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Finding Freedom

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”   ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Gorge morning

 

 

Freedom is Julie Andrews singing how alive the hills are on a German mountain. It is the breeze repeating that very song each time you begin a new hike.

 

 

together looking outFreedom isn’t just revolutions and rebellions. It is a legacy. It is the ability to improve. The opportunity to explore. The chance to learn something new.

 

 

True freedom to me, is that feeling you get when a day is perfect. So perfect that you can’t ever dream of it ending. It makes a story. Freedom can last forever in only a matter of moments.

 

 

wall

 

 

 

That perfect day to me: is the off chance of having two hours alone to explore The Great Wall of China.

 

 

 

sabino

 

 

 

Walking 17 miles with your boyfriend in the middle of Arizona, nearly getting lost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having a car crammed with girls all dancing and screaming songs at the tops of their lungs, only to break in fits of giggles. All night dance parties or midnight runs for donuts.

Tim

 

 

Or even skydiving, bungee jumping, surfing, long road trips in a stick-shift SUV that you only learned how to drive a week prior, it is indulging in too many sweets.

 

 

 

Dad

My dad would always tell stories when I was a little girl about all the wacky adventures he went on as an adult. He would preach for days on end about working hard, making goals, and not backing down from being yourself. He talked about how hard it was to train for marathons and how the discipline was worth it in the end. He talked about ice climbing trips, scuba diving in the Caribbean, driving across the country on his beloved motorcycle. We would never be able to get through a family car trip without hearing the words, “When I rode my motorcycle…” at least once.

 

 

 

When he talked, his stories would come alive and his memories would dance just behind his eyes. It was obvious that even though driving westward on a motorcycle and getting caught in the middle of a rain storm was horrendous, every moment was worth it.

climbing

 

 

As he spoke of the tribulations he went through, his smile spun a tale of how much he would give to go back and do it all again. No matter how hard it may have been in the moment, the ending was what made everything worth it.

 

cactus

 

 

When my dad rode out West on his motorcycle, he left from Columbus. Switching between highways and backroads, he took his chance to see what he had only seen while whizzing by in a car or an airplane.

 

 

 

 

 

“I stopped at the [Mississippi] river because I have never seen it, beside flying over it or driving by it in a car,” he says. “I met two guys going to Columbus, where I left from, and they were going to meet a girl I worked with. What are the odds of that? If I wasn’t on my motorcycle —being part of the surrounding — I would have never stopped to enjoy the river bank and never would have meet those two guys.”

 

papaMy dad took up riding, from his father — my grandpa. When I called to ask him, what freedom meant to him, the first thing he said was his motorcycle.

 

sabino canyon

He described nights where he would just drive for an hour or so through the country and how it was the best stress reliever. He also said how relaxing it was to ride alone, or with a group of friends, and how he always got excited to ride it from Ohio to Washington D.C. for work. He has been all around the world, and the one thing he said he wished he had done was take the ride out west.

 

3 wheeler

 

“I loved it so much that when I got too old for my two-wheeler, I went to three!” my grandpa joked.

 

 

Sing the Queen City

Every year in June, my grandpa, my dad and his brother, and family friends bike from Toledo, Ohio to Cincinnati, Ohio. My grandpa closely supervises their constant pedaling from the seat of his three-wheeled motorcycle. And each year the men come riding into town smiling, laughing, and with a fat stack of pictures to go along with their many stories of their ride. The smiles on their faces say it all: that ride was freedom.

 

Temple PanoTruth be told, I struggled to come up with a good way to sum up what freedom meant to me. The thing I learned while beginning this essay, is that there isn’t one, perfect way to describe it.

Cousin's Weekend

All of the wacky and fantastic adventures that I have been on: going to China on a People to People trip not knowing anyone, skydiving, bungee jumping, rock climbing — that is freedom.

 

 

Every smile.

Every laugh.

A spontaneous midnight game of flashlight tag with 70 other random people at a high school.

It is all freedom.

 

I took to social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to see what freedom meant to others:

Temple

 

My friend from the Marines said that freedom is the “sacrifice of my brothers and sisters.”

 

A friend from high school said, “Pursuing ideas out of mind and into the physical realm.”

 

One guy said, “Doing the will of God.”

 

 

The list didn’t stop there, it kept going. Some with the generic “the ability to do what I want when I want” line (my parents and a few relatives), others stood with the idea to make mistakes. Others simply put freedom as being able to live their lives as they see fit.

