Lookout Mountain, Columbine High (Part II).

Day four, we practiced van driving. Each team of ten or so had a staff supervisor, and mine was Libby—one of the younger staff members, and pretty sarcastic. This was fine later in the day, but I had been the first to volunteer to drive, and I didn’t really appreciate it at first, ha. Her route for us took us past Columbine High School, and even just going by was eerie. It's odd recognizing a fairly nondescript building you've only seen in pictures before. Like you've been there, but you haven't, and you can't quite remember which.

We drove to Lookout Mountain, and I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t the same Lookout Mountain from American Gods. Lookout Mountain is in Boulder, though, and that’s the city where the good guys are drawn to in The Stand. Lookout Mountain has Buffalo Bill’s grave, mediocre chili, and great fudge. The fog was thick—no more than 100 feet of visibility—and I got some beautiful, haunting pictures. Sparse pines, broken rocks, grey-white mist all throughout. With the fog so dense, you could barely tell we were on a mountain, which is too bad because Libby swore the view was fantastic.



We passed Columbine again on the way back, and Libby asked if we wanted to stop. I absolutely did, and I was glad I wasn’t alone. As if on cue, it started to rain. It was just heavy enough to be visible, and there was no wind but it was freezing nonetheless. The sky was a monotonous grey all around the memorial.

It’s a paved circle—brick laid about. A half-circle outer wall has maybe a dozen plaques on it. Quotes from students, staff, local officials, politicians. The students, the staff—their quotes were far more striking. Honest, not concerned with sounding like good speeches. Real people, sincere thoughts.

The inner circle is two raised half-circles of granite with dead students’ names and tributes from their parents written on them. A lot of them spoke extensively about God, Christ, heaven, dying because of their beliefs. Some were strikingly good, and some were downright awful. One made me coldly angry.

It takes a small-minded, selfish father to use his son’s memorial gravesite as a pulpit for his beliefs on abortion and prayer in school. Your son is dead and you don’t want to talk about his life, what kind of a person he was—you’d rather rant about Roe v. Wade?

Dead silent at that memorial. Hoods up, solemn faces. Grey sweatshirts slowly turning darker, damper, heavier, And absent: any reference to the shooters. No memorials. No apologies. No justifications.

I wore a trenchcoat in high school, and caught a lot of flak for it. These boys were a big reason why, the only reason why. Couldn’t count the number of times some jock asked if I was going to shoot up the school.

It’s not like I was never angry. But I wasn’t that angry. These people I went to high school with—and high school is an emotional cesspool, all these confused kids looking to find their place in life, giving and getting garbage because everyone is a little insecure—they are largely good, or at least decent, passable, acceptable people. Some of them may go on to beat their wives, to run down a kid while drunk driving—some were assholes—but it’s no one’s place to frivolously, single-handedly, devoid of checks and balances, take their lives. A bully in high school is probably a bully for life—but they are lives.

Still, even though they were the kinds of goths I wouldn’t have been able to stand, these kids didn’t deserve what they got, what they’re getting now. They needed help and got stepped on. You can only jab at a wounded animal so many times before it, feeling cornered, feeling threatened, fights back, goes into a frenzy. Some animals just want to flee, and some are feral—these two were feral.

In a sense, I identified. In others, I didn’t. But it’s pathetic when Marilyn Manson is the only person who offers to listen to these kids, suggests something started being wrong long, long ago.

The place had stern intensity, and I think it gave me something far different than it gives most.

The First Days (Part I).

They keep us busy. Staying up past eleven feels irresponsible and downright dumb when you wake up at seven. Day one was paperwork, settling in, and a meet-and-greet with the staff and team leaders. Day two fitted us for uniforms and got us a bank account, and I missed the second Obama/McCain debate for a meeting on wildfire fighting. Day three had us shuttled to a doctor’s office for physicals, a drug test, tetanus & tuberculosis shots—I also requested and paid for a flu shot—and upon our return we were fitted for steel-toed work boots.

There was also a three-and-a-half hour meeting on the member handbook. They said to come prepared, so instead of napping I read it cover-to-cover in the 45 minutes prior. It was a wasted effort, as it was read aloud to us, cover-to-cover. After dinner were the first of the wildfire interviews. They were really hurting for members this year—this class is smaller, and showed a statistically low interest in firefighting. We’re separated into four units—Earth, Fire, Sun, and Water—and anyone who showed an inkling of interest in firefighting during the registration wound up in Earth unit. They made another push to sell people on it, and it worked out okay for them. They desired 30 members and had about 40 do interviews and go to the baseline physical tests.

I did well in the interview and had a 6:22 for my mile, coming in about fifth. I had about 30 push-ups and 60 sit-ups, and scraped all the skin off my tailbone doing sit-ups. It was an inconvenient place for scabs.

Phoenix.

In the time before I left for Denver I went to a store in Ann Arbor called Hollander’s. The lovely Kat accompanied me and helped me pick out decorative papers. I had wanted to take up bookbinding for some time, but my spending was still a bit impulsive—to the tune of one hundred dollars. On the rare occasions I was separated from her in the following week or two (and sometimes when I was not), I made a 128-page blank book from scratch. It became my AmeriCorps NCCC book. The first thing I put in it were laundry instructions from my mother. Then I remembered a defunct blog of mine, and decided to make it my AmeriCorps NCCC blog.

The facebook group was our hub for communication, and I don’t think anyone’s posted a thing on there since we got to campus. People discussed flights there, saw who the government decided to put on the same planes. I was flying by Pioneer Airlines, and I was flying alone.

My suitcase was 57 pounds. The exasperated black lady who checked my bag had me take one or two things out and put them in my backpack, and just ignored the rest of the surplus weight. She was an odd mix of curt and helpful, and it cost me nothing to check my bag, instead of the 75$ it costs for an overweight bag. I still brought far less than most people, and I still brought a bit more than I needed. They fail to emphasize how much time you spend in uniform—eight hours a day, six days a week.

Flying delights me. It’s amazing to me, the things we’ve discovered. (But then, sometimes I’m equally as amazed by pasta. We figured out how to grow wheat, grind it up into flour, mix it with water into a dough, stretch, cut and dry it into noodles, boil them to eat. I’d have never figured that out.) The pressure from landing wasn’t as bad as I’d remembered from my last flight to Space Camp in 6th grade, but that was Florida, and not Colorado, and there’s a bit of an elevation difference.

I got my luggage and was directed by some team leaders and staff to a waiting room right in front. There were about 20 of us there for an hour, waiting for others to land, because we needed 50 before we could load onto a bus. I bought some Panda Express and gave half of it to the guy next to me—George, who talked slowly but was nonetheless eager to eat new people. He wiped off my fork with a napkin and ate the rest. Coincidentally, the first guy I talk to is directly across the hall from me.

My roommate had beaten me there. Dave has curly hair that he’s probably going to shave, and like many of the guys here, he’s taken to the scruffy look. We get along pretty well, though part of that might be because he’s practically never in the room. He sleeps here, and that’s about it. Like so many of us here, he fancies himself a writer. He likes some high-brow discourse, but conversation in the room is pretty sparse, since we see each other right before bed and right after we wake up.