The night once again brought frigid temperatures and scary noises. A couple of times during the night I actually said out loud “Hey Bear”, the sentence Jasmin told us to say if we saw, or thought there was a bear nearby. It’s strange how “city” my ideas about wildlife and survival were. Before Jasmin and Matt enlightened me I would have sworn the best thing to do when a bear was around was to hide and make as little noise as possible. The fact that the opposite is true surprised me.
I woke up a little earlier than yesterday, my first full day of solo. I peaked out of my tarp and saw that the sky was once again clear. My full second day of solo looked like it would be as good as the first.
I wandered over to the kitchen, devoured a few handfuls of GORP, and a few granola bars I smuggled into my solo site. The sun was shining and things were starting to warm up so I decided to clean up at the water source. My water source was the same as everyone else’s, a beautiful mid sized stream that carved its way through the middle of the valley. I sat at the edge of the stream and washed from head to toe (one part at a time) with my little sports towel. The freezing cold water was invigorating. I filled up my nalgenes and headed back to my tarp. Exhausted from the 50 meter trip I crashed back into bed and slept until the middle of the afternoon.
At mid afternoon I crawled back into the world. Another very weird part of solo is the lack of time telling devices. You are not allowed to bring a watch. I went nuts trying to figure out what time it was. The strange part is that it doesn’t matter what time it is. You still want to know though, for some strange civilized reason. I wandered out to the meadow and watched a hawk circling above for an hour or so. It starts to sink in that I have nothing to do but watch, think, smell, sleep. I enjoy the view of the mountains, the mice running around the fields, the hawk in the sky. A large mouse/small gopher scurrying by brought life lessons from Walden, life in the woods flooding back from first year philosophy.
I grabbed a few more bites of food and went back to bed with the sun still up. While I was lying in bed Matt and Jasmin came up for a visit. They were doing their “interview’ section of the course. They talked to me about my expectations before and during the course, told me I was great with people skills, had natural leadership skills, etc..etc.. It was a fairly “feel-good” experience, but it seemed genuine. I found it weird being alone with them. They’ve been our group leaders. Without the rest of the group around it was strange. I realized as they talked that we are the same age. For some reason my brain had blocked this out and falsely assumed that because they were ‘in charge’ and more knowledgeable than me that they must be older. Jasmin was only two years older, Matt just a little less.
Matt and Jasmin moved on to their next interview and I drifted into a dawn induced sleep. My nice slumber was interrupted sometime later that night by the frigging cold. Running on the spot and small inside-sleeping-bag jumping jacks were required to bring things back to sleepable temperatures. I drifted to sleep for the third time in one day thinking about home and how it’s been two weeks in the mountains. Two weeks that have felt like months or maybe even a semester at university.