I woke up the second morning outside, the first night out in the open air since the first night was in a teepee. This is what I saw. Peaceful, cold, silent. My prison was beautiful. My breath was taken away by the very thing that held me captive…it was an immediate love/hate relationship, this was. The relationship between master and servant, warden and prisoner, man and child. All around me was the reminder that even the most beautiful things in the world can lose their luster depending on when and in what circumstance you discover and view them. I look at these now and I see beauty, but the morning I took this, all I saw were the miles and miles between myself and well…myself.
The second day was horrible. My ankles started to hurt. We were supposed to do 17 miles to our water drop today. We’d done 12 the day before. No toilet paper, no showers, no roof…nothing. I started to think up a plan to get out. I had to find a way out. As the miles dragged on, we trudged through snow and mud, up hills, down valleys, across rivers back and forth, up to our waists in icy water, the ice chunks in it cutting our exposed skin. I didn’t feel it. I was frozen, sure, but I was so deep into my own head at this point you could have done surgery on my torso and I wouldn’t have noticed. Kids were falling in exhaustion, still no food on day 2. The counselors (I use this lightly as they were untrained college students out to make a buck) would grab the kids and drag them along, sometimes kicking them to get up. This was a dream. I was dreaming this. I wanted to wake up. Even my parents house sounded great right now. I must have been ill, because I actually cried for my mommy.
Liz Says:
December 10th, 2005 at 10:21 amVisit Liz
This is truly disgusting. I just found this somehow on spec after browsing the fornits site - I’m a fan of that, and I know all about Straight Inc too… but THIS… dragging kids for miles and miles through practically “uncharted” territory… and without the correct CLOTHING… that’s one of the things that bothers me most, the incorrect clothing, no HIKING BOOTS (which of course should be ideally measured to your feet and in any case always cost a nice packet!), no proper WATERPROOF TOPS OR LEGGINGS, no changes of SOCKS, no… nothing really!
So - weren’t ANY of the participants footwear checked? If one were wearing flimsy open-toed sandals or heels - would she be made to hike in THOSE?
Well, I tell you… I’m a Brit, see, and if you wanted to go hiking up to the tops of our Yorkshire Dales or Yorkshire Moors of the Peak District…. you’d NEVER be allowed to go like that!! “Mountain ranger/rescue” types would be all over you like a rash! Even if a group did it, they’d soon have someone in authority descending on them like a ton of bricks, and reports in all the local media - because they’d been stupid enough to go up to the peaks in the incorrect clothing! (And these aren’t mountains we’re talking about in my example, or wildernesses; they’re just high hills and moors dotted with plenty of farms.)
A “poncho” will not suffice.
Why aren’t Americans more scared than they appear to be here of their vast wildernesses.. it’s not a game! They’re not teaching “survival” here, they’re teaching suicide. If I were a college student without experience I’d never go to a place like that no matter how big and tough I was, what I could earn… or how many girls I could molest, and that’s disgusting. (One of the most disgusting things of your account.)
*I* think it’s a big wonder that there haven’t yet been any reports of how a whole party of people like this, now… other posters may say I’m being melodramatic… but how a whole party like this, led by inexperienced and criminal fools, gets totally LOST.. the whole expedition DISAPPEARS, off the face of the earth - if you know the paranormal like I do, you’ll know that such things have actually been recorded as happening. Even to Eskimo villages! But anyway, one needn’t call int the supernatural to explain the disappearance of an entire PARTY like this; and if they are found again maybe it’s only their corpses/bones, because they lost their way and died in a snowstorm; or all fell into a ravine; or… got attacked by grizzly bears or something!!
So - these “counsellors” weren’t scared??
Hey. Again I’m being a bit “poetic” here, but maybe on one of these trips, the group will get led the wrong way, as I said: and they will end up trapped in a frozen pass over winter; and it will be like the Donner Pass incident, and the survivors will be forced to resort to cannibalism to survive.
I hope it’s the kids who feast on the counsellors and not the other way around. And then I hope they get pardoned by the Pope for it, like what happened in that Andes incident. And THAT I think would FINALLY close down the entire “Teen Help” industry!
And so, even when they have the whole route prepared beforehand, and food stashes at each point… they don’t GIVE YOU ANYTHING TO EAT FOR THE FIRST FIVE DAYS?? (And nobody STOPS this? No Park Rangers, as I have already referred to?)
Supposing one of the girls is already malnourished, through drugs or anorexia…
BOY you American’s just aren’t rebellious enough! I’d eat the counsellors, I really would.
The whole thing is disgusting - this company especially - which one were they, again?
And I think that they should perish in a particularly grisly incident like the one I have mentioned, which would make all the media and be part of American folklore for centuries. That would be a fitting end to the “scene”.