Before coming to AmeriCorps, I had never been to California for any length of time. However, pretty much all I had seen up until a week ago was campus and the Walmart next to campus. So when they announced that our “mini spike” was in San Luis Obispo, a small town on the coast of central California, I was beyond excited.
The purpose of the “mini spike” is to teach us how to deal with each other in the van for long periods of time, give the drivers more experience on the road, and practice working together as a team to pack and plan our trips. The drive was six hours through terrain I had never seen before. It was arguably not the prettiest area of California, but I was enticed by the dry scrub and brush all the same. But all the beauty came with a price. There were signs every few feet warning about drought and the risk of fires. Being out of a Great Lake state where fresh, clean drinking water is abundant has me thinking twice about my consumption. I have adopted the “mellow yellow” rule. I don’t flush when I pee. You may think it’s gross, but someday we’ll all have to do this, and I think it’s a rather small price to pay for disadvantaged communities to have more water.
We arrived at the National Guard Base in San Luis Obispo in the afternoon after some unnecessarily long bathroom breaks. We set up “camp,” and I put “camp” in quotes, because it was really more just a field with rows and rows of tents. There was no wilderness, and what wilderness there was was off limits due to the high levels of poison oak. That first night ended with a mandatory skit around the bonfire, which our team of introverts begrudgingly stumbled through.
taking one for the team as a human ladder during teambuilding
Now, I know that most people hate teambuilding, but I just love it. Probably because I like being authoritative, and teambuilding gives me a platform. Kidding…kind of. Normally it’s fairly accessible scenarios, but since this was a National Guard base everything was military grade. There were walls we had to scale that I couldn’t even touch the top of. But I was proud of us getting through 3/5 of the scenarios. One highlight was when I was trying to climb this 15 foot wall, lost my grip, and a fellow team member singlehandedly pulled me up and to safety. Talk about teamwork. Had I fallen I probably would have broken a few bones since there were metal wires and posts beneath me.
The overarching theme of the obstacle course was imminent danger, the kind my weak self has never experienced. On one obstacle course, I had to climb a 20 foot rope, scale a beam, hang upside down with no netting underneath, and then climb 40 feet down a mesh wall. I was one of two girls to complete the obstacle, and I paid for it later with bruises, scrapes, and debilitating soreness. But I was crazy proud of myself for pushing myself to try it when few even tried let alone completed it.
camping out in the gym
About the time we were completing the obstacle course, it started downpouring. We raced to pack up camp before the deluge, and due to a flashflood warning we were moved to the National Guard gym complex. Imagine 200 people sleeping on a gym floor. Needless to say I did not sleep much between snoring and people stepping on my face on their way to the bathroom.
Because we couldn’t finish our activities, we ended up taking a side trip to Morro Bay, known for its giant rock that sits in the bay. Fog shrouded the wharf and the air smelled briny and of vegetation. We were standing on the pier when we heard a squeal. We looked down to see several seals dipping in and out of the water. I nearly cried from their cute beady eyes. I had never seen a seal not in the context of a zoo, and it occurred to me that to some people this was an everyday thing. There are places in the U.S. where you can experience the ocean, mountains, and wildlife everyday.
morro bay
I got this surge of happiness and excitement at the thought that after AmeriCorps I can move anywhere. There will be nothing tying me to any one place. Everything is open, and I floated on that feeling for the rest of the night and all the way back to campus.