Let's go rafting!

It’s been awhile since I last wrote. I guess I’ve had less down time where I’ve been sitting alone in my cabin because I feel like I’m finally a part of the staff here at camp, which is really awesome. I think the rafting trip + punk rock concert in back-to-back weekends really helped push through some of those uncomfortable boundaries.

The rafting trip. There was really too much that happened to really be able to recount for storytelling purposes, but I will tell a number of a stories that will help paint a picture of what it was like and include some lessons I was taught along the way by (literally) licensed professionals. This doesn't fit in a lesson or a story, but I jumped off a 37' cliff into a deep pool (with my life jacket) at a famous jumping spot. We take children there, so it really must be safe or this operation would have been shut down years ago.

Lesson I:

You need lots of beer. Coming away from the trip, I would say the hardest part of rafting is figuring out a good place to keep your beer so that it doesn’t tip over and fill with Giardia-riddled water. The skill I developed was to stick it down the front of my life jacket so that it couldn’t go anywhere. To complete this maneuver successfully, however, one must first drink at least 1/3 of the beer. Very tricky.

Lesson I.5:

Never abandon a soldier:

If there is an inter-raft beer exchange and a beer goes astray, leap into the water and retrieve said beer. There will always be a number of folks to help pull you back into the boat

The drinking was the key. While one of our numbers had to go to sleep by around 8pm because he was practicing this skill too hard, the rest of us sat around and ate and watched the stars through the carved columnar basalt cliffs that had been shrouded in the black drop cloth of night. I ended up sleeping on the side of a hill on top of a bush because of the state I went to sleep in. Turns out that’s not great for your neck the next day.

The next day we putzed around for a while and got down the river just in the nick of time for me to get out and drive my car back to the city for the opera! There was a double-bill of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Carl Orff’s infamous Carmina Burana. Without even realizing that I was seeing two operas, (opere?) I fell in love with the magic and power of I Pagliacci. I recognized the famous Aria “Vesti la Giubba,” and it has been stuck in my head for the past week and a half. Carmina Burana was wonderful as well, but they put dancers in front of the soloists and chorus and had a woman with an enormous live snake on stage. I have a few problems with this: First of all, this is cruel to the animal. These people are wearing a living creature as an article of clothing. Secondly, as a theatre semi-professional (boy, it takes some nerve for me to throw that one out there…), there has got to be a cheaper and less difficult way to create the impression of a snake on that woman without actually having a live snake on stage. The article in the paper was all about how difficult it was, which I would certainly believe. You’ve got to be able to make a puppet or just a stuffed animal that would look like a snake to the roughly 2000 person house this opera was playing to. I don’t know, maybe that was just me.

All in all, a beautiful, moving night at the opera, which was preceded by a ridiculous, but at this point, not at all unexpected weekend. I arrived in the city at around 6:30pm on Saturday and left the following morning at around 1:30pm to pick mushrooms with my father and head back to camp (if you would like further description of that activity, ask me later). Entering the opera building was a moment of peculiar perspective for me. The crowd at the opera (roughly 2000) was more people that I had been around in weeks. There are never more than 120 people in camp at any given time, most of them children, and it takes almost 90 minutes to drive to a town with a population larger than that (6000). For the first time in my life, I felt strange and out of place in the city I grew up in. It may have been the fact that I was wearing jeans and was covered in dried up river water, beer and sweat to a formal theatrical event, but who knows?

Vesti la giubba, Canio's aria from I Pagliacci

Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio, To recite! While taken with delirium,
non so più quel che dico, I no longer know what it is that I say,
e quel che faccio! or what it is that I am doing!
Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati! And yet it is necessary, force yourself!
Bah! sei tu forse un uom? Bah! Can't you be a man?
Tu se' Pagliaccio! You are "Pagliaccio"

Vesti la giubba, Put on the costume,
e la faccia in farina. and the face in white powder.
La gente paga, e rider vuole qua. The people pay, and laugh when they please.
E se Arlecchin t'invola Colombina, and if Harlequin invites away Colombina
ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà! laugh, Pagliaccio, and everyone will applaud!
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto;Change into laughs the spasms of pain;
in una smorfia il singhiozzo into a grimace the tears of pain, Ah!
il dolor, Ah!
Ridi, Pagliaccio, Laugh, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto! for your love is broken!
Ridi del duol, che t'avvelena il cor! Laugh of the pain, that poisons your heart!