Holdplacer

I am so busy- I can't wait to tell you about it, but I'm too busy.

It's another day here in paradise- the last of Junior High #4. Highlights of the week include getting up at 6:30 in the morning to move 400 or so chairs in order to sweep and then carefully placing them back in perfectly straight rows, as well as spraying down and wiping a ton of bathrooms with hydroxy (a sanitizer). Thus my mother's prophecy has been fulfilled- I did indeed have to clean toilets at Q.

More highlights include taking a group of 4 kids mountain biking up 2 different mountains, made possible only by this week's amazing speaker. Allow me to explain:

He is a mountain biker. I knew it within a few seconds of looking at him. He just had that look about him; the "I'm wearing a Kona hat look". Yeah. Sweet. It get's better. He talked to me, and I told him that I was the mountain bike leader, and that I hadn't done much biking in a while because I'd been at Briercrest.

I didn't think he was that hardcore though until I saw him give his first talk to the campers... about mountain biking! He talked about how he was teaching his 6 year old son to ride skinnies at a mountain bike park. He used it as an example, he said that he's teaching his son how to take risks, because when he grows up he wants him to not hesitate to do what he knows is right. That's a hardcore mountain biker.

It still get's better though. Let me tell you a bit about my job as the mountain bike leader first though: I take kids mountain biking- all kinds of them. I have this group of kids who come biking with me every day, and I have some that only come once because they have to, and I have some that beg me to take them to the jumps during a time section when I am clearly not allowed to. My hardcore group, the "Peak Experience" campers, are the ones who bike every day. The brochure is very clear that it is for "people who want to ride up one side of maple mountain and down the other" however there are always at least 2 girls who have never ridden a mountain bike before (I believe this situation exists because the Peak Experience option is one of the last options to fill up, and the girls waiting list for camp is always longer than the dudes) This phenomenon was visitted in a previous blog post. Which you should keep in mind as you read this one.

Ever since the day of that previous blog post I have been somewhat less merciful on little girls who have never mountain biked, simply because I wanted to discourage them from coming with us up a mountain. There are other things they can do, and I've been telling them that. Due to the fact that I was planning to continue getting up at 6:00AM all this week, I was not planning on being especially enthusiastic as a mountain bike leader this week. I really didn't have any high hopes.

However, on the second day of Mountain biking with my "Peakers" Sid, the speaker came along. At the time, I was very glad about this because my assistant was out with a broken toe and his replacement was complaining about the concusion he thought he'd gotten that morning and about how hungry he was, and how his head hurt and... ugh! So Sid (the speaker) came, it was great, he was super enthusiastic so I didn't have to be, he helped the little girls by holding onto thir seats while they road the skinnies in the bike park, just like he talked about doing for his 6 year old son. Then we just went to the jumps I think because the four other guys were into them. They were good friends, but hard on eachother- rough around the edges you might say.
Sid was enthusastic while they were jumping, and the girls were content to watch. ...I forgot to mention that I had been planning to do a really difficult ride in order to discourage the girls, what I thought was "being honest" about how difficult it "would be" for them later. Sid dashed that plan though- he's the speaker, you can't drag little girls all over the forest when the speaker is with you, it's unchivalrous, it's unidealistic, it's mean.

When the ride was over and the kids left, Sid talked to me. He said I did a good job, and I have a cool gig here. We talked about Briercrest, and he said he'd been their too. He did that thing adults do where they ask you what your career plans are.

But then he said some amazing things. He more or less said "Evan, you've got to love on these kids, especially the girls. Don't worry about the guys, they already think you're awesome, but you've got to love the girls. Tomorrow (day 3 of 4 days of biking) we have these kids for 2 hours, and if after 2 hours of mountain biking these girls say that they've had a good time, then we will have accomplished something amazing. Let's make those 2 hours the best time ever for these girls, I'll come with you."

I agreed.

