Adolescents with Swords

Evidence suggests that I’ve survived another summer fencing camp. The ten straight days of two or three practices per day were well balanced by the three hot, all-you-can-eat meals per day in the best college cafeteria in the nation. Let’s take a moment to imagine, if you will, two tables piled with desserts: fruit pies, several flavors of cookie, slice upon slice of sweet breads, double troughs of pudding, a freezer stocked with ice cream treats, and of course, cakes: carrot, oreo, white, and chocolate, all doused with sugary frosting. The frosting looked as smooth and fancy as on store-bought cakes, and I ignored the vision in my mind of some basement classroom where unfortunate hotel school students attended their nutrition science lab, icing cake after cake long into the night, until at last the professor deemed them capable of producing an acceptably uniform flower on demand. Oh, and the entrees were good, too.

A typical day had three sessions. In the mornings and afternoons, we had warm-ups and conditioning in an room with spongy artificial turf that’s great for running but less great for certain varieties of push-ups in which elbows remain on the ground. A friend noticed that his skin was having a minor allergic reaction to the artificial turf. He shrugged it off as an artificial reaction and kept jogging. After we were warmed and conditioned, we switched to a basketball gym for footwork and blade drills. If there was time, we would free fence or play bouting games while the coaches gave individual lessons. Coach Iryna imported four impressive-level coaches, and a few other Cornell fencers dropped by sporadically. Evening sessions were short, only an hour compared to 2 ½, and low-key. We watched videos of Olympic fencing, played dodgeball-like games with soccer balls (somehow without major injuries), went for a nature walk, or just watched a movie. Kids and coaches alike were pooped by then.

The kids were mostly high schoolers, although we had some younger ones, too. I made early friends with a particular 11-year-old who was quick to work into the conversation that he was from Oklahoma. I suspect that his motivation for attending fencing camp was so that he could return home and beat up on his brothers and friends with tree branches. The fighting style he had already built while practicing with branches in his backyard didn’t help him much on the strip. He seemed to have fun, though, mostly, until his attention span finally sputtered out during the last few days, when he complained variously of blisters, “pulled” muscles (read: sore, because he didn’t understand the purpose of stretching), electric shocks to the heart by the scoring machine, and circulation-stopping socks, all of which miraculously evaporated when it came time to fence someone he thought he could beat. Then he became a chivalrous young man. Pointing to one of the beginner girls, he shouted across the room to me, “Can I fence her? I can cream her, but I’ll let her win after I get the first four points!”

I was secretly terrified of the kid, and only partially because of his full-arm parries. Harry Potter 7 came out during the first few days of camp, and it wasn’t long before the campers, including my Oklahoman friend, started carrying around the distinctively orange tomes. I was convinced that I would overhear someone reading aloud the very last page. Whenever the radio so much as said the word “Harry,” my hand darted toward the off switch in a panic. I had visions of some lunatic galloping down the street, yelling out a synopsis of the plot through a bullhorn in order to make a point about the dictatorial powers of mass marketing. I had come so far, six Hogwarts years, without hearing a leak that it would be cruel for someone to reveal anything to me now. Logically, the bullhorn guy was unlikely, but this 11-year-old kid could too easily spill the beans accidentally. It’s like when my parents tape football games. They avoid the very presence of certain friends before they watch the tape due to the disappointing eloquence of those friends’ facial expressions: a grimace means we lost, for example, and a smiling nod means that it was close, but we pulled through with a field goal in the final seconds.

Magic was still on my mind the day we introduced some particularly complicated coordination drills. The goal was to fling your fencing glove into the air in various awkward ways, then catch it in a lunge. Keep in mind that an interest in fencing does not necessarily coincide with outstanding coordination. Adolescence doesn’t help, either. The kids’ clumsy, unnatural movements and expressions of confused concentration struck me as the same ones I had imagined showing up in Apparition lessons at Hogwarts. Our high-ceilinged basketball gym became the airy Great Hall, the kids’ gloves became wands. Coach Iryna was the official Ministry instructor, demonstrating the simple-looking task, and I was a minor teacher, keeping an eye on my students to be sure they didn’t splinch themselves as they lunged.

As it happened, I overheard mostly nothing about the book from either him or anyone else, bought my own copy within hours of the end of camp, and read the last word three days later. That, and a slice of chocolate cake, were my rewards for surviving another year of fencing camp.