Life at Colorado College » Block Breaks « Admission Home
Write about beauty, then hike it
Libby's outdoor orientation group on the Mt. Sneffels saddle: Jake Weiss '09, Casey Rommel '10, Frances Chase '10, and Neil Hesse '10I am in a writing block, so for 3-1/2 weeks I am a writer. In class we talk about writing, we read about writing, and we write about writing. “Write about beauty, but don’t be cliché,” is our first assignment. I am stumped. The words lovely, glamour, pulchritude, charm, and grace come to mind because they are in my thesaurus. Nothing strikes me that doesn’t sound dumb, so I hand in something that is dumb.
For 3-1/2 weeks I write. And I play soccer, go hiking, hang out. On the weekends I camp or I party or I do nothing at all, and before I realize it, it is the last night of the block and my final story is far from complete.
The library is teeming with procrastinators like me. I drink coffee. I write. I sweat. I drink Pepsi. I revise. By class, I have managed to crank out 18 pages of something fairly close to good. I think about high school, when papers were never more than five pages long and we had months to do them. It is amazing, I think, how well we adapt.
On Wednesday at noon I turn in my paper and suddenly feel 50 pounds lighter. I skip down the hall. It is block break and I am free.
I am leading a freshman outdoor orientation trip to the San Juan Mountains. I am initially skeptical of our group, because this year’s acceptance rate was half that of my class. These kids are too smart, I think. They must be nerds.
But by the second day I am in love with all of them. They go to CC. How could they be anything but cool? We hike and climb Mount Sneffels, and when I’m on the summit, I take in the most beautiful vista I’ve ever seen. I think about my first writing assignment so long ago and say, “This is pretty nice.”
Jake, my co-leader who was just in a geology class, says, “Yep, this is a sweet formation.”
“Oh yeah?” I say. “Tell me about it,” because my next class is geology. For the next 3-1/2 weeks, I’ll be a geologist.
“You guys are such nerds,” says a freshman, and it’s true.