To Fly

Paul is in camp this week, the wonderful one run by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Mayo, where the Rhodes River and the West River join.  This is his sixth year there and, like most years, he's going along with his friends Kayla and Bryan.  They are in the camp for 7th and 8th graders, which is hard to believe, I know.   As older campers they are given more responsibility and go on more excursions.   So when I picked them up from camp yesterday they thought ahead to the activities coming up the rest of the week and said they'd like to go to the pool now rather than stick to our plan of going after camp on Tuesday when they'd be tired out from spending the day hiking the strenuous Billy Goat Trail by the Potomac River.  Being impressed with this line of thinking and their planning skills, I rearranged my plans and soon we were at the pool where the kids spent most of their time leaping off the diving boards.

It must be a wonderful feeling to fly through the air like this, don't you think?

Well, not always.  When Paul tried the jump shown below he hurt himself "where no man likes to be hurt!" He kept this somewhat quiet since a girl (now that they are 7th graders Kayla has turned into "a girl" in Paul's mind and not just "Kayla"!) was present, but which he shared with me as climbed out of the pool.   As I snapped his picture I told him he looked very handsome, and he told me he was hurting like crazy.  Then he climbed up the high dive and leaped again.