All the Universes

It’s not really fair to report on a visit to Camp Indianola without mentioning the rope swing -- by far the best rope swing I’ve ever been on, with the possible exception of the one on the Wailua River on the island of Kauai.

This one is overland. You climb up onto a platform at the top of a sloped clearing in the woods. Someone hands you up the rope. You leap off the platform onto the round wooden seat, and hang on tight. For a while you keep plunging, but then you feel the seat gradually start to take your weight and carry you up into the trees. Because of the slope you’re a good 40 feet off the ground at the top of the arc, looking down into the underbrush, or out at the beach, or back at your friends on the platform waving at you.

It's wildly exhilirating, of course, but also quite safe: once your hands are on the rope and your butt is on the seat, you'd have to try pretty hard to fall off -- not something anybody is remotely tempted to do, ever (though we have seen a flip-flop or two drop down into the bushes.)

The only danger is that kids sometimes run across in front of the swing, a habit I do my best to quelch by telling them about the time I knocked my friend Peter off a cliff when he ran in front of a rope swing I had just jumped onto. He was going to take my picture, I think, and decided at the last minute that the other side offered a better angle. It was too late to stop myself; I slammed into him and sent him tumbling down into the rocky ravine, losing all my own momentum in the process. And so I found myself suspended over the middle of the ravine, unable to get back to the edge, looking down at my friend lying motionless on the rocks below me.

"Did he die?" the kids always want to know.

"No, he was okay -- eventually he started moving again, and some people came along and helped me get down off the rope and get him up out of the ravine. But that is why you should NEVER, NEVER run across in front of the rope swing. Got it?"

Maybe it's overkill. But they do get it.

I don’t have any pictures of the rope swing, mostly because anytime I was anywhere near the thing I was either on the ground helping kids get off so I could hand the rope up to the next person on the platform, or standing on the platform helping kids get on the seat so I could yank them back up over my head and fling them out into the unknown. Or swinging up into the trees myself, of course. There were photographers around, though -- hopefully some of them will come through with some pictures to share.

The kids developed a whole lexicon to describe the progression of forward momentum delivered by the various adults on the flinging roster. We had "not so high," "medium high," and "really, really high," to start with. Pretty soon we got up to "way high," "superduperduper high," and "higher than is even possible!" Then we moved on to outer space metaphors: "I want to go alien high!" "I want to go to the next galaxy!" "I want ten thousand galaxies high!" and my favorite, from Shannan: "I want all the universes, Daddy!"