A Phoenix Rises

Let's just say I was not the most motivated student. In my first year of tenth grade I got the reward for least handed in homework. I transfered schools and had the opportunity to repeat tenth grade.

After graduating high school I was accepted and attended Centre College, in Danville, KY. I spent the year doing as little work as possible and on Academic Probation. I was not a big fan of reading outside of class with the exception of comics, and poetry.

So at the end of that year I took a year off from college, and applied to the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) to attend a semester in Baja, Mexico. I chose this section because I really wanted to sail. This course would last three months and in that time I would hike through the San Pedro Martir Mountains, as well as Sea Kayak and Sail the coastline of the Sea of Cortes.

Reading over the packing list one of the things I was told to pack was a book I didn't understand why, but did what the list said. Not having a big library of my own I asked my sister, Shirer, for a recomendation. She thought I would like Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Rings, so in my backpack it went, I didn't think about it for quite a while.

About two weeks later, several Kilometers into NOLS' FSBI forray into the mountains, I needed some time to myself. Not time with my two other tent mates. Not time in the kitchen trying to distinguish plastic bags of dehydrated potatoes from parmesan cheese, and not time finding smooth sticks in the woods (for all you NOLS alum out there). I needed something that would stimulate my mind, and then I remembered packing the book. I went over to my tent group, if I remember correctly Mike was teaching Big Joe to play cribbage... maybe. I went for my pack and pulled The Fellowship of the Rings from it told the guys I was off to read and walked for a good 5 or 10 minutes.

I found a good boulder with a view over a pasture enclosed by trees and began to read. It did not last long. Me and Tolkein don't mix. I tried to read it for thirty minutes but had to keep going back several pages to where my mind began to wonder. "This is for the birds," I thought, and left my perch in pursuit of another book.

Going back into camp I found another member of the trek, Minnesota Katie, or "Kater" as we called her. I offered a book swap, LOTR for a book in her library. She did not want to trade books but fortunately for me she did have one available, My Family and Other Animals.

I immediately fell in love with this book written by Gerald Durrell. The title in and of itself was full of wit and humor; comparing his family to that of wild animals... I had a feeling I would like the book. And I did. It was nothing like the Shakespeare or Dickens I had to read in the ninth grade in Pensacola, Florida. It wasn't something that needed to be studied and graded like the books I had to read in Switzerland or Canada. More important than either of those I felt like I could relate to the author. Durrell talks about his youth being an ex-patrtiot of England, growing up in Greece. For me the book has a feeling of familial closeness, anthropologic study as well a glint of voyeursim since you are watching a real family from the inside. Durrell's imagery would be alive in my head and I could often see his imagery in the landscape around me. One could say it was the right book for the right time.

After I finished My Family, I was in a reading bonanza. It was rare I did not have a book in my posession. Granted they were books that others had brought with them, but they were books none the less. Several of the books were adventure books, speaking to man taking on the elements: Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Touching the Void. Into Thin Air and Into the Wild were both written by Jon Krakauer. Into Thin Air recounts Krakauer's personal experience in the 1994 Everest Tragedy that rocked the world of Eco-Tourism: the most shocking image from the book I recall is that of the amount polution that has been left, from spent Oxygen canisters to dead people. Into the Wild is an account of a real life "Holden Caulfield", Christopher McCandless, who decides to shirk his final term of school for a taste of real life, the real life finally bights him in the ass when he is found dead in an old school bus in Alaska; the book recounts his life from the point he leaves school to the point he is found. Touching the Void is another true story of disaster, and redemption. In this book the author and his friend decide to take on a new route up a mountain in the Peruvian Andes. The author makes it out alive, barely.

I would argue that this sharing of personal books, of ourselves made us a stronger, more complete group.