6:25am – My eyes open. There’s a pounding on the door. There’s a girls
voice. “It’s 6:25! It’s almost time to go! Are you ready?” “Yea, I’m ready,” I reply as I throw the
covers off. “Be there in a just minute!”
*Before I continue, this is how I concluded my previous blog: “Off day
tomorrow, so we’re planning on surfing down an active volcano, then camping out
in a cave underneath a waterfall. No big
deal, really.”
Oh boy.
Without further ado, here is a look back at the start of what
Phil Connors
would call, ‘the end of a very long day.’
6:28am – I sleepily jump off my bunk bed. There are around 300 joints in the human
body. When I hit the ground, each one of them pops. Twice.
6:32am – Throw a t-shirt and shorts into my daypack, along with my
sleeping bag and I’m ready to go.
6:40am – We all load up in the back of the truck. No, not the truck –
our truck. The truck we ride in back of that takes us wherever we need to go,
whether it’s a 3 hour long trip through the Nicaraguan night, a trip to the
grocery store or a 15 minute shortcut down a bumpy dirt road to the property.
Ol’ Reliable, I call her.
6:45am There are a few little girls up early this morning. As usual, they’re wearing pretty white and
pink dresses, but covered in dirt from their matching shoes to their matching
bows, as they have been playing all morning.
As we ride out of the neighborhood they stand on the side of the road
waving bye. ‘Adios gringos! Adios!’
7:27am We get on the highway and talk about our plans for the day.
Plans for the day: Drive to an active
volcano. Get a ‘sandboard’. Climb up the active volcano. Surf down the active
volcano. Get back in Ol’ Reliable, and drive to a
coffee shop for what is rumored to be the best coffee Nicaragua has to offer.
Continue on to ‘Cascada Blanca’, or White Waterfall, where we’ll swim, eat
dinner around a campfire, have a cigar with a little Flor de Cana, and camp in
the cave that’s right behind the waterfall.
Sounds like a pretty perfect day.
8:45am Diego, our driver for the day, friend, and head of New Song
Mission here in Nicaragua, takes a left turn off the way onto a dirt path. “This is one of the worst roads I’ve ever
been on,” warns Barbara, one of the full-time missionaries at New Song. But
Barbs can be a little overdramatic at times, so I’m not too worried. “Hold on
to your butts,” chimes in my teammate Chris with a nice Jurassic Park
reference.
9:00am We’re stuck.
9:01am Barbs was right. Everybody climbs out of the back of Ol’
Reliable. It’s time to push.
9:10am With a little prayer, a little digging under the tire, and a
little pushing we … don’t get out. We’re still stuck.
9:15am We hear a rumbling down the road, and around the corner comes a
dump truck! They hook up Ol’ Reliable to the dump truck and pull us out. No
problem. With a small celebration, we climb back into the truck. Next stop:
Volcano!
9:18am We’re stuck again. Everybody out. The dump truck is long gone
and, once again, it’s time for some digging and pushing. But our back tire is
pretty deep, and the team is losing moral.
(What happens next is not overdramatized. Really, not at all. Seriously.
Not even a little.)
Clara: “What shall we do? We’re stuck!”
Lacey: “My only goal for this year was to surf down a volcano, and this
was my chance. 2011… What a waste!”
Carrie: “If only there was a man here that really knew what they
were doing. A man that could save us. That could not only drive a stick shift,
but could really operate it like a professional.
Cadence: “Yea! If only we had a man that had spent 5 years stubbornly
driving a 2-wheel-drive, 4-speed truck without air conditioning into terrain he
knew it would get stuck in. A man that would advise his friend, when the friend
is considering driving his parents Hummer into a river, to ‘Be sure you really hit the gas as hard as
you can… ya know, so we don’t get stuck.’ “
I stood in the background, looking down, nervously kicking pebbles back
and forth. ‘I couldn’t possibly get behind the wheel,’ I thought. ‘After all, I
had been a legend for my driving skills. But that was ages ago, and I had said
so long to those days when I decided to sell my Dodge Dakota. Yea, I had hung
up the keys for an easy automatic drive car and hadn’t looked back. No, I
couldn’t possibly…’
But I knew what I had to do. Like a worn-down superhero, back for one
last battle, I raised my head up and stared at that back-right tire. “I’ll take
the wheel.”
There was a short gasp from the entire group. ‘No, Kellen,’ said Char.
‘We couldn’t possibly ask you to do this… after everything you already did –
already accomplished – with your old truck…’
‘It’s okay, you didn’t have to ask. I was meant to do this.’ I took the
keys and sat in the driver seat. The stick shift was warm, like Ol’ Reliable
had been waiting for one truly worthy of driving her all along. “Just get it up
to about 150 RPM’s, then hit the gas,” said Diego.
“Please,” I thought, “that’s like telling the Great Bambino to lay down
a sac bunt.” I threw it into second
gear.
What happened next can only be described by the Paul Walker comedy, The
Fast and the Furious:
“(I was) Granny shiftin’ and double clutchin’. I’m lucky that hundred shot of NOS didn’t
blow the welds on the intake!”
We made it to the volcano about 15 minutes later.
9:45am We rent our sandboards and head towards the volcano. There’s a long path around the volcano that
we have to take. It’s not even 10
o’clock but the temperatures already in the 90’s. Words I would use to describe the path: black
and desolate. And hot. And rocky.
Basically, it’s a real-life Mount Doom.
10:25am Chris suddenly stops walking and looks down. “If I take one
more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been,” he says. “Oh
Sam,” I reply. We keep walking.
10:40am Finally, sweating and tired, we make it to the top, and in the
distance we see the volcano. “I’m
confused,” I said, “I thought we were going to the top of the volcano.” But we
weren’t at the top. We were just on a
mountain that had formed from the last time the volcano had exploded. I stared at that volcano, and thought about
how many times in my life I’ll have to climb a volcano. “Chris, let’s go!”
10:45am For some reason, I found a burst of energy, and ran down the mountain. Chris followed, reluctantly at first. The volcano didn’t look that high, nor did it look that difficult to climb. “Be back in 15!” I yelled to the girls.
10:55am Running up that volcano, I felt like Rocky climbing the steps
in downtown Philly. There’s nothing in this world that could stop me. Invincible. Almost there.
10:57am I let out a scream as a stinging pain shot through my leg. Before I could do anything, the same pain
shot through my arm. I looked down at my leg, but didn’t have time to see what
it was before I slapped it away. I only recognized it as huge and red. I
slapped my arm before I realized I had stepped on a nest of… something. They
were everywhere. I ran down the volcano
faster than I had ran up it.
I got to Chris, dancing and slapping myself, and for about 5 minutes, endured the worst stings I had
ever felt. I swore more than Joe Pesci on Goodfellas and Home Alone combined,
and then I could do nothing but laugh at the pain.
11:05am Pissed and more determined than ever before, we climbed back up
the volcano. On our hands and knees, we
reached the top and looked down into the crater below. Then we felt the ground begin to shake. The volcano was about to blow.
11:20am Just kidding. We hung
out at the top for a few minutes, taking pictures and admiring the unique
colors of the rocks from the sulpher, and then headed back down to join the
girls.
11:45am After a few group pictures, we walked to the edge of the
mountain face. Time for some surfing. However, my teammate Chris’ video below can describe the experience to you more than I ever could.
(So I’m 1,500 words in and it’s not even noon yet. Part 2 and 3 and maybe-hopefully-not-but-let’s-be-honest-probably-4 coming up)
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