Got Competition?

We enjoyed the various ways parents and teachers at Camp Indianola worked to guide people's cutthroat instincts into collaborative channels. Some of these were more successful than others; we only hope the more visceral competitive moments didn't scar anyone for life.

Jody did quite well with a series of cooperative games on Tuesday afternoon. My favorite was this one, where your group has to figure out how to fit everyone on a towel, with no body parts touching the grass, and in each round the towel keeps getting folded smaller and smaller,

Until finally you all fall down.


The water balloon toss, which we sort of imagined might get a little Lord of the Flies, was expertly managed by Kelly. She and Mike demonstrated the technique of throwing the balloon very gently to your partner so it wouldn't explode all over him or her in a wild wet blast, at least not on purpose.


(We haven't been able to confirm the rumors in the crowd that Mike has an impressive baseball resume, but we wouldn't be surprised -- look at those hands!)

Some people started out so gentle it was a little ridiculous:


But it turned out the balloons could survive a fair amount of manhandling, as long as they didn't hit the prickly grass.


Emerson and Spencer -- motivated by the promise that the team that preserved its balloon the longest while flinging it the farthest would get dessert first at dinner that night -- took things to a whole new level.


These two got at least 20 feet apart before the balloon finally burst at Emerson's feet, and the crowd went wild. We loved this game -- but we did miss, just for a moment, that other kind of water balloon toss, where the wild wet blast is the whole point, dessert be damned.

Next we moved on to one of the most primal forms of competition out there: Tug o' War. First the kids divided into two teams and faced off along the rope. Then they got together and succeeded in dragging a team of parents across the line, a feat that filled them with such powerful glee that we really should have known better than to beat them in the rematch.

We're still not quite sure how it happened. Maybe our cutthroat instincts, long squelched by civilized modern life, had been reawakened by the sea air. Maybe it was because there were just so dang many of them the second time,


and they were pulling so hard,


that it really did take all our effort to keep from losing ground. And once it became clear that it wasn't going to be easy to win, the idea of letting them do it became less and less appealing.


Then came the clincher: the boys against the girls. Why didn't someone have the sense to step in and stop the madness? The kids sorted themselves out, and when it became clear that there were, like, twice as many boys as girls, some of the women joined the girls' team. The men politely declined to help the boys (as one of them said later, "There was no way I was going to get myself involved in that.") and so the boys found themselves facing their own mothers, along with their female classmates.

In any other situation the mothers might have taken it easy, but it turned out that enough of them were unwilling to see the girls lose that the horrified boys were dragged across the line once more. (I'm not sure Simon has forgiven me yet -- especially after Maidi told him I was one of the ones chanting "Childbirth! Childbirth!" I told him it was meant as a reminder of our strength, not a cry for revenge, but it didn't help much.)

Even if some of the adults were unsuccessful in suppressing our own visceral urge to win, we did succeeded in managing our children's bloodthirst during the big pillow fight, which took place at an appointed time, in a contained area, with clear rules, a two-minute time limit, and a team of doctors and therapists standing by.








Music: "Teen Beast" by Los Straitjackets