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.

My Shelf

Today I made a Shelf.

That was my task when I showed up to the museum this morning: “This high table needs a shelf underneath it halfway to the floor to store all these fancy display lamps. Feeling handy?” Sure... I assured her that I could cobble something together, assuming beauty was not paramount. Thankfully, the table stands in a corner of the already disorganized tool shop, so the shelf’s potential aesthetic merits would likely remain unnoticed in any case.

So, building a shelf. No problem. I have spatial reasoning skills. I get along with drills for the most part. I’ve watched Mom create a picnic table and a swing set from a pile of wood, neither of which are in danger of collapsing any time soon. (In fact, their monumental sturdiness is sure to grant them heirloom status someday.) Growing up, I always assumed I inherited woodworking genes, and now was their chance to express themselves. Why, just the other day I took apart a mini-golf hole with a sledgehammer and a crowbar and felt satisfyingly Tool Time. On the other hand, that was destruction, not construction.

I stood in front of the inferior table for a while in what I hoped was a “thinking” pose. I stood in front of the shelves of wood for a little longer, then took inventory of the tools at hand: a cordless drill, baggies bristling with used screws that looked only vaguely similar, a battery-powered chop saw mounted on a Rubbermaid-style plastic base, and a portable table saw too small, and with too short a cord, to be useful for its intended purpose. Finally, I decided that my plan of action would likely include some sketching and measuring. While investigating the shelfless table's dimensions, I concluded that its original creator had been no more a master carpenter than I was. It was a solid piece of furniture that served its purpose, but its legs were haphazardly spaced and lacked any supports to ensure their verticality. Well, my Shelf would give it support! No longer concerned about defiling the already-cobbled table, I began to cut my wood.

And I did it: It took all day, but I did create a Shelf! It fits snugly between the diverse legs with clearance below for plastic storage bins and above for fancy track lights. The surface is what appears to be part of a repurposed chalkboard, which is supported below by rows of sturdy beams. Those fancy lights won’t fall off any time soon.

And now, I feel unusually successful. There now exists a newborn Shelf in this world because of me. Hopefully, years from now, people I will not have met will take that Shelf for granted, putting things on it and taking things off, because of me. Tomorrow, when I drive down the hill to work, I can gaze across the lake, through the trees, to the museum, and know that it is a better, more efficient place because of my labors.

I think I’ve finally graduated from Legos.

Weeding the ScienCenter

I am a natural disaster. I am the sudden, unpredictable obliteration of an entire habitat. There was a healthy patch of clover between the ScienCenter mini-golf course and the brick wall of the building. Now there's not. Now, instead of lush greenery and bulging purple flowers, there's a strip of dirt, ugly and bare and hot and dry. Not only do the clovers vanish with a few waves of my callous hands, but also the spiders, centipedes, aphids, bees, wasps, ants, and all the other bugs that fly and crawl and dig become immediately and inexplicably homeless. Some are scattered into unfamiliar lands by clinging desperately to the doomed vegetation. Spiders skitter several inches up the newly exposed wall, then halt in disbelieving bewilderment to survey their unrecognizable homeland. Worms and centipedes writhe fiercely in silent panic until they find shelter under ragged clods of the freshly scarred earth. I've never seen insects run so fast.

I am as abrupt as an earthquake, as destructive as a hurricane. I am environmental annihilation personalized. I am one unit of humanity playing out humanity's instinctual duty to raze nature. My strip of former clover could be a miniature subdivision in its infancy, all ready to pour concrete roads and driveways and basements.

When that deed was done, I went to the other side of the building to plant geraniums. That reversed my conscience.

Mostly.

Amazonian at Work

The other day I was called “some kind of Amazon woman” at work, while hefting 40 pound bags of dirt (and manure--just because it’s composted doesn’t make it less messy--first one to develop a tear-proof manure bag gets an A+ and a lollipop), apparently making the bags look like the world’s filthiest (and least comfy) pillows. I took it as a compliment. Later, when I was called over to help another lady, she squeezed my upper arm before allowing me to load her dirt. An elderly couple even tipped me $2 for transporting a single bag from the shelf to their cart a foot away to their car idling on the sidewalk (the cash was in two $1 gold-colored coins featuring George Washington, the first in a presidential series, so it’s one tip I won’t be spending). There have been plenty of other puzzled looks and comments upon my approach, from “But you’re only as big as I am!” to “But I thought they’d get one of those big strong men to help me...” Thanks to the wealth of muscularly underdeveloped female gardeners out there, at least I can skip going to the gym.