 

Yucatan waterEither way, social media proved both helpful and even more confusing. I had felt like I went four steps back in summing up what the elusive word, “freedom” means. However, I also felt like I went forward from all the wonderful responses I received.

 

McMillan

 

 

 

I learned that freedom is not a simple definition. Google gave the one definition: the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. But that didn’t help much.

 

 

 

Nisha

 

 

Some viewpoints of freedom, I agreed with. Others…I didn’t. That’s what I learned. Ultimately, freedom is open. It is an open road with miles to go. It is an open trail ready to be explored. It is an open (and blank) Word doc with a story to be said. But most importantly, it is an open definition. Freedom means many things to me, just like it means many things to many different people.

 

 

 

 

You are free to acknowledge the freedoms within your own life and interpret them however you’d like. (See what I did there?) That’s the beauty of it.

 

Turpin soccer sunsetWhat I ultimately learned about myself and freedom is that it is the reverse of what I initially thought. Freedom isn’t solely in adventure. Adventure is in freedom, whatever that adventure may be.

 

 

 

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When You Wish Upon a Lantern

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I’m going to be straightforward with you, all of my currently non-existent readers, I don’t have much to say for this post on “The Lights Fest.” But of course with my never failing wordiness, I might find some (or too much) to say. Definitely too much.

Wyatt and I left from the Clifton Kroger at 6:00 with a 12-pack of Cherry Coke and bottled water to venture out to Harveysburg, Ohio. More popularly know for the annual Renaissance Festival fairgrounds, Wyatt talked excitedly about telling his dad how much different the grounds would look. Spoiler alert: there was no change. Buildings still stood tall, worn-down, and old-timey. We were just in one half of the grassy parking lot for our festival.

Arriving before 7:00, we stepped out into a perfect day that was originally predicted to be overcast and onto a field that was dry despite the constant downpours of the prior weekdays. Although Wyatt wasn’t overly enthused about the fest, he was being nice enough to be enthused with me. At check-in, we received our lanterns and a little baggie holding a sticker, marker, and bracelet all doning the event’s logo. We set up camp among the 1,500+ other patrons and sat on the small blanket. I hurriedly began to search for designs to decorate the lantern with while my stomach growled.

As promised “The Lights Fest” had a bouncy house, live music, and food trucks. However: only 2 bouncy houses, six food trucks with lines that would rival Dimondback lines at Kings Island (for those who aren’t familiar…that’s long and not one I am patient enough to wait in), and ish music. To be fair, the musicians tried their best to put on a good show for no one in particular. We enjoyed a laugh while the second singer would sing popular cover songs like, Wagon Wheel only to hand the well-known chorus off to the crowd and be met in return with irrefutable silence.

We sweat.

A lot.

I drew.

Wyatt warred with Instagram.

We waited. Not well, I add. Surprise, surprise, patience is neither one of our specialties.

Doors had opened up at 5:00 and closed by 8:00. Arriving at 7:00 seemed uncomfortably early. We were excited for the lanterns, but not the direct sunlight and the boredom it took for them to finally be ready to light. The sun would be begin to set at 8:58 my phone told me, we groaned.

We eavesdropped to pass time.

A kid got lost.

The kid was found.

We sweat.

I drew more flowers as I wished the weather would have been right for once.

By the time it began to hit dusk, the crowd began to get antsy. We squished our way toward the middle where hundreds of tiki torches were being lit. The announcer proclaimed that the fire department had to okay the take off before everyone lit their lanterns off and to keep writing their hopes/dreams/prayers/whatever on them while we waited. Also, we were told to boo any preliminary lightings.

 

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9:15 passed slowly.

 

 

Wyatt and I passed the time by talking about our boredom and the ridiculousness of the events in this festival with a lovely couple made up by two mid

dle-aged women. We joked about sneaking the lanterns out of the designated areas and lighting ours off later.

Then 9:30 hit.

Two lanterns were gone. A chorus of boos met them.

At 9:45 we were told it would still be a little while before we could let the lanterns go. The booing was louder than they were for the “rebellious” lanterns.

At 9:55 it was dark and the go-ahead was given.

The crowd rushed to ignore the instructions given up on stage as they anxiously lit their lanterns. With over 2,000 people now and 4-10 people to a tiki torch, the lanterns went up more so in waves than all at once. Although I had gone to see the floating lanterns more out of desire to hopefully see the Thai lantern festival, Loy Krathong, one day. . .I couldn’t help but feel like a disney princess. For the first minute.

