The fact of the matter is that I’m notoriously hopeless at essay writing and analytical thinking; when I signed up for Freshman English 1, I took a breath and braced myself for an agonizing year of woe. Surprisingly, I see that it’s like any other English class. My parents, on the other hand, were rightfully skeptical; they’ve seen my 'best moments' in the decade and some odd years that I’ve lived, survived the terrible devastation of my famous temper tantrum tsunamis and, of course, the best part, signed all of my horrendous grade reports. However, when I make up my mind, I don’t budge. I said to myself, “I want to take a difficult class to improve my writing and I’m going to take it”. The class so far has not sunk my ship, and others are even enjoying it, which just proves it’s not impossible. Now, here comes the hard part as of yet. I never thought I would do it, but I did it anyways.
My newfound pride comes from a simple trip, the class hiking trip. Now, I’m a swim girl and I’m pretty agile and flexible, but I don’t have upper body strength. I love sleeping, I love eating, and I love reading my old, worn-out books. Sweating is gross but bearable because I swim. I don’t run for fun. I’m terrified of the gross creepy crawlies that dwell outside. Would I even make half of the trail?
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As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t budge. I wanted to prove first to myself and then to my family that I can do it, that I can crawl and not start asphyxiating when in the presence of heavy arm-work. I simply wanted to be able to say, “Yeah, I’m living. Oh, hiking? Yeah, I did that. That’s right, me”. I want to love nature before I become a vegetable via injury, or crazy trying to come up with rent, or maybe, I don’t know, die at a tragically young age. In all seriousness, I really thought I was going to crack my head like an egg.
Here we go, buckle up because this tale is going to be one long, bumpy ride. The bus ride? Amazing. We drove for nearly 64 years, and I was so bored; I thought I was going to croak right on the bus. To top it off, the bus driver’s yakking on his phone a mile a minute, swerving, occasionally speeding up, but he, for the most part, drove like a snail. If you compared our speed to a snail, the snail would be going at Mach 20. It was an arduous journey filled with miserable attempts to kindle conversations with the other sleep-deprived teens on the bus, hefty sighs, and shifting around in my uncomfortable seat. The only thing I wanted at that time was to slip into something more comfortable, like a coma perhaps, however, once we arrived, I was jubilant. I was so enthused, I looked just like a who child stepped out of Whoville during the Christmas season. We set off on our hike after everyone went to the bathroom.
When we were going up the slight incline, I was already gloating prematurely. I found myself thinking that we were only going to be walking, then I had no reason to be wary. This was not the case, as I soon found out. After Mrs. Baker led us to a very tall and rocky path, which was actually not the rock scramble, it was the path to it, I needed to take one hot minute to look at the climb. It looked difficult, the rocks looked painful, and it looked like a struggle. Surprisingly, I was at the front of the group with Mrs. Baker and my hiking-dexterous peers in no time at all.
An amazing thing I discovered about myself is that I liked the trip and that I do like hiking. Sure there were some tall rocks, loose pebbles, and terribly annoying comments, courtesy of my oh-so-astute classmates. But I had fun still and even better, I was a bomb at climbing. Sometimes I thought I was going to be an unfortunate statistic or a vermillion splatter because I wanted to go up higher and faster. Evidently, I’m not very keen on self-preservation, but to be fair, neither were others. Another thing I discovered is that my mountain goat game is strong. I could climb with ease and I wasn’t out of breath at all, so 20 points for Slytherin, please!
There was, unfortunately, a devastating moment on Friday the 25th. The banana that I had carefully packed and was looking forward to eating had exploded. Right in my bag! I was enraged and probably dropped so many curses and insulted the banana that I twisted even Shakespeare’s ears from the grave. On the bright side, my apple, 2 bottles of Arizona Iced Tea, and sandwich that was soaked in ketchup because my mama can sometimes be a little heavy-handed with it, were perfectly fine and dry. This did not deter me and I simply scooped out the nasty mush like a champ, dumped it, and ate the remaining unsmushed banana half.
Sometimes I went too far ahead and Mrs. Baker did not appreciate that, so I hovered around with the A-team. The A-team, a.k.a the athlete team, was a group of schmucks who could (surprisingly) keep up with my energetic climbing frenzy. I don’t really talk to these people in particular, but now I know they’re not half-bad. Just strange sometimes. Often I felt that their 5 cents really did add to the experience and they had some pretty funny things to say along the way.
The best part of my hiking trip was definitely the lemon squeeze. I went after Mrs. Baker who had to help one of my best friends climb up because of her injured wrist. She said the view was pretty, but I wasn’t too interested in that. What I wanted to experience was the infamously cramped lemon squeeze in all of its dark, damp, slimy glory. I did pretty good hauling my butt considering I have little to no upper body strength, and I even helped take the other kids’ bags and helped them climb up if they needed. That’s the third thing I discovered about myself: I like helping others because I want them to enjoy the activity as much as I do. Okay, I lied, I liked helping most of my class. The A-team was pretty much fine so I didn’t need to do much. Overall, I found the view was spectacular and my sandwich, although dripping ketchup, was superb.