I'm pretty darn spoiled. It seems that, whenever I'm about to be well and truly screwed, something spectacular falls into my lap. In this case, I got waylaid by email-checking on my way into Meyer to finish up my E14 problem set before going to the end of class and putting it in the stack just as everyone else was on their way out. Instead, I found a message from the professor giving us an automatic extension 'til Wednesday on this one, which was such a relief. I really wasn't ready to hand it in 'cause I'd been gone the whole weekend and got back to my room much, much later than expected.

What happened this weekend was that I co-led a SOOP (Stanford Outdoor Outreach Program) trip. It's a new student group pushed and pulled into existence just this year by Daisy and Twila, among, I'm sure, a bunch of other great people. The idea is to ally with area schools and take kids on backpacking trips—the goals being [1] to introduce them to, and, with luck, make them fall in love with, the wilderness and [2] get them to know their classmates/schoolmates in a completely different environment. This time around, we've been working with Gateway, a San Francisco charter school. Our particular liason has been a teacher there named Kevin Krasnow who graduated from here in '96, did some stuff, and has been teaching chemistry and biology there for the past few years in addition to founding the school's Outdoor Club last year. He's just awesome at dealing with all of these guys in a way—well, reminiscent of P, is the only way I can analogize it, and their feeling towards him is some spectacular blend of reverence and love and respect and fun.

While I was pretty confident with being their leader in terms of backpacking and first aid skills, I was chronologically a whole lot closer to them than I was to my co-leader (23) and the teacher-chaperone-type dude (25), young as they were. It was funny to think that, as I was showing 'em how to adjust their packs and they were making giggly speculations about their teachers' love lives, I could have been on their side of the equation only a short year ago. And now I was clearly not. I didn't lie to them about my age when they asked, but I think we had just presented ourselves as the leaders to whom they ought to turn in case of questions, and that was that. It worked really well.

The kids (note: I instinctively call 'em "kids") spanned all the normal high school ranges of age, fitness level, worldliness, maturity, socioeconomic class, squeamishness, and cliques, though at a point definitely more representative of urban demographics than what I've seen of Edison. A good number of their med forms had "none available" next to the blank for medical insurance. A few of 'em "missed their cell phones," "wish I'd brang tweezers cause my eyebrows are growing", were grossed out by packing out toilet paper, had lugged along their liquid eyeliner. It was a lot of the kids' first time hiking or backpacking, which is inevitably a baptism by fire. There was one girl with asthma, and another who'd decided that fashion boots were synonymous with hiking boots, for both of whom I had to half-empty their packs and dump stuff into mine. On top of that, I was shouting out ridiculously perky encouragements every five steps to encourage them uphill yesterday, our longest and steepest day. Our total mileage approximated that of a solid day hike, albeit with a few thousand feet of elevation tossed in there for spice. But overall, it was the psychological drain that was tougher on me than the physical.

I don't mean to say that the kids weren't great, which they definitely were. In fact, our bunch was just about as wonderful as circumstances could have let them be. They got along really, really well with each other, were pretty responsive to what we had to say, and almost unanimously put in their best efforts at walking without the faster ones being domineering at all. Small victories: Elena, who'd been having some serious trouble all Sunday morning, hightailing it up the hill after lunchtime. Marlo, as appointed water dictator, being super lovable and insistent when reminding everyone else to drink so they wouldn't get dehydrated. Sarah, a skinny, pretty blond chick who had all the cool name-brand clothing (yes, I am a perpetrator of image-based stereotyping) but who took a third helping of Saturday night's spaghetti and a fourth one of yesterday morning's cream of wheat. Alex, a quiet freshman (that's my brother next year!) who caught a good-sized fish with his fly rod when no one, not even rangers passing through, thought there would be any in the creek. I guess the most difficult parts for me, then, were the thoughts running through my head—how much of their personalities and identities were being formed as I sat there worrying, and how much potential I (egotistically, of course) had to help form them.

Funny how age boundaries can ebb and flow so much. I usually find myself... well, usually I can't find myself because I don't know which side of the child/adult divide I ought to be on. My role was pretty clearly defined for me this time, though, and here's to the hope that I fulfilled it well. This had originally been scheduled to be my second and last trip, but a midterm the previous weekend combined with one of our co-leaders getting rammed in the hip by a car while he was on his bike (yes, he'll be fine eventually; no, he cannot walk) means that I'll be going next week as well. It definitely throws a wrench in the whole Edisonians-coming-to-visit thing, but I'm sure the joys and benefits will ultimately outweigh the temporary insanity that it has brought.

Anyway, we were at the trailhead even before our scheduled 3pm rendezvous with Twila and Daisy's group who'd basically done our trail backwards with some twists, but didn't get back to San Francisco til 6, and then to campus 'til after 8. I'd been all set to start plugging away at E14, but Twila kindly invited us to leftovers at Columbae, where we sat gossipping about the kids and their quirks and generally creating a paroxysmally laughing havok in their dining room. Got back around 10, unsuccessfully dealt with housing bureaucracy, went through a lot of paperwork and reading, and eventually fell into bed at 3:30 only to get up to work on my problem set at 6:30. If only I'd known... ah, well, it's probably for the best.