The first wave of lanterns went up without a hitch. So did the second wave. My speckled flowery lantern proudly joined. The third, fourth, fifth, and however many waves after were a bit different. Having been made specifically for this event to prevent fire hazards, the lanterns burnt out quicker than it took to get them into the air (honestly quite a funny sight watching all of them dive to the ground). It looked like a war of the angels with these precious lanterns gently floating while all of these burnt out, darkened paper lanterns ambushed them in the air.

After lighting off our lanterns, Wyatt and I made for the car. The pretty view had come and gone quicker than intended as our bellies complained unceasingly. As nice of a day as The Lights Fest was and as funny as it was to watch the “dreams coming true when it reaches the sky” lanterns crunch under my car’s tires, never reaching the sky, the day was an A-okay day. Fun, yes. But definitely only a one-time experience kind of festival.

Maybe I’ll have better luck in Thailand.

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Paul at the Great Wall

Keeping invaders out is the ironic lure that seems to draw more people in daily.

 

Picture this: an elaborate serpent built from stone. Its body is ancient and decrepit in some places but is seemingly immortal as it stretches more than 13,000 miles. This mystical beast should come out of a fairy tale book in the way it valiantly protected its people from outsiders and engulfed those 400,000 sacrificed to it, so that their bones could follow the stones into immortality too. Rather than a mere story, this snake-like legend emerged from history books, dating back to the third century B.C. It is: The Great Wall of China.

Built under the orders of Emperor Qin Shi Huang starting back in 221 B.C., The Great Wall rises 15-30 feet into the air with ramparts that are 12+ feet higher. Guard towers were placed at intervals to protect the Chinese people from outside tribes that threatened China’s unification as well as protect the Silk Road trading routes that ran along the wall.

The Great Wall may have lost the mythical protector status it once held, it has since become a thing to marvel. With hundreds of thousands pouring in yearly just to gawk, maybe it should begin protecting what threatens that of the civilized world, the scariest and funniest thing of all: tourists.

We were just that: tourists. There was no hope in hiding it. From Hannah’s rice hat that she bought for next to nothing from a cart vendor — which we used for funny pictures rather than using it to protect ourselves from a grueling sun while working tirelessly in the rice fields — to the American flag shirt my mom had bought me and the camera practically glued to my eye, we were as touristy as tourists could get. But we didn’t care as we chattered excitedly for our two free hours to explore the wall.

Quoting Mulan and laughing at the peculiarity of a man who rode into the parking lot, bought a ticket, and parked his camel before leaving to go up the wall himself, we debated which way to go. Left, a flat landscape following along the base of the Yan mountains (Yanshan in their Chinese name), or right, go up it.

“Come on guys!” I complained. “Just think of the view we could get if we went right.”

I was out voted. We went left. And boy, was I lucky that we did so.

After a half mile into the walk, I looked back to see wall crawling up the side of the mountain. On it was monster that morphed with the wall stretching the expanse of the walkway like it was doing the Chinese Dragon Dance, pressing tightly against the modern guardrails and serpentine up the stone. The monster had hundreds of heads pivoting side-to-side with cameras equally glued to their eyes as mine was.

While each head of the monster fought for control, I spread my arms and spun to see the tips of the vibrant, green trees peaking their way over the castle-like tips of the wall. It was ours — for two hours. Me. Three friends. An ancient wall. Mountains and a little bit of fog. My breath caught.

My breath was completely stolen we entered the guard tower. The smell was abysmal. Finally, something authentic to what the past would have been like. In the back was a dead opossum or a raccoon or a mystery animal, it was too dead to tell. I wanted to puke.

We rushed up the stairs, partly from the smell and the other half was from us being more skittish about someone scolding us for exploring what we shouldn’t. But no one did. It was just the four of us and absolute peace. A little over an hour outside of Beijing, could have been an entirely new world. And it was. The city was loud, overpopulated city with people constantly trying to take pictures of us while out here in Huairou Qu, China, on the wall, it was serene. A cool breeze rolling in a soft fog and sunlight making its lazy way into the world, making the trees seem to glow off the stark contrast off the wall that was older than them. However, the section of wall that we were on could have rivaled the trees in age, it had looked as if it was recently renovated.