The next day a 5th guy showed up for the first time that week. I thought he'd be ok because he's a guy and he signed up for mountain biking. As we got ready to ride that day, everyone was asking me where we were going, and I kept saying I didn't know. I felt dumb, I felt like I wasn't leading, I felt like I should know what to do, where to go. I didn't know though. I didn't know how to give those girls the best time ever. I didn't know if it meant I should forget about the guys and just do easy stuff, or if it meant I should make the girls do something really hard, but just enocurage them and wait for them so much that they would be able to do it, to help them get over obstacles they couldn't get their bikes over, to be chivalrous- Maybe then they'll have a good time, and a sense of accomplishment as well. So in the end I said "we're going to head up the mountain, but I don't know how far we're going to go" and we went.

It was slow going. I knew it would be, I had to be in the front as always so I couldn't help the girls that much. Sid was in the back and doing a great job as usual. I had an assigned assistant who was hanging with the guys, and was doing a great job of joking with them and generally being cool. It soon became clear that the one knew boy was slow, and he was wearing pants on a hot day, and he fell into a hole and got dirt down his pants, and he wasn't wearing any socks.

This is going to be anticlimactic. Sid talked to me, and he said that me and my assistant should keep going up the mountain and that him and the girls and the slow boy should go at their own pace. I said that there was a trail that we would have been going down that they could take, but that since we were now able, the rest of us were going to push up to the top of the mountain.

So we did. Me and the 4 rough guys and my cool assistant went up to the top of the mountain- the same mountain from my other blog post 6 weeks ago. We did it on day 3, not day 4. We did it in 2 hours as though it was just a normal thing, and while we were up, the girls and the boy and Sid went back down to the bike park and rode skinnies, and Sid did his regular amazing encouraging thing and they had a great time, they even did some of the hard stuff that most of the boys don't do, because Sid helped them learn and get confidence to do it. Later on, their counselor came up and told me how much fun they had had, and she thanked me. Last night, the 2 girls wanted to get their picture taken with me. Sid and I shook hands and congratulated eachother, and then the next day, Sid and I both individually went out of our way to make sure the girls were signed up for a different activity, because they choose not to come on our final ride, of their own volition, because they knew it wasn't really for them.

So we climbed another mountain, a mountain I climbed last week with the boys of my last group. It was hard. It was crazy. It was intense. It was mountain biking, and this time I wasn't sick so it was actually fun. We had a good time and the kids did great. It took all afternoon and the guy with the broken toe ended up coming and doing it, which made me happy because he's a super great guy and just perfect for anything with kids.

Yeah so now I'm kindof lost, and staff meeting is starting. That was a long story, I hope I didn't bore you. I guess I should just sum it up by saying that this week was very challenging for me, but that I learned a lot, and now I am very tired. Next week I have decided to counsel the final juniors camp, an oppurtunity which came up suddenly. I had the option of doing something much easier, but it seems like I'm supposed to council. One of the deciding factors was that I saw one of my old campers today because he came with his dad to pick up his older brother from this camp. I know have an oppurtunity to have that kind of bond with 10 more kids, and I'm going to take it, even though the girl I like a lot isn't councilling next week and so I was really hoping to get to know her better. Oh well.

Topical Moisturizer

One of the bikes has a flat tire, I already fixed it once today, but I must not have done a good enough job. Today has been the first full day of Junior High #3, which brings me back to my old routine, the routine where I feel like I'm most doing my job as mountain bike leader. It means that I do three group rides a day, each about an hour, including the time it takes to get all the kids ready. Groups vary in size from 5 to 11, (the amount, not the age) both guys and girls. I like it when the girls get into biking, sometimes I have groups of girls who are super-hardcore, and that makes me happy. Sometimes little girls scare me though, like when they ride through trails sitting on their seats and with their feet dragging on the ground- it's just not safe, they can hit their shins on the pedals and they don't have their weight centered very well for maneuvering. So, in conclusion, girls who come mountain biking provide a mostly pleasant challenge.

Today we had some crazy dudes. Most of the crazies come out in open activities, not in the scheduled blocks. They can be scary to, and they're kindof hard on eachother. Often there will be one who thinks he's bigger, stronger, older, tougher, or better than some of the others, and who likes to criticize.

It's all fun though- It's just taking kids mountain biking. Some of them have never tried it before, and some of them speak broken English; other kids remind me more of myself. It's special.

Bed time.