"Editor's" note: Excuse the present tense; this was written contemporaneously with and describes Thursday-Friday of last week.
After an eminently memorable first day, the second two days
of our Camp Lake Stephens were… decent. It’s kind of odd. After a day clearing
underbrush, I found myself really really
wanting to write about them and tell the story of that day, because it was a
profoundly unique feeling, a real NCCC memory. What we did yesterday and today
was fun and dynamic and unique in its own right, but it didn’t leave me
thinking “Wow! That was amazing, I have to tell everyone I know!” in the same
way that Day One did. Maybe that’s my standards being unrealistically high, I
don’t know.
In any case, Day Two would’ve been called fun by even the
stingiest summer-camp participant. We did a low-ropes course and a high-ropes
course. The low-ropes courses focused on teamwork; you had to fit everybody
through the (rather small) holes in a man-made spiderweb of ropes, or get
everyone to swing on a rope swing across an (imaginary) highway and land safely
on the other side. It was okay, I guess. This connects to the Myers-Briggs personality
tests we just took, I suppose, but I would’ve welcomed a little less standing
and talking about the course and more “Let’s do something and see if it works!”. Perhaps correspondingly, my favorite
of the four was when we were all mute, standing on a log, and had to arrange
ourselves in a specific order (our birthdays, Jan-Dec).
The high-ropes courses, on the other hand, were all about
individual achievement. We did a “flying squirrel”, in which—through the magic
of lines and pulleys—one person (the squirrel) stood on one end of a rope, five
strong team members were clipped to the other end of the rope, and the point
was for the Five to run and yank the rope as hard as they could and send the
squirrel flying as high as possible. That was terrific fun; I was one of the
Five for about seven squirrels before getting my turn, and it’s like a giant
eagle just picks you up and yanks you into the air. There was also a rock wall
with a wicked incline at the top (I couldn’t quite make it, failing two
handholds from the top, to my immense irritation) and The Pole, a highlight to
end all highlights.
The Pole is simple in design, difficult in execution. The
chosen one is equipped with helmet, harness and safety line and made to climb
up a thirty-foot pole (handholds and footholds provided. Once at the top of the
pole, they will see a trapeze suspended in the air about 5-6 feet in front of
them. The objective, of course, is to jump and grab the trapeze.
Plenty of people were scared; perhaps two-thirds of my team
required some sort of coaxing from the ground before making their attempt. I
wasn’t scared at the top, at least not of falling; I just remember thinking
“Okay, I have one shot, so I better not miss.” Didn’t help all that much. I did not make it. After a sort of
swimmer’s dive off the top of the pole, I fell about a foot short by my
estimate, never touching the confounded thing. A very, very few people Corps-wide made it; I
would guess about 20-30 out of 240. My teammate Joe actually touched the bar
with both hands (he’s 6’4”, which helps a lot) but slipped off because his
hands were sweaty—it’s unbelievably hot on top of the Pole. That was easily the
high point, figuratively and literally, of yesterday.
Today was the “Amerilympics”, a unit-wide competition in all
sorts of things. We had a punt-pass-and-kick with a football, a water balloon
toss and subsequent free rein to just go nuts with water balloons, a trivia
competition (apparently Ben Franklin died on 4/17/1790), a competition to kick
the most soccer balls in a net, a Frisbee accuracy competition (I hit three of
five cones myself; no TEAM of 8-12 people totaled more than four), “Dragon
tails” (break into two lines of five, last person in line has a tail, get the
other guy’s tail before he gets yours) and a three-legged race (Joe and I won
within my team, but lost by eight seconds unit-wide). Like I said, it’s all fun
enough, but none of it is particularly extraordinary. And perhaps that is an
unfair standard, but many of the Corps’s activities have been extraordinary
(using it correctly, i.e. much better than ordinary); this was just ordinary.
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