Early morning, looooooong day, and The Captain

Tomorrow morning, I'll have to be at school at the completely ungodly hour of 6:15, in order to be ready to go on our ASB end of the year celebration trip up to Wild Waves in Federal Way. For those of you not in the Portland-Seattle stretch of I-5, Wild Waves is a water park that was recently acquired by the Six Flags behemoth. Federal Way is southwest Washington's version of California's Valencia, a town which seems to exist solely for the purpose of hosting a Six Flags park within its city borders. Federal Way is also THREE HOURS AWAY. BY SCHOOL BUS. WITH 21 MIDDLE SCHOOL CHILDREN ON IT.

But, all is not lost - along with my fellow ASB advisors, Dave and Kris, we are making our second pilgrimage to see The Captain.

The Captain is, well, an enormous, fiberglas head, made into the shape of some stereotypical pirate (eyepatch, earring, trailing beard, three-pointed hat), that is positioned about twenty feet over the kiddie area there at Wild Waves. Last year, the three of us staked out our position in the park across the lake from the kiddie zone, in full view of this pirate head thing. The pirate's head gets filled up with water, and then, when it reaches capacity, tilts over, drenching whatever hapless six-year-old happens to be directly underneath it.

My recipe for fun on an otherwise long, boring day: take three friends and coworkers, one massive fiberglas pirate head, and the debased mentality that can only come from teaching middle school. You've got an instant party, baby!

I don't know which one of us it was, but we began contemplating the enigma that was The Captain (as we began referring to him). After an hour, we'd seen his cranium fill up with water and splash down on kids below, only to fill up again, an even ten dozen times. That many times of seeing The Captain do his Captainly duty for the kiddies got us thinking: what must The Captain be thinking as this goes on? And, better still, what would he say, if his synthetic lips could talk?

Whatever it would be, it would certainly be in Pirate-speak, peppered liberally with "ARRRGH!"'s. As in "ARRRGH, mateys, I be spillin' me cerebellum upon ye!" and "Avast, ye scurvy dawgs! It be The Captain, and I be a-spillin' fer ye! ARRGH!"

Hilarity certainly ensued.

After we ran out of various permutations involving the words "swabbie", "matey", and "bilge rats," we settled on voicing The Captain's own barbaric yawp every time his head would spill. He would tease the kids, and us, see, by feinting that he was going to spill, usually a good ten seconds before the actual deal. So, that's how three adults with Masters degrees who are responsible for educating the children of our community ended up crying out, twice a minute for nearly two hours, "ARRR....ARRR....ARRRRRGH!!!!!!"