And so it begins... I met my lovely travel companions only once at a dinner party in April, and now we're in an airport terminal awaiting our flight to the Middle of Nowhere, South Dakota, where we will enjoy three weeks worth of dinner parties around a campfire. Imagine if The Breakfast Club graduated to college, then relocated to the wilderness... That's us. Just a bunch of strangers from the same school learning to interact with each other. Except instead of being forcibly placed in detention, we're voluntarily trading the leisures of everyday American life for the challenges of living simply in the Great Outdoors for a month. By some extraordinary stroke of magic and insanity, we're all stoked about sleeping closely together on the cold Rocky Mountain soil each night, daily eluding bears and other threatening beasts of the western wild, and learning the ins and outs of each mineral in each rock of each outcrop of every mountain... Mind you, this is all while we face the challenge of enduring South Dakota's summer snow epidemic. But it's these absurd ambitions that have brought us together! As of now, we only really know one thing about each other: we're all a little crazy. Otherwise, we wouldn't have chosen this trip. But that's why I'm so eager to learn more about everyone; they're adventurous and bold, and they all have the same unorthodox idea of "fun." It's like Andrew says in The Breakfast Club, "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all." Well there's no hiding it on this trip. I'd guess that by the end of the month, all oddities will be exposed and all personalities let loose. If there's one thing I know, it's that sharing a tent will make or break a friendship. Between changing clothes, snoring, sleep talking, and flatuation tendencies, it can get pretty intimate. Here's to tolerance and patience. But I've discovered that learning about the people I don't know is the best way for me to learn about myself. I honestly can't wait for this.
Speaking of learning... Let's not forget the academic aspect of this class trip...
I'm surrounded by brilliant geology professors and Furman's best Earth & Environmental Science and Sustainability majors, prepared to expand their already well-developed knowledge of earth systems. But where they have rock hammers and magnifying glasses in their packs, I have 5 novels and a sketchbook with an envelope full of pencils and pilot v5 pens. See, I'm an English and Art major. What the heck is she doing on that geology trip then? Well, I figure if nothing else, I could be the class secretary. Maybe draw a pretty picture of a rock just in case all the cameras get lost in transit and every iPad and iPhone suddenly goes rogue. Plus, I can always fabricate a few campfire stories if the conversation goes downhill. But even though my literary and artistic knowledge is useless for this particular excursion, I like to think that all knowledge is beneficial in same way to whichever discipline you choose to pursue. So because of my love for the outdoors, I applied for this trip in hopes of learning more about its beauty. As an aspiring writer, I'm hoping to find some inspiration in the sublimity and overwhelming magnitude of the Rockies. If you've ever read any romantic poetry, you'd know that Wordsworth would be lost without the mountains. Or if you're more into transcendental writers, you'd know that Thoreau's Walden wouldn't even exist without the wilderness... Did I just compare myself to Wordsworth and Thoreau? I guess I kinda did. I'm just much less clever, talented, famous, and deceased than they are. So in short, I'm absolutely nothing like them. I just couldn't resist throwing a few little literary factoids up in here. Shout out to the English department. Woot woot. But anyway. The point is that, yes, I am here to soak up like a sponge all the facts and theories that these smart geologists shoot my way-- instead of just pointing at a mountain and saying,"that's pretty," I want to be able to say, "that's pretty because..." But I'm also here to see the earth from a different perspective and to fall in love anew every day with a different mountain or river or rock or sunset.
And did I mention I think I'm getting a fever? So that's fun.
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