or, Another Volunteer’s Tale
The alarm rings. My legs refuse to move. I must have walked a hundred miles
or more since Thursday.
Thursday night was the beginning, for me, anyway, of a wild, four-day ride.
It begins with a walk into Exhibit Hall D at the Midwest Express Center
here in Milwaukee. I know how big it is; I’ve been there for other events.
Still, with only a few of the lights on and about a third of the tables set
up, it seems like I’ve walked into a large airplane hangar. I almost expect
to see the Spruce Goose sitting in the dimness. The 2002 National Junior
High School Chess Championships are here in Milwaukee; right now it still
seems like it’s off in the future, even though the side events started this
afternoon and the main event starts tomorrow. We ferry boxes and boxes of
sets and boards across the room. We set up nearly 800 in all, as we’re
expecting over 1400 and probably 1500 players. I leave my computer bag
behind the podium during this operation, about where someone would stand to
address a room full of kids. When I pick it up, there’s a new patch of a
whitish substance right on top. I look up. That’s right, there are birds in
here.
Friday morning the gates open. We broke the previous attendence record by
nearly 100. The center fills with excitement. And crises. We hear from a
coach who’s angry that his friend who paid for a booth hasn’t been given
one. Of course he had been given one, I’d taken him to it myself two hours
earlier, but that doesn’t help us out with the coach. Last minute supply
runs: paper, chalk, what else is missing? As time for the opening ceremony
comes near, we hear the sound of seagulls. Our roof, you see, is the
popular hang-out for all the gulls in town; no self-respecting gull hangs
out anywhere else. A player complains the gulls are making too much noise;
I explain that we knew a lot of people were coming in from the eastern,
western, and southern coastal areas of the country and so we went to a lot
of trouble to import these gulls, at our expense, just to make our
midwestern location sound more like home to them. Doesn’t he appreciate our
efforts? I can tell from the look he isn’t buying it. As the speakers
approach the podium I sneak a look up; I wonder if last night was something
personal, or merely a practice run. Apparently it was personal.
A little boy gets a hard grilling from his father for drawing with a lower
rated player. I fantasize about grilling the father — slowly, on a spit
over an open flame. Someone asks me where the USCF book store is; I resist
the temptation to point to the sign they’re leaning on while talking to me,
and give them directions. The bookstore was placed in what we thought was a
great location; everyone coming from the host hotel, over the skywalk to
the playing site, would have to walk right past it. (Downtown Milwaukee is
riddled with “skywalks,” enclosed tunnels linking buildings together well
above street level; someone described it as “gerbil city”. They make it
easy to go almost anywhere downtown on a winter day without ever setting
foot outside. They’re great, even if you do get the occasional urge to jump
inside a wheel and run as fast as you can.) Unfortunately, most of the
players seem unfamiliar with concept of a skywalk, and come to the playing
site by actually going outside and walking on the sidewalk! Oops.
As the tournament continues, the contents of the lost and found box
multiplies far beyond all reasonable expectations. At one point we decide
to let the Seattle Chess Foundation use the clocks from the lost and found
box at the next US Championship; we don’t know what we’d do with the all
the clocks we’d have left over, though. Some things I’ll never understand,
and one of them is how someone can walk away from a $120 chess clock. Their
parents will just buy them a new one when they get home, is the explanation
I’m given. Their parents have obviously never met my mother. My mother is a
kind and gentle woman, generous to a fault, but if I ever did anything
like that when I was that age, what she would do is probably illegal in
many countries. I’d still be washing dishes and scrubbing floors to pay her
back for it. But clocks aren’t the only things flowing in; we could house a
small nation comfortably in the found coats we’ve been handed. OK, so
perhaps having two daughters has irreparably softened my heart, but the one
item that bothered me the most was a bag of barbie dolls left on the shelf
outside the playing room.
I spent a few hours running results between the tournament directors and
the scorer’s table. A room full of children of that age being so quiet you
can hear footsteps from 100 feet away is something that has to be seen to
be appreciated (or even believed). While wandering the floor I saw a lot of
quick games, and some really unusual checkmate patterns. (I never did
figure out how one, involving a knight, a queen, a rook, a pawn, and a
bishop, could actually happen. I stared at it for a while in fascination,
like you might at a particularly grisly train wreck, but decided I’d better
turn away; I was afraid if I’d spent much longer thinking about it I’d
start to bleed at the ears.) I must have looked pretty scary out there,
because at least three children who had been waving their hands for
attention looked up when I arrived at the board and quickly said, “Never
mind. Sorry.”
The lights are out in half the skittles room. “Move them all to the other
half,” is the answer from the convention center. “Bzzzt. I’m sorry, wrong answer.
Thank you for playing.” The lights eventually come back on. A child throws
up (nerves? excitement? ebola?) in the hallway. I learn how to use the
house phone to call for the staff. One by one the crises arise and get
handled. We’re actually getting the hang of this!
A trophy winner is wheelchair-bound; we make a call and access to the stage
is provided. (Alas, it wasn’t tested with a fully-powered 250lb chair,
and it jammed near the top, but with a little extra effort he got to be
onstage in the spotlight with the rest of his teamates. We make a note to
use a heavier test load next time.) A coach runs out of storage space for
his digital camera; I loan him another SmartCard. A local reporter comes,
sees the rainbow colors of the kids, sees Jews, Moslems, Hindus,
Protestants and Catholics all in the same room without a weapon in sight,
and goes back to her paper and writes about how sad it is that chess is so
testosterone-laden. We shrug, then realize that if we had so many different
testosterone-laden males siting quietly together in the same room without
bloodshed then chess must be something special. There’s an extra set in lost
and found; should we send it to someone?
Every night my back ached and every morning my legs ached. It must have
been my deep-seated masochistic tendencies that raised me out of my bed and
into the playing hall every day. Sunday came and I reflected on how I spent
the long weekend with some satisfaction, tinged with the thought that I
must be finally losing my grip on reality. Then came the awards ceremony.
Earlier, I had been asked if I’d man the “early departure” table, to hand
out awards for winners who couldn’t stay to see the final ceremony. I said,
“Sure.” Silly me. I had kids, parents and coaches swarming around me like
they were moths and I was the only candle flame in the universe. A
wonderful lady named Maxine tried to come to my aid, but ran away screaming
after few minutes. I think she survived the experience; I hope so, because
she seemed like such a nice lady. A little while later I realized I was
starting to lose it. From the large number of coaches and parents who later
thanked me and complimented me on how well I behaved during the onslaught,
I must have really lost it.
Which brings me back to the morning alarm. I stagger to my feet and somehow
make it in to work. I’m exhausted. My feet hurt, my back hurts, my legs
hurt. I have aches in places I didn’t even know I had places. But what’s
this in my pocket? It’s a case with a SmartCard, the one I’d loaned to the
coach when he ran out of space on the ones he brought for his camera. I’d
promised to email them to him today. Great. So I’m not completely out from
under the event, even now. I slide the card into the slot on my reader, and
being the nosy parker that I am, take a quick peek at the pictures before I
send them on to him.
I see ten of the biggest, brightest smiles I’ve ever seen, each child
proudly displaying the medal he got for participating in the event.
The aches and pains are gone, coach. I’m not tired anymore.
When do I get to do this again?