(Everything has a beginning. This weblog began with a simple story. Six years later, it remains close to my heart. Recent events have raised it to my mind. Just last week, I took it out and blew off the dust. I polished places that were tarnished. I filled cracks. So before I place it with the other stories, here it is … back on the front page.)
There is a simple story that got my college roommate, Darrell, and I out of bed at 4:30am, at the very crack of dawn. And on a Saturday, of all days . . .
We would roll out of our beds, hop in my car, drive three miles in the waning dark, and wake up Peter. Never was a dissenting comment made, and none of us ever griped about the early hour.
We didnt take much. We had a few backpacks that were actually repurposed book-bags. In each bag, we would stuff purchases from the night before like apples or water. We would dress appropriately, layered in the fall, always with shoes or boots agreeable to hiking. And always, just in case, we would bring Petes ant stuff medicine in a small case to combat his allergic reaction to insect bites. We never had to use it.
Our goals were simple. We had to get to the top of Lavender Mountain before daybreak, because the sunrise was worth seeing just that much. Or we had to find a new path to the Campus Reservoir and walk bravely through the dark and muddy tunnel that ran from the bank, under the lake and up into a standpipe at the center of the water. Or we had to find that old church again, the one with the broken piano and the collapsed pews that still kept an air of sanctuary.
Looking back, those little adventures, those weekend hikes through the woods of our campus, they became an integral part of my college experience. For all that I learned in the classroom about Shakespeare and theatre, I learned just as much about myself just walking with friends, climbing leaf-strewn hills and talking about anything and everything. And if anyone asked us why we did it, we told them:
Were grabbing sand.
