Final writing class….

Final writing class….

 I am really going to hate to see this class end. I started it for one reason and I found so many other reasons to rejoin the Spring class. This final writing prompt was to describe ourselves without adding our name to the paper. They will we distributed and read by someone other than ourselves during the class and we have to see if we can identify who the person is. Of course as writing goes, everyone has there own style of writing and as one class member noted, she cannot keep a straight face so it is going to be hard for her to not give herself away.

This will be my final contribution to this class. I am seriously thinking about joining again.

Catch me if you can

    
They say you cannot go back, but in this case I am going back to the first day of this class. I decided to apply the cluster method to see if I could pinpoint some word, place, or action I had not mentioned.

 I thought about all the ways in which I’ve traveled. I’ve been in a baby buggy, on roller skates, and a bicycle. I ridden/driven a car, a truck, a motorcycle, an old time humped-backed black taxi, and driven a tractor and a four wheeler. I’ve been in a boat, both big and small. I flown in a plane both commercial and private, but never a rocket or a helicopter and hope I never do.

I began to think about all the places I had lived. Seven states in all and traveled to another country but never lived there. Then it hit me, my Alaska! Alaska had been my dream for years. I envisioned its rugged landscape enfolding around me and swallowing me up in its vastness. I’d become a speck on a speck there. I’d forge my world out of the woodlands and blend in with nature. I’d be clothed in the skins of the animals I’d hunt and feast off their roasted, baked or broiled flesh. I’d savor every bite of wild berries and relish in the long summer fruits . . . Whoa! Wait a minute! Hold on!

Yes, Alaska was and will always remain as one of those thoughts planted in the reserves of my mind and heart where it will remain untouched or tainted. But the reality is that after visiting and standing in Alaska’s breathtaking five dimensional wonderland, breathing the pristine crisp air and feeling dwarfed by its mass, I came home to either have to summon up the courage to throw all caution to the wind and move there without a foothold or even a place to start or forever let Alaska be that everlasting dream.

I learned over the years that courting dreams are like courting a mate. The list of desires or deal breakers varies from person to person and asking others for their input is a ridiculous thing to do. It muddies the waters of love and dreams get washed away in the landside of human differences.

But Alaska gave me something I did not expect. It gave me one of life’s impossible moments that come when you least expect them. As our plane was departing Alaska the pilot came on narrating one last time the highlights of Alaska’s rocky terrain. As the plane made its final bank to the left Mount McKinley in the Denali Valley appeared in plain sight out my side of the plane. I had two last exposures in the disposable 35 mm camera I had brought with me, so I lined the camera up at my left shoulder in the cramped space of my seat by the window and clicked it once, and then for the last time hoping for whatever I might capture of this majestic mountain as I left my dreamland. Thinking that what I’d probably end up with would be a glossy 3x5 snapshot of the plane’s left wing.

As one often does in life I settled back into my daily routines letting them override the excitement of my trip and the 35 mm camera lay undeveloped for weeks. When I finally had the pictures developed, I was once again transported back to Alaska and beyond.

The last two pictures not only caught my immediate attention, but the strings of my heart. I could not believe what my hastily taken unfocused picture-snapping-act had afforded me. I had been to the top of Mount McKinley! My eyes had seen its majestic peak! I joined the ranks of mountain climbers who have seen this very same spot. Me, a nobody in the climbing community, a couch-peach, captured not only in life but forever on film the top of a mountain that stands thousands of miles away, that never knew I was coming, that had been forged out of hundreds of thousands of years of wind and rain, sunshine and violent storms.

Every time I look at these pictures I am so amazed. In looking back if someone asked you, “what was the most amazing thing you ever ended up doing that you never dreamed you’d do?” What would it be? For me it was looking upon the top of a mountain that I did not have to exert one bit of strength in making the climb. And yet I too, have been to the top of the mountain; A mountain that is standing this very moment in time maybe being bathed by sunlight or enduring another harsh storm that is reshaping its massive formation. Perhaps even now someone is being rewarded by their physical endurance and has reached its peak and is rejoicing in the magnificent view.

The same view that you now hold in your hands and I saw with my very own eyes. Hopefully these pictures will teach us all the lesson hidden within them, you never know when something quite unexpected will happen and become a lasting memory.