Senior trip day 1, part 1.

Being a chaperon is kind of a strange thing to do. You hang out with kids and act friendly but all the while with some small amount of your attention you're supposed to be monitoring their behavior. I guess I'm well suited to this because that's kind of what I do most of the time anyway; the problem I have is that spending long chunks of time with a group of people highlights (to me anyway) my lack of social skills. I'm pretty good at concealing this most of the time, but over extended periods it gets difficult.

That being said, this has been a pretty pleasant day so far. I had to get up ridiculously early, because we had to be somewhere a couple of hours away by 9:30. I get to school at 7 and start to perform my first duty, the bag check. This is an awkward kind of thing, pleasantly chatting with someone while you rifle through their personal effects, opening up and sniffing water bottles, poking around through socks and underwear. In the past, this has presented some difficult situations, like spotting condoms in the bottom of someone's bag while conversing with him and his mom, but nothing that interesting happened this year. Honestly, anyone who tries to hide stuff in their bag is an idiot, since at least so far we haven't made people turn their pockets out or patted them down.

We got up to the Poconos at the proper time and got ready to go river rafting. We got fitted for life jackets and sat around until the guides gathered us up for our orientation. River guides tend to all have the same unserious kind of of patter, mixing corny jokes with useful information. We're supposed to be able to know the difference, I guess, though it's not always obvious.

Fortunately, rafting is pretty simple business once you learn how to steer. It's pretty much impossible to sink a raft and even in mild rapids you have to seriously screw up to fall out.

I found myself in a raft with another chaperon and three girls who, had they been given the choice between river rafting and sitting in the luggage compartment of the bus for 4 hours would have had to think about it, at least for a minute. Once I saw how terrified they looked just getting on the bus to the river I knew we were for a treat. The river was pretty calm, but whatever fears the girls had, getting lost, drowning, being eaten by crocodiles, was soon subsumed by an all out effort to avoid getting wet. This is hard to do in a river, since it's made mostly of water, especially when everyone had bailing buckets, described by the guides as being for taking water out of your raft and throwing it into someone else's. As soon as we started everyone commenced trying to soak everyone else with pretty much complete success. This prompted the girls, who had previously been somewhat indifferent to paddling, to race to the front of the group so as to have limited interaction with the others. This also turned out to be a success and we stayed dry for most of the rest of the trip.

We stopped for lunch, during which time another dynamic, chilliness, came to the forefront. Turns out, if you keep soaking each other when it's not very warm out, you get cold. So by the time we had to go back to the river there were a number of malcontents. I noticed one bunch of girls, who had been play-flirting with the guides  during lunch, kind of drifting aimlessly along the side, occasionally getting stuck and not really doing much of the paddle in the water thing. As we were making our move back to the front, I looked back and saw that their boat looked like it had orange wings. Then I realized that they had gotten one of the guides to get out of his kayak and paddle them the rest of the way. If this was a plan, I mean if they did the drifting, getting stuck thing on purpose, it was brilliant.

The river was beautiful for the most part and the air was pleasant. We got back to the base and waited by a fire for the bus to pick us up. It came reasonably quickly and then it was off to the next phase, the resort hotel, which I will cover in part 2.