Spring Break Update.

Things have been busy so I haven't had the time or inclination to write another update. I'll try to cover everything that's happened since last Saturday, but that seems unlikely since there has been so much that has happened, so I may have to stop at some point and fill in more details later.

Sunday of Terminus was canceled due to rain. There was a slight drizzle when we woke up, but I guess that it poured all night and flooded the fields. We were all pretty bummed, since we were seeded second for bracket play after a tremendous Saturday, but it was out of our control. Most of us went back to bed for a couple hours or watched trashy television. A group then went to Hooters to drink, since liquor stores are closed on Sunday in Georgia and that was the closest and cheapest place to buy beer. Those of us who were 21 bought pitchers. Those of us who were under 21 ordered glasses of water, drank their water and then refilled their cups from the pitchers. This worked for a while, but as we drank we grew less discrete and the manager eventually caught us in the act. He yelled at us, but was surprisingly civil considering the circumstances. We finished our meal and headed back to the hotel.

Back at the hotel, our drunkeness took on a rowdy nature. A group of us ended up marauding from room to room, finding specific teammates and tackling them to the floor. This resulted in several exciting wrestling matches, with combatants rolling across beds and getting wedged on top of one another in the space between the bed and the wall. Josh grabbed a hair buzzer and shaved a patch in the top of Allan's head. With my and a couple other people's help, Allan pinned Josh to the floor and stripped him of his vintage Amherst High jersey, which Allan claimed as retribution. Josh later tried (unsuccessfully) to choke Allan out, and Allan ended up punching Josh repeatedly on the chest and shoulder. Josh had horrendous bruises the next morning. I also opened a door into Jeff Kelly's face, giving him a small cut on his forehead. It was an interesting afternoon.

After a short nap, we had dinner (Sonic, after searching out a Cici's Pizza Buffet only to find that it had closed half an hour early). En route, we were pulled over by a police officer who clearly saw our Massachusetts plates and the youth of our driver. He claimed that we were wandering across the lane (we weren't) and wanted to see if our driver, Jeff Steeves, had been drinking (he hadn't). The officer was friendly, but it was still obnoxious.

After dinner, a few of us resumed drinking with the thirties that Henry had purchased the night before. Allan, Galen, and I went outside to sit in a gazebo and smoke a joint. After a couple minutes, two cop cars pulled up and the officers went inside. A minute later, two more patrol cars pulled up to our gazebo. I put the joint on the moist bench behind me and sat on it, extinguishing the flame. Apparently, somebody had called in a noise complaint about our group, and the officers just wanted to check in with us. We kept our cool, showing the officers our water bottles - which were full of actual water - and they left us without incident. On the way out, however, one of the officers asked me if Massachusetts ultimate was the same as Wisconsin ultimate. I explained that, while we played the same game, we were opposing teams at Terminus. He then asked me if I knew somebody named Evan Klane (sp?) laughing that he "had met him last night". He got back into his car and left without saying anything else.

I talked to Jake the next morning as we drove down to Jekyl Island, and he told me an absolutely absurd story about his teammate Evan. Somebody else in the hotel had been smoking, which precipitated the arrival of the Atlanta police. Evan and the other occupants of his room were asleep in bed, but they left their door unlatched so that their teammates could still get in. Because the door was not latched, the police reasoned that they could enter the room, and those poor Wisconsin players awoke to find a group of police officers standing over their beds with flashlights. The officers conducted some sort of vague test to see whether they had recently smoked. This test concluded that all of the room's occupants were high, even though none had smoked in the last twenty-four hours and one of them had never smoked in his entire life. Regardless, the officers searched the room and found that Evan had just under an ounce of marajuanna (about a gram short of being a felony), a bowl and a vaporizer. They confiscated it all and I believe that Evan is facing criminal charges. An absolute travesty of justice.

Anyway, back to Zoodisc. We packed our bags the next morning to head for Jekyl Island. As we were about to leave, I was accosted by a little old lady who came to my doorway. She told me that she was very upset at the banging of our room doors the night before, when we had been moving from room to room without latching any of the doors. I honestly had not been aware that this noise could have been heard from inside of the hotel rooms, which I told her and apologized sincerely. However, this apology only seemed to fuel her anger. She continued to berate me, saying that we were either idiots or immature "A-H's" (I think she meant "assholes"). I told her that, if she was so upset, she should have acted like an adult and come to talk to us. I reiterated that I had not been aware that we were making so much noise, and that we would have extended her the courtesy of being quieter if only she had given us the courtesy of communicating with us. The old bat then said, "You were warned by the cops, don't tell me you didn't know about the noise," thereby implying that She had been the one to phone in the noise complaint rather than simply asking us to be a little quieter. At this point, I wanted to take back my apology. I decided, however, to be the bigger man, so I curtly wished her a nice day and slammed the door behind her.

Jekyl Island was beautiful. Fucking. Beautiful. Our campground was on a National Park. Tall, majestic trees filled the entire campsite, and spanish moss formed a dense canopy. We had plenty of room to set up our tents and for a small fire, and they gave us a large white event tent just in case we hadn't brought enough tents for everybody. Henry set up his tent inside the event tent and we used the rest of it to store our clothes and gear.

The one potential problem was the proximity of our campsite and those of others. Instead of being an isolated site in the middle of the woods, as I had envisioned, the campgrounds was really more of an RV/tent lot. Every nature of campers, RV's, tents, and trailers stretched as far as the eye could see. Our campsite was probably visable, and audible, from twenty other sites. I was afraid that we would offend other campers through our juvenile fun. However, a few of the closer campsites were occupied by other ultimate teams, and the older campers who were nearest to us seemed very nice. Several of them approached us as we were setting up our tents and their tone was refreshingly friendly. A nice old lady told us to have fun and to not worry about being a little stupid on our spring break, but reminded us not to do anything Too stupid. She told us that another ultimate team had gotten drunk and wandered around the campground stealing signs from in front of people's sites. These signs announced the home states of some of the farther travelers. Stupid, pointless, petty theft. The real issue is that the campgrounds are on a National Park, so this theft constitutes a felony. The perpetrators were caught and, at that time, were sitting in a Georgia jail. I was amazed at her story, and promised to learn from their mistake. Talking to her was a really nice experience, and I noted how different it was from my conversation with that other old lady earlier that morning. It's amazing how big of a difference attitude makes. Had the first old lady been friendly and considerate in her attitude, I would have paid attention and come away from the conversation feeling quite bad for inconveniencing her. Instead, I just felt angry because she had been rude to me. Conversely, the second old lady had been friendly, so I felt obliged to honor her request and be quiet and considerate during my stay at the campground. Life has a funny way of presenting obvious little foils.

The beach was only a ten minute walk away, and it was an amazing beach at that. A row of trees had, long ago, fallen over and only webs of roots and portions of trunks looped from the sand dunes that slowly build above them. The water was perfect - refreshing but certainly not cold - and low waves licked the sand. I was a little unsure whether camping was the best idea, but it was absolutely the perfect way for us to approach High Tide.