Every year the school does a Pieniny trip and every year I say I'll do it differently and every year I do it exactly the same, because it works. Bus to Krościenko, up through the forest, forty minutes of steps at the end, the platform, the view, the raft down the Dunajec, home.
What changes is the kids. This year's lot are fifteen and think everything is a bit embarrassing, including limestone. Then they get to the platform, which hangs over a drop of about five hundred metres, and the embarrassment goes and something older comes in.
One of them — a boy who has said perhaps nine words to me since September — stood at the rail for a long time and then asked how the river had cut the gorge, and I told him, and he said 'that's a long time' and I said yes, and we stood there being small together.
The raft was rafts. The felt hats, the jokes the raftsmen have told ten thousand times, the moment where the whole thing goes through the narrows and thirty teenagers scream. Geography. I love my job.
