Saturday, August 06, 2005

Girls Gone WildWOOD

Last weekend I ventured up to New Jersey for the 13th Annual Wildwood Beach Ultimate Tournament. More than 150 teams from around the country show up to the run down beach town of Wildwood New Jersey for a two day ultimate tournament. I had long ago promised my meager services to the Oberlin reunion team. JKD and I were to drive up after work on Friday, but some horrible illness (sore throat, etc) struck JKD on Thursday and I was left scrambling for a ride. But in the Frisbee community you can arrange rides on short notice, in fact, it seems nearly to be expected. After emailing everyone I know who plays in the area I was able to get a ride and as the clock struck 7 I was wedged into a northbound Subaru with 4 other disc chasing maniacs.

After this weekend, I’ve come to realize that the feelings that most people associate with vacation: disconnect from daily life, a sense of being calm, a feeling of being rested and rejuvenated…I get these from ultimate tournaments. Normal vacations, like trips to visit other cities don’t do this for me. But an entire weekend of running around, cheering, chanting, screaming, and laying out, somehow this recharges me and brings me the release from my normal life that vacations are supposed to.

Upon pulling into Wildwood at 1 am I learned that I represented just the 4th player in Wildwood for team Oberlin. As Dan Scott put it the team came down with a case of the bails. This was further exacerbated by the fact that there were more Oberlin alums playing with other teams than there were playing for Team Oberlin. Our previous poor showing at Poultry Days meant that people were searching for more capable teams to join. A rare case of obies not sticking together and one that I have to admit really bothers me. But being the adorable rogues that we are we were able to recruit some players, and NAchie arrived from Oregon via Newark via NJ Bus Transit.

Rather than write up the results of each game I’ll just offer some general thoughts and maybe a few highlights here and there.

The first thing to realize about playing beach ultimate is that you play barefoot. I’ve long since sworn off playing barefoot. The last time I played ultimate without shoes was freshman year and in so doing I broke and sprained my big toe. Now I continued to toss on the quad for another hour until I was reduced to hopping to get the disc. Knowing when to stop has never been a trait associated with me sporting adventures. Playing barefoot on the beach is fine. Well, fine might be the wrong word. It’s nice and certainly different. But it does result in dozens of small cuts to your feet. Oh, and when you, as I did, step on a shard of glass from a stray beer bottle, well the cuts get a little larger. I stepped on this particular bottle (I didn’t get a brand, but I’ll assume it was Coors just to further fuel my hatred for that particular company) midway though Saturday. I continued to play for the rest of Saturday and through Sunday. When I finally got back to DC (and back from vacation) I realized that the now sand filled hole in my foot seemed to be the cause of no slight discomfort. How about that. Who could have predicted that? Aaron returned from a tournament injured, and yet still played well past the point of logical cessation. Stunning realizations. Not dissimilar from noting the fairly high humidity found in a glass of water.

As avid readers may know ultimate teams tend to have strange names. It’s part of the charm. You never play a team named The Lions, or the Jazz. It’s stuff like Sexually Considerate, Yellow Suckmarine or Girls Gone WildWOOD. This is part of the joy of the sport, or at least part of the preposterousness and entertainment.

In terms of personal performance, I played well. In our first game I scored 2 of our three points, and threw for our third score. In our final game I scored our only point. I played nearly every point in our four games first day. I think it’s reasonable to guess that I layed out about 20-25 times over the course of the tournament. I adore the feeling of flying through the air, and when you play on sand (especially wet sand as we did) the landing is just as fun. The best part of our team, besides it being full of fun people/Obies was that we were all willing to lay out. No one finished the tournament without sacrificing their cleanliness for the good of the whole. That’s rare, and is to be most sincerely appreciated.

I don’t know from a New Jersey Boardwalk. I grew up in the Midwest. We don’t have use for boardwalks. We are not obsessive in our recitation and playing of the song “Under the Boardwalk.” We are plagued with other foibles but fetishizing the boardwalk is not one of them. Turns out the boardwalk is like the midway of a bad county fair, but as a permanent, celebrated feature of a town. Hard to imagine why NJ gets mocked. Before someone else points it out, I realize that other states have boardwalks and that Wildwood may be a particularly sketchy place. My favorite features of the Wildwood boardwalk were the t-shirt shops and the hunt the insurgent. Like so many other t-shirt shops the ones in Wildwood adopt an attitude akin to that of Alfred E. Neumann after a night at a strip club and three too many tequilas. It’s not about critiquing the flaws of society it’s about reveling in the degree to which the wearer of the shirt can distance himself from caring through the purchase of a shirt. That’s right, let’s prove just how little I care about something buy purchasing a product declaring my ambivalence.

The other startling feature was “Hunt the Insurgent.” In this “game” you are able to shoot (with paintballs) a man in a large protective suit wielding a shield. This man, dressed like the men from some of those women’s self defense classes, prances and gambols around as small boys pepper him shield with pastel colored splatters of paint. As I understand it this booth is supposed to reinforce our patriotism, and resolidify in public sphere just how much we hate those whom we should. Except, here’s the thing…the insurgents aren’t just sitting around getting shot. They’re firing back. An no point in time does the “insurgent” blow himself up, or threaten the person attacking him…oh and he has a shield. It just feels like it mocks the danger faced by those for whom hunting insurgents isn’t a boardwalk game. But I guess mocking the sacrifice of those who actually fight wars has become a cottage industry in DC, so I can’t really criticize Wildwood for making it more visceral.
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One non-NJ related comment. While driving back from the tournament my teammates and I were talking about my sparsely appointed apartment (I still don’t have a real bed, or you know, a dresser). The captain of my DC team commented, “you know not having a bed makes it much harder to score with chicks.” To which I responded, “I already have enough trouble with that, but you may have a point, I guess I don’t need to make things any harder than they already are. It’d be like having the steeplechase in the Special Olympics.” For which circle of Hell did I just punch my one way ticket?

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