There’s a persistent rumor out there that things are always getting worse.
There’s plenty of evidence to support the theory. Everything costs more than it used to, there’s less parking, and there’s no shortage of horror in the headlines. If you get your news and commentary from social media, of course, the bad news is being guided to you by an algorithm designed to make you feel scared or angry enough to keep scrolling.
If you’re in your hometown, as I am here, it’s hard not to look at a dirty street and remember how clean it was in your childhood, or to look at a cookie-cutter chain store and remember the locally owned haven that used to occupy the same building. I’m an optimistic person, but I can get caught up in worries that the persistent rumor is true just like everybody else.
That’s why it felt wonderful last Christmas to break the news that the Long Beach Unified School District was bringing back Camp Hi-Hill and to see the LBUSD Board in February officially approve the return of the beloved tradition.
Camp Hi-Hill was a decades-long tradition in Long Beach that sent fifth graders to camp in the mountains for five days, with schools from different neighborhoods mixed so that local kids got a chance to make new friends from around the city. Like a lot of people who grew up here, I have fond memories of Camp Hi-Hill, as does my wife — we both have our Memory Sticks rattling around in the garage.
For a lot of my friends, Hi-Hill was the first (or only) trip into nature that childhood offered, and it was a beloved horizons-expanding experience for generations of Long Beach kids.
More than a decade ago, state budget cuts and wildfire regulations shuttered the camp. For a lot of us who grew up here and are raising kids here, it felt like another major piece of evidence that things might not be as sunny in Long Beach for the next generation as they were for ours.
The return of Hi-Hill — now run at the YMCA’s Camp Oakes — was celebrated on all corners of local social media, and since our son Vinny is a fifth grader, we were thrilled that he’d get to be one of the first groups of kids to restart the Hi-Hill legacy. His school was scheduled to go with the second group to make the trip this year, but just days before they left, the camp had to close for a week because of a bed bug infestation.
I pushed the nagging negativity in the back of my mind even further and had faith that the school district would do right by our kids, which they did. Vinny and his classmates got a rescheduled date and went to Hi-Hill last week, spending the week before Christmas in the cold air making memories and new friends, doing some school learning but also a lot of life learning.
He and his friends came home a day early to beat the snowstorm that put travel restrictions on the roads to and from camp, and we were happy to see them all as they lumbered off the bus bundled up in their cold weather gear. Our school’s fabulous principal and counselor waited until 6 p.m. to make sure all the kids got picked up, and as I stood there looking at all the smiling faces on the school’s lawn, it felt like a little miracle.
So many people worked so hard to bring the camp experience back, and my son and his friends came home raving about how much fun they had. And while we had to huff diesel fumes in the yellow school bus back in the 1990s, the kids even got to ride up the mountain and back in a nice charter bus.
Maybe things are getting better, after all.
Long Beach Bites
I was proud to represent The562 at a Thanksgiving food giveaway for the hungry in Long Beach at King Park, organized and hosted by The Six. There are a lot of people who like to talk about supporting our community, but I’ve been around long enough to know how much easier talk is than action. The good folks at The Six put a call out for local organizations to sign up to bring a specific food item, and more than 60 stepped up. That meant that people who came for food didn’t just get something handed to them — they got to walk around and “shop,” picking out ingredients and staples so that they could cook the kind of dinner they wanted. It was a beautiful example of the Long Beach community pulling together, and I look forward to signing up again in 2024.
We have a special start to the holiday season every year in Long Beach, which is when the wood-frame Christmas trees get floated out onto the Bay, and the duck ponds at Heartwell and El Dorado Parks (although ElDo missed out this year due to construction). Every time I see them lit up for the first time I get the same sense of excitement about the holidays that I got as a little kid, knowing that the next month will hold so much joy and family time. Of course, now that excitement comes from making a great holiday season for our kids — for giving presents instead of opening them.
Like a lot of families in Long Beach, my gang and I look forward to walking around Naples Island and checking out Christmas lights with friends. Every year it fills me with a sense of warmth and community, strolling in the chill air (60 degrees is cold, all right) and sipping on hot chocolate, running into buddies up and down each canal. The lights this year were, as usual, beautiful enough to make you forget that you’re standing in someone’s backyard staring at their house while they host a party and pretend they don’t see you.