Working in my Element-On the Ropes Course

The activity of the morning was ropes course, and half of the staff headed down with them, since it was the first day all summer that we were running the MVP, as part of Mega-week.  I had the period off, but wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to do something constructive with Brandon, as well as see my cabin members do the MVP, so I went with them.  There were five staff members, so once the other four had the Leap and MVP up and running, I took Brandon and a few other kids to the other side of the ropes course to use another event.  The Multi-line belay was the only other event setup, for Junior Adventure to use for the ladder jump.  But they were nowhere to be seen, so I decided to commandeer it.  I had requested Brandon to join my group, but didn’t feel a need to force him to go first, so I took volunteers, and sent another one of my guys James up first instead.  I told Brandon to put on a harness because I wanted him to go second, which he actually agreed to do, without much resistance.  Unfortunately James freaked out by the time he reached the top of the ladder, and it took ten minutes for me to convince him to jump from there.  During this time Brandon had been offering helpful advice to James about ‘how to not think about how thin the rope was, and advising me to give the rope a quick jerk to yank him down.  I of course told him to be quiet, but didn’t push it too far, since being tied to the tree, I wasn’t currently in a position to back it up.  Eventually Brandon stated that he was sick of waiting for James to finish, and so he was going back over to the Leap and MVP.  I let him go, just to be rid of his commentary, which wasn’t helping the situation.  I got James down within a few minutes, and was disappointed that I had lost the opportunity to get something constructive accomplished with Brandon.  Another of my campers, Nathan, wanted to go, so I belayed him, and he completed the event in less than five minutes, as it should be.  At that point Hong showed up from the zip line where Junior Adventure was, and I told him I would get out of the way, since the event was scheduled for his group.  He was appreciative, and told me I should sent up one more kid while he and Sunshine got his group rounded up and brought over.

My next kid in line was Mike Holmes, the youngest kid in my cabin, and the first cabin member I have had with the same name as me.  He seemed fine on the ground, and climbed the ladder quickly with no problems, but once he reached the top of the ladder, he totally froze up.  Within a minute or two, Hong and Sunshine showed up with their group, but I had a kid stuck in the tree using the only rope available on that side of the course.  Sunshine took their group to do some of the low ropes elements while Hong helped me try to talk Mike out of the tree.  The situation only went down hill from there, with Mike totally bawling at the top of the ladder, and then of all things, it began to rain, fairly hard.  Eventually Squeaker came over to let me know that it was lunch time and the rest of the group was ready to leave.  And I am looking up thinking, “Oh, this went well, I came down here on my time off, to do something with Brandon which totally failed, and have managed to ruin the Junior Adventure ropes course event for the day, and I have a kid stuck in a tree in the rain, and now I am missing another meal.  I love it when that happens.”

It turns out, that while I was dealing with Mike on the top of the Multi-line ladder, Brandon had actually done the Leap of Faith, but I didn’t find that out until a couple days later.  Eventually using a method that should not be committed to paper, Hong and I were able to get Mike down from the tree, and we headed off to lunch at our respective camps.  Once Mike was back on the ground and had a few minutes to settle down, he was fine, and talking about how he was disappointed in how he had done, and wanted to try it again sometime to do better.  It was this attitude that made him my favorite camper of the summer before the end of the week.  So we walked back, and caught the tail end of lunch, before I headed back to the ropes course with the other activity group, and sent my cabin, including Brandon, off to the 22 range with Paladin.  My second activity period went much better, besides only getting 5 of the 10 guys to try the MVP, which always bothers me.  The last kid to head up didn’t have a partner, so I did the event with him, which is always fun, while Autumn and Crash belayed us.

We managed to survive the rest of the day without any major incidents, but things were not perfect.  We had an early campfire, with a talk led by Jesse, once again convincing Brandon that this selection was deliberately for his benefit.  He asked a couple of questions that were out of line, but Jesse handled it very well.  Throughout the event, Brandon and the girl sitting next to him, Katie, continued distract each other from what was going on in front, and seemed to be enjoying themselves together.  Remembering what Brandon had told me earlier about why he had stayed, I figured I knew which combination of people I would need to keep an eye on.

Once campfire was finished, we headed into another first for the summer, night paintball.  At my insistence, we had setup an alternate option at the campfire pit, for anyone who did not want to be out on the paintball field.  In the same way I didn’t want Brandon on the night hike if he didn’t want to be there, I knew we didn’t want anyone on the paintball field in the dark who didn’t want to be there, especially Brandon.  Once someone decided to sit out, the likelihood that there mask would come off at the wrong time was too great, and no one would be able to see the problem.  I also hadn’t decided until the last minute how I felt about letting Brandon play.  The idea of handing a mentally unstable teenager with violent tendencies a projectile launcher and setting him loose in the dark raised a few red flags in my mind.  We eventually decided to let him play and just tried to keep a close eye on him.  We really tried to keep a close eye on everyone that night, but that proved to be very difficult in the darkness.  The event actually went very well all things considered, and we had no safety violations, nor any problems from Brandon.  A few campers elected to exercise the opportunity to go elsewhere when they got tired of playing within a few rounds, which helped keep the chaos level down.  It was nearly eleven o’clock when we finished playing, and headed off to bed.  Mouth was once again stationed outside on the porch all night, and this time I actually got some sleep.  Brandon or no Brandon, I was pretty tired at this point, and plus, he had gone for like 12 hours without doing anything incredibly stupid.