J.T. vs. Loy Krathong

Okay, so I guess I have a few things to cover before I get started on my next blog entry. Between my last blog entry and this one, I've visited Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan. All very cool, though the Vietnamese trip was more of an adventure than a vacation. Upon returning home, I got a job at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Now I teach Environmental Science to school groups. The hours are long, but the job is fun and the people are great. And this is where our story begins...

Most of the time, I spend my workday at the park teaching middle school or elementary kids. However, every once an a while, there are special programs the administration decides to hold. Sometimes these are fundraisers where rich folks get together to be rich, while we hope that some of that rubs off onto us. Other times, it's primarily for some simple, old-fashioned community outreach. This was one of those times. It was called the "Festival of Lights," and although I believe the original intent was bringing holiday joy to children, more adults signed up than anybody.

We signed up for what stations we would work months before. I signed up for a holiday called Loy Krathong. I would later learn that it is a Thai holiday held near the end of the lunar calendar. I knew very little about the holiday at first, and that's what attracted me to it. I felt it would be a good opportunity to learn about a tradition I didn't know anything about. However, as it turns out, preparing for a holiday that nobody around you even knew existed until that week is not the easiest thing there is to do.

Preparations began soon after sign up. During the rare periods that we're not teaching during the day, we are assigned "projects" to work on. One of the projects was to build the krathongs. Krathongs are floating rafts made of banana tree trunk (traditionally)that are decorated with flowers, leaves, candles, incense, etc. The candles and incense will be lit, and they'll all be floated down the river. It's an act symbolic of letting your anger and suffering from the current year go, allowing you to begin the new year unburdened by the problems of the old one. People will even cut off pieces of their hair and fingernails and add them to a raft, thus sending "bad" parts of themselves away. The krathongs themselves are quite beautiful, and I can imagine a river filled with them must be awe-inspiring.

Anyways, that was what the people who were working on this specific project had to replicate. I, sadly, was not involved in this process. I'm told some testing took place, but I'm left to my conjecturing as to what form it took. When I saw the krathongs that had been built for the events that night, I instantly knew there was a problem. Most of the "rafts" were made of the sort of thin, laminated cardboard you'd find snack boxes made from. There were two made from a single sheet of corrugated cardboard. I was told that they had tested a prototype to make sure it works. I can only assume that they tested it with one piece of thick, corrugated cardboard, saw that it floated, and assumed that any cardboard would float. I put one of the corrugated and non-corrugated krathongs in a sink full of water. Sure enough, the granola bar box krathong sank instantly. The other one stayed afloat a while, but a little splashing and it sank, too. There was disaster looming.

On the plus side, the paper flowers made for the krathongs were quite beautiful. So, after grabbing a bite to eat for dinner, I headed back to the November Lodge to rebuild the krathongs less than an hour before the event began. My partner in crime, Sarah Edwards, soon joined. I had, at that point, immersed myself in the recycled art supplies, desperately looking for all the useable cardboard I could find. When I found some, it was cut savagely in a manner that Sarah described as "The Guillotine." After a lot of frantic destruction of old krathongs and nimble rebuilding (indeed, we felt like the little-acknowledged "krathong elves" of legends past), we had a fleet of seaworthy krathongs.

By the time we got the krathongs to Cattail pond for the demonstration, we realized that there was still a great opportunity for disaster there. I lit one of the krathongs and put it in the pond. The first thing we noticed was there was absolutely no wind or current; the krathongs simply sat there, about a foot "offshore." I found a stick that I used to push them upwards of 5 feet away, but it was hardly the effect we were going for. On top of that, the candleholders, constructed of yogurt cups hot glued to cardboard with a cross-shaped slit cut in them, were not the most sturdy device imaginable. The candle of my krathong fell over almost immediately, putting the flame directly into the paper flower. I suddenly had a display much more suited to discussing the history of the "Viking funeral" than anything holiday related. Once again, disaster loomed.

Fortunately, Sarah and I pulled it off. We had a lovely demonstration and discussion of the holiday. Sarah kept referring to the King Consort who started the tradition of the krathong as the King's "special friend." Everybody enjoyed the idea of the secret beauty contest we were holding. The krathongs mostly stayed afloat. The only one that sank was the one with only one sheet of cardboard to which we had forgotten to add another sheet. We were definitely glad that we had taken the time to rebuild all the other ones with two sheets of cardboard, at that point. Also, the krathongs kindly decided not to combust entirely until near the last groups to visit. I also went to the other side of the pond and put a few in there, giving the illusion of some that had floated away. For a while there, it was actually quite a beautiful display. At the end, about half of them caught fire at about the same time and spilled wax and who-knows-what-else into the pond, but I'm going to gloss over that part due to the great success Sarah and I pulled off against all odds.

And now, with my victory over Loy Krathong, I have returned to Grove City to enjoy a holiday that I am somewhat more familiar with: Christmas. With my two weeks off of work, I should have just enough time to recover. Happy Holidays to all of you and yours out there, and I hope to see you all soon!