Further down was a house. I was a strange contrast to the Great Wall. It was obvious that the house was newer that the wall itself; however, the house was much more decrepit. It was an ancient Chinese-style house that looked as if it were once beautiful. But now, it was peeling mahogany-colored paint, old wood, and inside the cracked doorway a flood of cans. Alcoholic, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, everywhere. It was like looking at the topographic map of the mountain range we were in, only made from aluminum.

“Do you think it’s all right to go in?” I asked.

My friends didn’t respond.

There was a grunt. Much deeper than what we could make.

We jumped.

A slim man in a ragged, once grey shirt stepped out of the house.

He grunted again.

We fumbled about our words, but only knowing how to say, “thank you” (spelled in English: Xiexie, pronounced: she-a-she-a) didn’t help us much.

He grunted, smiled a little, and walked outside the house.

“Name?” I asked. (We eventually rightfully named him Paul for simplicity.)

Nothing.

“Picture?” I said motioning to my camera.

Paul nodded. We took pictures with the man and he took one of us nicely modeling our sweaty selves in front of his home. Afterwards, he handed the camera back, grunted, and went back inside. His stint in an up-and-coming modeling career died quickly.

We thanked him through the door and were on our way back to the busses.

We would come to find out later that he was the maintenance man of the Great Wall. Instead of burly guards to protect from the overbearing tourism, they simply have silent men who clean up after them instead. We never realized how clean the wall actually was until after leaving, it seemed too surreal.

“Maybe we should have told him about the raccoon-opossum thing,” I said once settled into my bus seat.

