Summer Begins

School’s out. Summer vacation has started, even if the ongoing rainy weather makes it seem like Summer will never get fully underway. But never fear; this will not be a weather rant. I’m only going to talk about good stuff.

Troop 22 Family Campout: The annual family campout at Newport’s South Beach State Park was fun, though more of a long, drawn-out event than last year’s Paulina Lake trip. Early campers showed up Thursday night, and campers cycled in and out until Sunday morning. There was rain, but there was also some very nice sunshine. And, the cathedral tent finally showed its full potential.

See, last year’s family campout was a non-stop rain-fest. We had just upgraded our tent to the big barrel-vaulted unit, thanks to Next Adventure, and this trip was its christening voyage. It’s a nice unit, which I’ve blogged about before – two big rooms: one a built-in screened porch setup, with a solid partition separating the porch from the very large main room. Sometimes we use this as a two-room tent, with the kids sleeping in one room while the parents sleep in another. Other times, we use the porch for its intended purpose. On th first trip, we used it in two-room configuration, with two kids, two adults and the dog. Except that, like I said, it was a nonstop rainstorm.

And I hadn’t sealed the seams on the new tent.

So the tent leaked.

Back at home, and Seven bottles of seam sealer (“one bottle coats one entire backpacker sized tent!”) later, the tent was ready to go for its next scheduled trip: a week of camping in the mountains of southern Oregon in August. Should be dry. No worries.

Except, somehow, the rain fly didn’t get returned to the tent bag after sealing.

Oh yes we did, we arrived at camp, four hours from home, with no rain fly. Oops. We used a hodgepodge of blue tarps to cover the tent. C was somewhat embarrassed (and I don’t fault her) for the hillbilly-Bedouin look of our tent all week. I tried to tell her that we were paying homage to the look of SkyLab, but while she appreciated the reference, she didn’t appreciate the aesthetics of our campsite.

So, by now, we’ve used the tent twice and not had a fully operational tent at either time. This trip to South Beach with Troop 22 was my final chance at redemption.

I’ll save you the suspense: it worked fine.

We had rain overnight both nights. The seams didn’t leak. The zippers didn’t leak either. The rain fly over the porch area is rather minimal, while the bug netting area is maximized (for the view potential) which allows water to find its way in somewhat more easily in this section than in the main room. Nevertheless, we stayed dry, and relatively clean. Even with all the sand.

I had packed a radiant space heater and an extension cord, just in case we had electrical at the camp site. No such luck. Otherwise, we’d have been nice and toasty. We really weren’t cold anyway.

R was able to demonstrate some of his new skills as a First Class scout. He slept in another tent with fellow scout, and showed a noticeable improvement in his self-reliance skills. M reacquainted herself with a couple sisters in the troop, and started acting as girl group hostess, using our porch as their clubhouse. Imagine that…. <GRIN!>

Benson High School: The campout afforded a lot of good community discussion. For C, she got a chance to talk in-depth with four alumni from Benson High School about the appropriateness of Benson’s program for R. The short summary is that all the alumni were unanimous that R was the kind of kid that 1) tends to thrive at Benson, 2) will benefit from the AP-level course material at Benson, 3) needs the practical and practical-minded style of education at Benson, and 4) will continue to be challenged throughout the entire four-year program.

One of the alumni is a young man who just graduated two weeks ago. C had made the connection that this young man had been where R is at the same age. Now he’s articulate, educated, a leader, and on his way to college with an athletic scholarship and an agenda focused on education. She didn’t speak about it out loud, but I sensed that this talk gave C a sense of peace that there is indeed a High School that will suit him. I think she’s starting to really understand what Benson is. The older alumni shared just how well known the Benson program is for technical universities (and R’s preferred choices, by the way), and that many students going on to college after Benson often earn as much as a year’s worth of technical equivalence credit just because of what they learned at Benson. This fact was not lost upon her.

Undersea Gardens: More back story is required here. Oregon Coast Today ran this article a while back:

“Built in Seattle in 1966, the Undersea Garden was towed to Newport and anchored on 10-foot I-beam pilings. Back then, the cashiers (called “Aquamaids”) had to wear skin-tight neon uniforms that looked like wetsuits, complete with “weight belts” and headgear, and a diver provided an underwater performance.

“Today, the Aquamaids’ outfits are polo shirts and khakis. But the diving show continues, offered at regular intervals throughout the day (if you’re doing all three attractions, it pays to check in at the Undersea Gardens first, so that you know when the shows are scheduled).

“Divers like Mike Stonum wear a wetsuit, scuba gear and mask, and swim through the water surrounding the viewing windows. In coordination with a narrator that talks inside the vessel’s theatre, he picks up Dungeness crab and sea stars, cuddles wolf eels, and feeds the rockfish and shark. He’s slowly coaxing a new octopus into the open, Stonum said, but for now she’s a no-show at showtime. The Undersea Gardens also has a tidal touchpool and, of course, a gift shop.

After the show, Stonum walks up to the rampart for photos and questions. He’ll tell you about the water, the job and how the octopus seems to know him from the other divers. A one-time longhaul truck driver who thought life should hold more, Stonum can now call wolf eels with a dinner bell. “

We didn’t meet Mike, but we did meet Jim. Jim was the diver on duty that day and he’s (in)famous for jumping off all sorts of high places around the Gardens, and splashing into the bay. He’s quite a character, and his antics certainly draw attention to the Undersea Gardens for their show.

Now, see, in the late 60’s when the Undersea Gardens moved to Newport, I was a little guy – 4 or 5 years old. At that time, there was no other aquarium on the Coast to speak of. No Hatfield Marine Science Center; no Oregon Aquarium. Just the Undersea Gardens. And this four year old boy LOVED it. I remember being THRILLED to go there. The Undersea Gardens WAS my destination. Once we were there, we weren’t going anywhere else that I cared about. I was fascinated by the diver show. I never got tired of the fish and the crab, the eels and the octopus. I’m told that we’d have to stay through multiple diver shows before I could be convinced to leave.

Though I couldn’t dredge up an exact memory of the inside of the place, once we descended the stairs to the viewing gallery, I knew exactly where I was… even after (ahem) 40 or so years intervening. No really. Sorry I didn’t share that before, did I? I haven’t been back inside since I was, seven or eight. The program had changed a little – updated information – but not very much. Same basic idea. You watch from the gallery and the diver serves up specimens straight to the window along with a scripted piece on each one. A quick, 20-minute educational piece in which the children can interact with the diver.

Oh, and meet the diver to ask questions after. Which my kids did. R’s question? “What are the qualifications for your job? What do I need to do to get this job when I grow up?”