Summer on the Green

Ah, these warm and sunny summer days... The time of open windows, sprouting gardens, overflowing shopping carts at Home Depot, increasingly frequent laundering of fencing apparel (or at least increasingly frequent olfactory reminders of this need), and golf.

Now, I tend to use golf courses mostly in winter, because my skis don’t slide nearly so smoothly over the sand traps in the heat of August. Also, I’d rather not disturb the nice people with bagfuls of clubs. My spindly ski poles, I suspect, would not put up much resistance against an enthusiastically wielded 9-iron.

This summer, though, I’m spending two days a week out on the links. No, Spaceballs fans, I’m not working on my putz. I’m working on my putt-putts. You see, my course of choice is of the miniature variety. Specifically, it is Galaxy Golf, the science-themed mini-golf course in the side yard of the local children’s science museum, the ScienCenter. I work for its greenskeeper.

Keeping the grass green is rather easier here than on traditional courses. Cut the sod into rectangles, add a few staples in strategic locations, reattach the edging, and you're good to go for years, no mowing or watering required. There's no driving range to worry about, unless you count the parking lot.

Wily groundhogs are less of a pest than spray-paint-wielding teenagers in the night. They're the only ones who make divots. (They can smash our bright blue loop-de-loop on Hole Seventeen and plug up the Black Hole with stones, but they haven't yet managed to break into our ball reservoir on the last hole!)

The biggest concern is making sure balls don’t get stuck. They occasionally disappear down the PVC pipes that lead from a higher green to a lower one. I wonder whether the balls do the same things in those pipes as I used to hear what happened in The Tube on the playground of Rose Glen Elementary... Balls also sometimes pause on their spiraling descent down the DNA model, and once in a while the black hole hole lives up to its name. Although balls don’t get stuck on Hole Two, its blatant ignorance of several basic theories of geometry nevertheless causes the greenskeeper no small amount of vexation.

Mostly the work involves renovating the holes after the winter, the sun, and the children and teenagers have taken their respective tolls. One of my first tasks involved replacing the mesh netting barrier between the holes and the parking lot. This gave me no end of glee when I went to practice that night because I got to tell people that I did fencing in the mornings and then I did fencing in the evenings. I didn’t tell many people that, come to think. It got a disappointingly cool reaction. But it made me happy all the same.

If you’ve never been Galaxy Golfing, I’ll take you on a verbal tour.

The Front Nine:
1: Ricochet your way around a carbon ring.
2: If you hit the ball straight, in theory, it should bounce off the parabola at the end and land in the hole at the parabola's focus.
3: Starting at a plastic owl, make your way down the food chain, past plastic squirrels, plastic insects, plastic "grass" (that was once an ugly doormat), and a wobbly wooden sun.
4: Putt through a slice of a very large tree.
5: Change your ball's potential energy to kinetic energy by putting from a platform into either a shallow or deep valley.
6: Putt just hard enough to keep your ball on a curved, borderless embankment.
7: Putt left-handed. (No easy outs for you leftys—try it right-handed.)
8: Your ball is now a giant particle of pollen, which you must hit up a ramp and into a giant flower.
9: Starting at Pluto, putt through a scale model of the solar system (complete with gravity wells around the planets [but not, of course, around Pluto]) and into the sun.

The Side Nine (They’re on the side of the building):
10: Choose the slippery plastic ramp or the frictionful turf ramp. This one’s called Science Friction.
11: Putt up a ramp and down the double helix of DNA.
12: Forget your club in favor of a catapult! Fling your ball onto rubber, metal, concrete, or sand to bounce into the hole.
13: If you can manage to putt a nice, narrow parabola, your ball will roll over the top of a barrier on a wide ramp.
14: Escape from the black hole by rolling your ball down a large funnel (like the kind you roll pennies down), aiming for the escape hole in the side instead of the event horizon hole at the bottom.
15: Avoid three pendulums, each with a different length and therefore a different period.
16: Get your ball through a narrow opening before two magnets fall slowly through metal tubes and block the way.
17: Try putting past a bee hive while wearing "bee goggles," kind of like strapping a kaleidoscope to your head. Now you know how bees see the world.
18: Putt onto a checkerboard of positive and negative numbers. You only get to aim at the hole when all the numbers you've landed on add to zero.
19: You made it! As a bonus, you get to send your ball down a sloping grid of bells. If it falls straight down the middle, a free game for you!