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Thursday, June 8, 2006

I'm on the volunteer group's SWAT team, which means they can call me in when they need emergency help. I got a call to "help out" at a picnic, held this morning and early afternoon at a riverfront park. One of the Kingston schools matches fourth graders with elderly pen pals, as a writing exercise, and for socialization. This picnic is for the kids and elders to finally meet (end of the school year, end of the exercise).

A few of the elderly pen pals were unable to attend the picnic, so I was asked to act as a substitute pen pal. Actually, when I was first called, I thought I'd be "working" there, like cooking hot dogs or organizing games or something. When I discovered I was going to be paired with a kid for the day, I wasn't all that enthusiastic.

Fifty fourth graders, and about as many senior adults (about a third with walkers). The "program" was mainly ecology. We were going to clean up the beach, and hike to a stream, and take and test water samples from the stream and the river.

My kid was a tall (taller than me) strawberry blond 10-year-old girl (who is going to be a heartbreaker in a few years), who was plainly disappointed that her real pen pal hadn't come, but eventually we got along just fine.

Well, it was high tide, so there wasn't much to do on the beach. Any crud was under water. I heard that at low tide they can collect everything from bits of plastic to truck tires.

We hiked up along the river a ways (fifty kids, the three ecology folks, the two teachers, a very few seniors, and me) 'til we got to the stream. Just upstream from where the path crossed on a little footbridge there was a 2-level waterfall, and sitting on the middle ledge was the biggest danged snapping turtle I've ever seen alive.

I was interested in the turtle, of course, but I was surprised at how much joy I took in watching the kids react to the turtle. It was great. They all crowded on the little bridge, leaning over the railing. Their comments were priceless. Not so much what they said, but the way they said it.

Later, on the beach, one of the boys found a huge dead eel. The kids all crowded around, and it was funny how a kid would push to the inner ring of the crowd, someone would poke the eel with a stick, and the kid would scream and push their way out. The crowd was roiling with kids pushing in, screaming, and pushing back out. Then a girl managed to get a sturdy stick under it and lift it up to toss it in the river, and the whole ring screamed and widened out.

The beach looked nice, all groomed sand and all, but none of the beaches along this section of the Hudson can be trod barefoot, because they are all full of water chestnut seed pods, which are pretty, but very nasty. The photo at the link (scroll down to it) shows the four sharp "horns", but what it doesn't show is that each of those four horns starts out tipped with a barbed spine. If one of those barbs sticks into you, it doesn't come out without cutting. I was amused that the kids called the nuts "cow's heads" (from the side, they do look bovine), "devil's heads", and the one I liked best, "devil's eggs".

There was an open grassy area where the kids played whiffle ball and kick ball, with a pole fence bordering a steep overgrown drop-off down to the river. They were playing kickball, and the ball sailed over the fence and down the bank. (If the ball went into the river, it would be gone forever.) Naturally, there was an immediate surge of kids to the fence, all of them, and a few of the boys went right over the fence and started down the bank. I happened to be the only adult there, and I yelled "Everybody this side of the fence! Now!" and I was absolutely amazed when the boys immediately reversed and came back. Good kids! The ecology guy (a college student) went down for the ball, which had been stopped at the edge of the water by a drift-log.

So, I had a good time. I'd forgotten how much fun a herd of good kids can be.

Going to play Trivia tonight with Tom.