2001-11-07
Backpacking, posted at 8:13 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I'm back.After five days in the mountains with four fifteen-year old boys, three instructors, no showers, 20-degree weather, and lots of rock-climbing, I'm alive, well-rested, and back to school. It was a decent time.
Did I have fun? That's the question everyone seems to be asking this morning. Well, not really. It was tough. We hiked over twenty miles over the five days, over rocky terrain and often in steep climbs or drops. We wore sixty-pound backpacks, and slept under the stars in sub-freezing temperatures. So, "fun" just sort of doesn't sum it up too well. But it was a good experience, and I'm glad I did it.
The number of students going dropped from 14 to 12 to 7 and finally to 4 on the day we left, as three didn't show up on Friday morning. I got to know these four kids very well over the long weekend. There were a couple that had severe cases of teenage boy syndrome (false bravado and machismo masking insecurity), which I can tolerate better than teenage girl syndrome (halter-top bitchiness masking insecurity). The program targets both kids who want to do it because they're just overachievers, and kids who should do it, because they're troublemakers. We had both.
The program is neat for me as an instructor/chaperone, because I had the least amount of responsibilities. Because it's a peer-leadership development activity, the kids basically do all the work, and make most of the decisions as a team. And since there were three instructors from the program, I didn't have to do any of the instructing or breaking down of information I would as a teacher. I learned a lot and did all the activities, but didn't have the direct responsibilities I normally have in front of a classroom. It was a nice break in that regard.
It was physically challenging, however. The hiking got arduous. I'm in decent shape and was able to do it better than the kids (!), but I was still exhausted by the end of the day each day. Monday's seven-mile night hike uphill kicked my ass and I had about fifty near-ankle twists. My back muscles still feel sore from trucking around that huge backpack. My lips are more chapped than they've ever been right now. Rock-climbing was harder than I ever imagined, but I was able to scale a sixty-foot wall (that was much tougher for me than the kids). Repelling was even scarier, as the instructors asked me to slowly lean back off a sixty-foot cliff. I did it, though. It felt good when my feet hit the ground.
The mountains were beautiful. The Appalacchians have a lot of trees on them, and the autumn leaves were gorgeous. We hiked to the tops of a lot of peaks, and the views were extraordinary. The Northern Lights visited us on our last night. The trail was desolate of other people and lovely. My previous idea of camping was getting drunk with friends at a crowded campground, but this gave me a whole new definition. (Granted, the nights probably would have been a lot more fun with a cooler full of Purple Rain and Erin, Gale, Kelly, Paul, Jason, Nate, and others there).
(Up in that previous paragraph, I would have put a link to my last camping trip with friends back around my birthday in August, but for some reason all of my entries from August are not on my archive list. Any ideas where they could have gone?)
The kids were nice. I only knew one of them before the trip, and they all called me "Mr. Mark" despite the fact that I told them to call me "Mark" for the trip. One of them didn't earn his certificate because of attitude problems, but I think they were a bit stingy on that and I'm going to help him write a letter to earn it. It was very nice to see kids excelling, even though I heard from the instructors a few times that my group was "low-functioning," probably because the lack of any females made for a lot of testerone wars and the smallness of the group made personalities clash a bit more than usual. The groups are usually mixed-gender and about twelve, rather than four all of the same gender.
The instructors were pretty cool people. One was Val, a 27-year old Canadian with a nosering. She was very good at her job, and had a great laugh and good taste in music. We played this game most of the trip where we said a word and the other person had to think of a song that had that word in the lyrics, and then sing that song. She had decent taste in music (Indigo Girls/Peter Gabriel/Tracy Chapman/Joni Mitchell), so we matched up well. I had thought of asking her to the Melissa Ferrick/Dan Bern show on Nov. 15 here in Baltimore (about my dream lineup), but decided against it. The second instructor, Tim, was a 58-year old cancer survivor, open farter, and retiree who loved the outdoors so much he decided to give up his highpaying computer job to work for the program. He was an MSU grad thirty years ago, so that was a neat connection we had. The third was a nineteen-year old instructor trainee who was a neat guy. He was African-American and from Baltimore, and made good connections with the kids on the trip.
The trip was designed to give kids self-confidence and make them into leaders, and I think it had the same effect on me. I have a slightly new outlook on things right now, knowing I can make it through five strenous days in the mountains. I did a lot of thinking on the trip as I walked those trails. I thought about where I was a year from now, as I was grieving over Ann's death and getting a different outlook on life. I'm sure there will be a future entry charting my progress, because I wrote it in my head while walking those miles. I thought about where I'll be a year from now, if I'll still be at this school (probably) and in this city (probably). I thought about how I can change my approach in the classroom and make myself more effective as an instructor. I thought about other things. I thought about Thoreau telling me to "live deeply, and suck all the marrow out of life." I thought a lot.
Despite the fact that I basically enjoyed the trip, it was wonderful to be home. I had a unique and newfound love for porcelain toilets rather than holes in the ground, and I took one of the longest showers of my life. I had no idea I had the potential to smell as bad as I did. The report from my roommates was that Holden missed me a lot. He seemed very happy to see me.
I'm back at school now, and still not sure what to do today. I have a lot of things to go over with the kids. From the sub notes, it sounds like all my classes were decent except for my horrible 2/3 period, which had to have my department head come in and one of my angelic bitches got taken out to be spoken to. Also, apparently my principal came into one of the classrooms with a parent and sat for twenty minutes - I have no idea why (or why'd they pick a day that I was gone to do it). But we shall see. I don't think it's anything serious, even though I'm regretting it was the day that the fairly boring Emily Dickinson video "Voices and Visions" was being shown.
Jason sounded like he had a pretty good weekend. MSU won a good game, and Apryl came up to watch it. Her boyfriend made her promise not to spend the night, so she left fairly early apparently, but they had plenty of time to talk about me. Erin told Apryl all about my diary, and Apryl in turn told Jason all about it. Ugh. Jason wasn't mad, just suprised that I would write about our little bets and stuff on here. I'm rather surprised that Erin told Apryl without telling her not to tell Jason about it. Oh well, no harm done, I suppose. But it's hard not to think about it as I write about personal details of my life, knowing that friends are speculating about them. I want this to be a freeflowing expression of my thoughts, a record of my actions, and a way for old friends to stay in touch, and don't want to start to censure myself as I write. Which is hard to do if I know that a weekend away will lead to "So, did you know that Mark has a diary and writes all about the little bets you and he make and his secret crush?" type of conversations. I have not really had any diaryland ettique conversations with my friends, but I do prefer if the speculative conversations are with me and not without me there, and if there are those conversations, I would at least like to have the luxury of not knowing about them. It was a weird clash of worlds as I spoke with Jason last night, who never had any idea I kept an on-line journal. I write about him all the time. He's not really the type to go and seek it out, but I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable with him reading it - probably because I do talk about him and our friendship so much, because it's very prominent in my life right now. I tell him more than I write about in here, anyway.
Okay, that was a tangent. Anyhow, it will be a busy week as I struggle to get my grades in on Friday. All the other teachers had their grades due yesterday, but I was granted an extension because I had the trip. But I've still got a stack of essays to get through before I can calculate them. And I don't own a calculator. A trip to the store awaits me.