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Bad Ideas

Everything stood proudly against the harsh ground like the zombie apocalypse:dead-looking, very much alive, ready to kill us.  With our lack of water and preparation, we were ready for the land to take us.
Bear Canyon Trail. December 2017. Tuscon, Arizona
“Remember, all bad ideas start with Wyatt,” Wyatt joked as he handed the map to me and winked. His coy smile turned into a snicker as he set out onto the trail we were already supposed to have finished. I stood there, mouth agape.  The dusty desert air rushed to seek shelter behind my teeth. I couldn’t move, nor did I want to. I looked down at the map, then my sweaty boyfriend getting progressively smaller as he walked away. I could see the little trail of blood rolling down his calf from being pricked by spikes, on his same leg that suffered from chronic shin splints.  I wanted to complain about my beaten-down muscles being out of shape and my screaming lungs, but if Wyatt could do it in all of his cocky confidence, I wanted to prove to him that I could, too. He turned around once more to mock my slowness, and I retorted, “I know all bad decisions start with you. I’m the one dating you!” I readjusted the walker’s pack wrapped around my hips like a fanny pack. Inside of it was a small snack sized bag of Cheez-Its and two measly water bottles before hurrying to catch up with him. I took one last look down into the Sabino Canyon at Seven Falls where actual humans sat and talked and enjoyed sandwiches by water that look oh-so-refreshing just to be near.  I wanted to pout. With two and a half hours in the canyon and four and a half miles already under our belt, Wyatt was persistent on finishing Bear Canyon Trail, meaning another four-mile trek to the end. “You know that we would still have to walk back,” I reminded him. “We have no clue what we are doing,” I said for the one hundredth time. “Isn’t this place just gorgeous?” My grandmother’s shrill voice rang inside my head.  It was a trip to visit her that brought us to Tucson with my mom. Thankfully, she wasn’t on the trail with us now. Arizona different, for sure, but growing up in the Midwest, I needed my grass and trees that didn’t attempt to stab me if I got too close.  “Just one of the prettiest places I have ever been and where I choose to stay.” I snarled at my grandma’s voice.  My stubbed and bruised toes hollered in agreement.  Tucson,Arizona, was in fact pretty (if you’re into everything being dry and constantly dead-looking), but it was a beast.  And Sabino Canyon was the narliest of all. After another five minutes of grudging up and winding and steep mountain with bits of grueling small talk, we stopped. And stared back to where we had come from. At an altitude of 3,300 feet and more than 1,000 feet above where we started, we gazed throughout the Santa Catalina mountain range and saw the bits of speckled lights from downtown Tucson.  Sabino Canyon stole our breaths (not just because we were horribly out of shape). The view was spectacular as it peaked between the mountains. We certainly did not know what we were doing and definitely did not look like the seasoned backpackers we passed. The tourists stop — as we quickly learned — as soon as the rest areas and water fountains stop. Which was about half a mile behind us. We gawked at the mouse-sized town below in the bottom of a harsh V.  Echoes whistled in either direction, but our voices were silent. Everything stood proudly out of the hard ground like a zombie apocalypse: highly dead-looking, but very much alive.  Of course, that was what everything looked like in Arizona, not just in the canyon.  Sunlight glinted off the tops of the 12 million-year-old mountains that were barely 50 feet higher than we were. Wyatt and I pressed on farther into a place unknown to us.  Even the beaten trail seemed to disappear as our feet sunk into pits of grainy sand, or around desolate rocks that felt cooler than even the breeze whipping around us.  We tripped up stones and were pricked like Sleeping Beauty on every living plant like: Mesquite, Palo Verde, Brittle bush, Saguaro Cacti. “Do you think I can find a mountain lion?” Wyatt asked.  I stared into his face.  It had finally relaxed after being so nervous about meeting my grandmother when we arrived two days prior. He shaved just for this December weekend, but he needed to shave again.His dark gray University of Cincinnati Bearcats shirt was rifled with sweat. The nice white shoes I had bought for him two months prior now blended in with the tan ground we traversed.  “I know I can find one; they’re just scared of me,” he said. I wanted to laugh, but I knew my bright yellow shirt was dripping just as much. “Don’t you even consider it!” I hissed, trying to catch up with him. “I think I need a better opinion,” he said with a smile.  “Do you think when we walk a little higher up, I can get enough service to call my mom?” “Wyatt!” “Fine. What about Rhianna or Travis?” he asked thumbing through his phone contacts to reach his siblings. “If you get mauled, I’m not going to feel bad,” I said. Thankfully, we weren’t thinking of any other animal that could cause just as much, if not more, harm than the mountain lion. Animals like: bobcats, coyotes, foxes, cactus wrens, roadrunners, canyon tree frogs and red-spotted, gila monsters, and rattlesnakes all called this area home. Wyatt simply stuck his tongue out before pressing on up the mountain range. Despite the broken promise of warm weather, it was chilly.  I was thankful for the t-shirt and leggings I now wore rather than the shorts and tank top my mom talked me out of. Six miles in.  Already two miles past the point where we should have turned around. Seven miles. I wanted to die.  We had been on the trail for over four hours. “I wonder what it was like for settlers first seeing these mountain ranges?” I asked Wyatt. Spanish explorers in the 16th and 18th centuries as they scoured the land. Archaic nomads using the area to hunt. Farmers from 1,500 years ago in the Hohokam culture using the zombie-like land and after them, Pima and Tohono O’odham Indians. How was it without padded Nikes, comfortable attire, and belts to hold water bottles and Cheez-Its that had been forced upon the wearer by elderly women? I couldn’t imagine. “I don’t know,” Wyatt said lost in thought.  “But I have a whole new level of respect for Frodo.” At eight miles, we passed several people.  Even though it had only been an hour or two in isolation, we were grateful for them to pass our way. People with metal walking sticks, lots of water, backpacks made for trips like this,and actual hiking boots and not sneakers helped remind us how utterly out of our element we were.  