This will probably be my last night at my time off house in the next month. Right now I'm packing for a river trip I'm taking with my group on the Lumber River. For 14 days, we'll wake up each morning around 5, pack up our stuff, gather wood/cook our food... then paddle a few miles to our next spot to set up camp/gather wood/cook food. And if we have enough time, we'll fish and swim and play! I'm so stinkin' excited.
A good portion of my kids didn't know how to swim before they came to camp... and were afraid to even go near water. That's been a funny concept for me to wrap my mind around... because I just assumed that maybe 2% of the world population didn't know how to swim. And yet at camp, it feels like 2% of the population did know how to swim before coming to camp. Being one of 3 lifeguards at our camp, I feel a little pressure when it comes to water safety.
This afternoon as I was working with them and teaching them how to paddle a canoe, I had one kid scared out of his pants. He was acting really squirrely and trying not to show it, but when we got to the part where he had to tip the canoe, he started freaking out. I waited in the water for him, and after he tipped and then realized that he wasn't drowning and that I wouldn't let him drown... he eased up, pulled himself back into the canoe, and the rest of the afternoon he was a paddling machine. That was a rewarding moment. I love this kid.
Random tangent: I just watched Deliverance for the first time last week. I absolutely loved it-- it resonated through the core of my being. I love the scene where they're trying to decide whether to be honest "law-abiding" citizens who would confess to the county for murdering somebody... and then Burt Reynolds steps in and goes "What LAW!? Where's the LAW out here?" I swear I've thought that before. In the "wilderness", there's so many variables that it seems laughable that a written law would suffice to bring justice into a community. It seems that laws can only work when there's a solid community of people who believe in outcomes for certain behaviors. Laws make us think that the world works in a predictable way... when it's anything but that...
