2009 Fall Retreat

I have no personal pictures from the first seven youth trips I took with my former church, but sometimes that's hard for me to believe, because I remember the scenes and experiences so vividly. During and after each trip, I spent excessive amounts of time writing down my memories, and it amazes me how much reading the accounts takes me back to the setting, people, events, and mindsets of the time. Even though some aspects make me cringe, overall my records were a wonderful gift to my future self that I do not take for granted. Not long ago, I had a glorious time rereading everything I journaled about the 2009 fall retreat, when I was an eighth grader. It was my first youth trip without my older sister, so I felt very independent and extra excited. The trip started off, however, with the wrong kind of excitement.

"Someone needs to go tell Zach!" I exclaimed, standing with a group of girls as sewage seeped up through a drain in the floor of the ladies' bathroom in the admin building.

"I'll go with you," said Courtney, and we hurried over to where our youth pastor was checking people in. We paused awkwardly, exchanged glances, and then simultaneously announced, "The sewer in the girls' bathroom is overflowing!"

He looked up and shrugged. "Well, I can't help you. I'd have to go back to plumbing school to learn how to fix that."

As I wrote in my journal, this was "a good rebuttal to our agitated, panicky attitudes." I forgot to write about this experience until after the trip, so it appears in my journal out of chronological order, but I've never forgotten about it since. It makes a great story to tell, and people always say, "I love how that implies that your youth pastor dropped out of plumbing school!"

When it was time to load up into vans, I started to sit with my friend Melissa, but then I saw that she had her iPod speaker with her, and jumped ship. I'd had bad experiences with it in the car on the way to summer camp, when someone else plugged in their iPod and played a lot of loud, screaming, obnoxious music that I hated. (Out of an hour and a half's worth of music, there was one song that I liked. When I asked what band it was, the boy said, "It's Coldplay. I think you'd like them." Five years later, I discovered that he was right, and I was miffed about his apt prediction.)

I found a different van, and I'm so glad I did, because I made quality memories there. I sat next to Rebecca C. and Sarah L., two people I was friendly with, and our driver was Wesley, the man who led worship on our retreats and would perform short, witty songs he wrote about retreat events. After perhaps an hour and a half in the van, Wesley told us, "We're going to stop to eat soon."

"Just where are we going to eat?!" Rebecca C. asked as we sped along a country road.

"Right there!" Wesley said, pointing at a dilapidated old barn decaying by the side of the road. (That line is verbatim from my journal. I see why everyone told me I was a great writer. I should have believed them.)

Rebecca C. made up a long, dramatic story about what would happen after we stopped at that barn and got rabies from bats. It involved many stages, and ended with us becoming vampires and "spreading rabies to the ends of the earth." She later made up a song about this.

Wesley also made up a song, of course, performing it before worship. It began, 

"I’m driving down the road

To nowhere

I haven’t seen a person for

Two hours…

There’s a burned out trailer

By the side of the road

And an old barn that hasn’t seen hay

Since 1920 or so..."

He also mentioned roller skating in the song, saying that maybe we'd break an ankle. Then he said with spoken word, "No. We're not going to do that. That would have serious repercussions in all kinds of ways." No one got injured during roller skating, to my knowledge. I proudly noted in my journal that I fell down fewer than ten times.

When I took a break from skating, Hannah R. invited me to come sit with her. She sat next to one of the emo guys I found alarming, so I approached with trepidation. He introduced himself, and I told him my name. There was an awkward pause that Hannah ended by saying about me, "She has the cutest dog!" We talked about what breed it was, and then the emo guy told me about his mixed-breed dog: "Her body is like a German Shepherd and her face is like a Lab. She's big like a German Shepherd, but the Lab part of her brain tells her that she should sit in people's laps."

I roomed with Melissa, Rebecca C., Sarah L., Sarah S., and Maddy. Here's a quality snippet from my journal: "Rebecca wanted to pull her sleepwalking stunt on Maddy. When she got into bed, only moments elapsed before she was snoring. Less than five minutes later, she was up, mumbling that she was Bill Gates. She went on and on, calling those who laughed at her 'hobos.' Through all this, I was cracking up, and I knew I was ruining it."

It rained all day Saturday, but we did some fun activities anyway. One of the guys who ran the zip line was named Jim Henson, and everyone thought he was cool, but I thought he was an egotistical creep. I've often wondered where he ended up in life and if I misjudged him or not.

Because of the bad weather, we didn't go to the lake, but I sat in the dining hall with other youth and played a game of mafia that the pastor's daughter narrated. It was my first experience with that game, and it was glorious. Later, some of us played a violent game of spoons. We would move the spoons further and further away as the game went on, and had to run to retrieve them. When one game was down between me and Rebecca C,, a poor innocent bystander went down the hall, picked up the spoons, and then stared transfixed in horror as we stampeded towards him.

On Saturday night, we went back to the roller rink, split into teams, and played dodgeball. Somehow, I was the last one in for one of the rounds. I find this baffling. That night, back in our shared room, Rebecca C. tried to steal my journal and read parts, and because of her, I will always remember that this journal began with the declaration that my little sister was eating her first bologna and loving it. 

I tackled Rebecca C. and fought for the journal back. Sarah L. helped me, and it was she who retrieved the journal. When I lamented that because of Rebecca C., the spiral spine was bent out of shape, Sarah looked me in the eyes and said, "I don't know about that journal, but this is no reason for you to get bent out of shape!"

The next day was beautiful, with brilliant blue skies, sunshine, and just the sort of weather that we would have liked the previous day. At the time, I was woeful, but looking back I wouldn't change anything about the trip. I enjoyed the mafia and spoons games far more than I would have enjoyed a trip to the lake, and I had a great weekend of spending time with delightful people.