They were experienced to the point that the vernacular they used to talk about the trail while in passing sounded like another language. Even a woman with striking white hair and who had to have been in her mid-60s regarded us with curiosity.  She didn’t ask it but her expression was demanding to know what we were doing out this far. But rather than asking, she merely pointed us in the direction of where the trail was heading and said we had another few miles. Our insides wept. “Fake it until you make it,” my dad would also tell when I was growing up.  Here,as hard as I tried, I think my pained expression sold me out. Fifteen minutes later we were eight and half miles in and tired of the trail. The plastic water bottles we had been carrying along with the bottles in our pack had been drained an hour ago except for the final sips we saved until the very end like lapping dogs. I was beat and as much as Wyatt tried to hide it, I could tell by his limp how much pain he was in.  As we sat on a boulder, we looked in either direction.  Around the bend of another mountain or the same, we couldn’t tell, we couldn’t see downtown or the end of our trail. It was just us in a little dry pocket of solitude. Sitting on a boulder that could have been out of a Road Runner cartoon, we ate our Cheez-Its like starving children.  We tried to eat and make small talk,but it was futile.  Food came first. We split the pathetic sized bag of Cheez-Its that we had initially fought against bringing. The original plan was to leave them behind in the car along with the walker’s belt.  We didn’t dare say it, but we were happy to have both a sour stomachs growled for more and the vision of McDonald’s burgers and nuggets danced about in our brains. Glaring at the sun for it was beginning to set, we knew we had to start heading back. It was almost three and we needed to get back through most of the mountains before five. “Shit, I didn’t even consider having to walk back!” Wyatt said. I couldn’t even respond.  I was laughing and groaning too much, and my exhaustion had finally worked its way into my vocal cords. Stumbling and fumbling we found our way back. Twelve miles trekked and three and a half miles closer to being done, Wyatt asked, “How long is a half marathon?” “13.1,”I replied numbly.  I was bitter about him breaking up my thoughts of the dreamy soak in the hot tub later that night and questioning how much soot would come off my body.  “Why?” “So, we will have walked over half a marathon by the end of the day…” “Honey, we will have walked roughly 17 miles by the time we finished.  That’s the same distance my cousin and aunt walked daily on the Appalachian Trail.” “Whoa. So, we’re like, actual backpackers.” “Not even close! Did you see the people we passed two hours ago?” I shot at him, I fought hard against the giggles wanting to escape. “Easy. Better backpack.  More food. More water,” Wyatt said with a laugh.  The sand had now begun to settle into his leg hair.  I wanted to think it was gross, but it was more funny-looking than anything else. “A lot more water.  And a lot more training,” I emphasized. Our tripping over rocks and silent curses continued back down and around the sides of spotty bush-filled mountainsides.  The greens blended with the tans and were significantly less vibrant than they were back in the Midwest.  The green tips on bushes and aloe plants were faded to an almost pastel blue-green mixed with murky brown accents. The rocky outcroppings became more apparent than the vegetation itself as if they were reproducing on their own for the sole purpose of stubbing human toes. We scampered down the rough terrain finally making it back to Seven Falls, the place that was originally our designated stopping point.  Being one of the most popular destinations in southern Arizona, we were lucky that it was later in the day. Unlike our first time passing it, there we significantly less tourists. With Sabino Canyon being a natural desert oasis located in Tucson’s Coronado National Forest, water was a blessing. Even if there was very little water due to the area only getting 12 inches of rain annually. Cold water was still cold water. We ventured down to where we promised we would be. A place with seven large pools that during the rainy season would fill up and trickle down to make seven waterfalls.  Today, there was only two pools fills and not enough to trickle. Collapsing by the water, we could feel the air outside begin to chill our bones and the water did so instantly as we let our hands float on top as if they were water striders.  I was envious of my own hand being cooled off and cleaned.  I longed to seep in and stay there forever rather than hiking back another four miles. The walk back seemed longer than the getting there.  Several times we had lost our way and our limping muscles didn’t help either.  With sweat dripping more than the water we had left, we joked about what seasoned hikers and backpackers would think. “Next time we’ll need an actual backpack,” Wyatt groaned, shifting the walker’s belt once again.  Even though he took it for the walk back, the evident sweat ring on my shirt told a different story. The last mile was on pavement.  We regarded the winding trail we began with and opted for a more civilized route, and our calves agreed. Talking about the bravery to ask my kooky grandma for McDonalds and Coke even though we knew her answer propelled us forward.  Our mouths salivated.  Thinking of the “scrum-dili-umtous” meal that only old McDonald’s could provide, unlike the under-cooked hamburgers without the buns we had that morning at my grandma’s. We kept walking, not knowing whether we were going faster or slower.  The ground seemed to move us along rather than our own exertions. Passing two older gentlemen with speckling gray hair and backpacks of their own, we walked with them for a bit. They exclaimed how crazy we were for the 17 miles of trail that we had covered. They asked if we had enough water. We said we just needed a soda. Rushing to the bright pearly rectangle of paradise was the beautiful vending machine…behind locked doors. The pain and grief on Wyatt’s face mimicked the feelings in my heart.  It was 5:04.  Everything closed at 5. “Every bad decision starts with Wyatt…” Wyatt said again.  He grumbled it several times on the way back but this time it was full of mourning. Looking like beguiled elders with arthritis everywhere, humps on our backs, and in need of walkers, we laid on our deathbeds: metal bus benches. They were more comforting than any Memory Foam king-sized bed could be. I ripped my shoes from my feet to reveal the translucent-alien skin.  I breathed heavily, waiting for my mom to arrive with air conditioning and water.  I welcomed death with open arms.  It was my time. Wyatt lay on the bench adjacent to me, and chirped, “So this was fun…how do you feel about training for the Appalachian Trail?”