Boy Scout David Michael, of North Chicago, was up a hour before dawn Wednesday to eat cold Pop-Tarts and apples and drink milk. He and his buddies had spent the night in sleeping bags on the ground under temporary tarps slung between metal poles.
They had broken camp the night before on the grassy field that had been their home for the last 10 days of the National Boy Scout Jamboree, on 76,000 acres of an old Army base about 90 miles due south of Washington, D.C.
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The big campout, which comes but once every four years, was especially rigorous for David, who spent his days on a pair of crutches or in a cumbersome wheelchair.
His left leg had recently been amputated near the knee and was still swathed in a protective layer of white bandages.
The 12-year-old, who lost his leg to cancer in May, was one of roughly 18 kids needing wheelchairs at the jamboree and one of 175 so-called special needs kids there, a group that included not only physical disabilities but mental ones.
David’s participation is part of a continuing movement in Scouting–an organization associated as much with physical skills as character and citizenship–to get kids with special needs involved in mainstream activities.
“It is a little challenging because some of the things are hard for me to do,” David said, a baseball cap covering his scalp, still hairless because of recent weeks of chemotherapy.
In addition to working on badges for camping, conservation, safety and first aid and the like, David and his friends also worked together on a merit badge that few would associate with Scouting, one called disability awareness. Its purpose is to create sensitivity among Scouts for people who have special needs. The badge was unveiled in 1981 as the handicapped awareness badge. The requirements were revised in 1993 and its name changed to disability awareness.
As part of the requirements to earn the badge, the boys played wheelchair basketball, softball while blindfolded, golf with one arm and ran an obstacle course with crutches.
“At first it’s hilarious to watch the boys try to do this,” said Jim Harper, of Wilmette and Scoutmaster of Jamboree Troop 1402, which includes kids culled from local Boy Scout troops in North Chicago, Wilmette and Glenview. “But then you realize that it also teaches you about courage,” Harper said.
The badge is part of Scouting’s ongoing efforts to break down the barriers that separate the nearly 110,000 Scouts with disabilities from the 5.6 million other kids and adults who are members of Scouting, officials said.
David, whose dad is a paramedic with the North Chicago Fire Department, was diagnosed with bone cancer earlier this year during treatment for a broken leg from a January ski accident in Lake Geneva.
By May, David had been admitted to Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago for amputation of his left leg. It turns out that the skiing accident may have been providential.
“If he hadn’t broken his leg, the cancer would have spread, and they might have caught it too late,” said his mother, Sue.
Though the National Jamboree comes only once every four years, most kids in David’s situation might have skipped it. But David, whose leg wound is still too fresh to allow for a prosthesis, insisted that he still be allowed to go . . . crutches and wheelchair in tow.
“I knew that this is what he wanted to do,” said his mother. “David is just going full force . . . that’s good. I like his determination.”
“Scouting is about a sense of brotherhood,” said Scoutmaster Jim Harper. “In this case, David had applied to go to the jamboree and I had a spot in my jamboree troop.”
As one of 18 wheelchair participants among the 35,000 kids jamming the hot and humid jamboree grounds, David received a lot of media attention. He seems a bit more poised than the average 12-year-old going on 13 in three weeks.
The other night, he took out an hour from the after-dinner games to talk to a reporter amid a background jumble of sounds that included shouting kids and bellowing bugles.
“The questions don’t bother me,” he said, “but sometimes I do get sort of angry . . . well not really angry . . . but they have done so many papers and things on me that all of the questions they ask are practically the same.”
The attention is ironic because David is trying hard to be just an ordinary kid. One of David’s most cherished goals is to earn enough merit badges to qualify for the elite ranks of Eagle Scout.
By all accounts David, an athletic kid before the accident, is still so. During an evening Frisbee game, David surprised everybody when he dropped his crutches to leap into the air to catch the Frisbee.
But earlier this week, when he and his patrol participated in a five-kilometer race, David had to use a wheelchair. Each boy took turns pushing David in the wheelchair over hilly terrain. And David crossed the finish line with the rest of his buddies, pushing the chair with his arms and pulling it with his right foot.
“I can’t go long distances on crutches,” said David, whose home troop is No. 66 in far north suburban Beach Park. “I had to do the race in a wheelchair. It bugged me a little bit, I like to run and have fun . . . uh, you know . . . so that bothered me some.”
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“David doesn’t want everybody to do things for him,” said friend Jamie Gilman, 13, of Wilmette. “But we push him around and go around with him and help him do what he needs to do and stuff.”
Meanwhile, David seems to be recovering well, say his parents. And David himself says that he is fine and feeling no pain.
Mostly He is looking forward to when he can get his prosthesis so that he can get back to sports like archery and softball that require two legs to excel.
“Next year, I’ll be able to do that stuff,” he said.