters the garden plot with a spray nozzle, a little of the water sprinkles Felicia, who's back in her hot-pink wheelchair. "Wow!" she exclaims. When her counselor asks if it felt good, she pauses for a couple of beats, then answers, "Yeah!" like she's just uncovered a terrific surprise, "Yeah! It feels good!"

Soon, other campers get in on the fun. When counselor Sean Gallagher asks camper Patrick Horrigan if he'd like to be sprinkled with water, Patrick grins, throws his hands up to his face in mock horror, and hits a button on his wheelchair tray. "Oh no!" booms an electronic voice.

"Oh no?" Sean teases, and Patrick, squealing excitedly, gets a hit from the hose. "Again," he mouths.

Sean has been circling the garden, joking with campers, replacing fallen sunhats, and reminding Reine to wear her glasses. When he notices Ben sitting alone, he pulls up beside him, a hand on his tray. "Come on, Ben, head up," he says. When Ben obliges, Sean is there in his own chair, looking him in the eye.

Though he's now in his sixth year as a counselor at the MHS camp, Sean started out as a full-time student at the school in 1988. Diagnosed at birth with spina bifida, he got his first wheelchair when he was 3 or 4. Early on, he attended a public elementary school in Halifax, but his foster mom wasn't happy with the school. When he was 11, she enrolled him full time at MHS.

Sean says his time there helped him grow a great deal emotionally. Before that, "I was just a terror. Then I came here, and saw all these things I'd never seen before. It smartened me up pretty quick."

In high school, anxious for a more-rigorous academic program, he transferred to North Quincy High School in Quincy, Mass., where for a couple of years he was the only kid in a wheelchair. "At first, with some teachers, it was a little uncomfortable," he says, "but everybody got used to it pretty fast. A lot of it has to do with how you present yourself [to people]. If you act timid and awkward, they'll react to you that way."

Sean now takes classes at Quincy College. He also works part time in the security department at Sears, and plans to transfer to the University of Massachusetts in the fall.

He says he started working at the camp for the same reason he hopes someday to teach disabled kids: "I thought that having someone like me here would give them something to strive for."

The Hospital School, a state-funded institution, was founded in 1907 for the care and education of young people with physical disabilities. Over the years, it has expanded in size and mission to also include kids who are both mentally and physically challenged. Virtually all of its students and campers are in wheelchairs, and most have been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, or brain injuries.

Sean says his group of 14- to 18-year-olds are "some of the most medically and physically involved" at the camp. A few can speak in sentences, a few in words and short phrases. Others verbalize in ways that those close to them have come to understand as their own languages.

Some of the kids also use electronic boards to help them communicate. Ben's board has buttons for essentials like "hurts," "yes," "no," "toilet," "thank you," and - indispensable to any teenage vocabulary - "I'm bored."

Today, though, he's not using it much. At lunch, Sean sits next to him, trying to feed him yogurt. For almost an hour, Ben ducks his head and cries. Finally, he eats, and the group heads off to their horseback-riding session.

To get there, several campers use hand controls to drive their chairs down the hill to the barn.

"Good driving, Ben!" shouts Sue Hurley, a nursing attendant at the school for seven years. "You're doing such good driving! And you know why?" Ben pauses, a hand on the control. "Because you're 15 years old!" she says.

At the horse track, the campers settle under a tree to wait. It will be a couple of hours before each of them has had a turn on horseback. As staff members lift Patrick out of his chair and onto the horse, he grins and flashes a thumbs-up sign to the crowd of onlookers in the shade.

Suddenly, spotting a portable radio in Sean's lap, Ben jabs at his "music" button and whines.

"Ben, no whining," reminds Sue. "You're 15 years old, remember?" Sean flicks the radio on and settles on James Taylor.

Ben looks up. After a minute, Felicia exclaims: "Whoa, music!"

"Hey Ben," Sue calls, over "You've Got a Friend," "What did you do for your birthday? Did you have cake? Did you get presents?"

Ben bobs his head. "Use your voice," Sue prompts.

Ben looks up, struggling. Sean turns off the radio, and in the sudden silence, all the counselors - and even some of the campers - are watching Ben.

He says something softly, and Kym, who has the best view of his face, whispers, "He said, 'I got...'"

"What'd you get, Benny?" Sue asks. Ben rolls his head back, and opens his mouth. Sue helps out: "Did you get something to do with music? A CD?"

Ben suddenly looks her in the face, raises his arms in the air, and breaks into a huge grin.

At 3 p.m., the campers hustle off to their buses for the ride home. When Felicia reaches the pick-up point, her bus driver is there waiting to greet her. "Here you are, darlin'!" she says.

"Yeah!" Felicia answers, after a pause. As she rides up the wheelchair lift, Sean calls, "Bye, Fufu!"

She's already in the bus being buckled in when suddenly she calls back, smiling: "Yeah! Bye!"

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