Retreat

Honors Devils Fall Retreat - a blast and a figurative as well as literal breath of fresh air - a welcome break from the endless heat and monotony of Phoenix. Camp Tontozona is such a great place - I like it more every time I go.

We left around 5pm and drove up - my car happened to have all of the new recruits, so it was great to get to know them a bit. We definitely picked five great people this semester, if I do say so myself.

The first exciting moment of retreat occurred at the midpoint of the drive, when a very large tarantula crawled out onto the highway in front of our car - I only realized what it was seconds before we ran over it. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure it was positioned between the wheels, so unless another car behind us nailed him (a possibility I cling to) he's still out there procreating and making more ghastly little monsters. I still maintain that I would rather live in a world filled with 25x more insects than deal with spiders of any sort. Surely God could have devised a less repulsive form of population control. Then again, he must have known that doing so would have deprived him and the rest of the car's occupants of the undeniable hilarity of watching me run over a tarantula at 70 miles per hour and then howl in disgust while doing the "Ew-I-just-saw-a-spider-and-now-I-have-the-shivers" dance in the driver's seat like a schoolgirl.

After arriving at camp, it was time to throw the sweatshirts on, breathe the crisp, mountain air, and devour an unholy amount of pizza which we had delivered to the cabin from Pizza Hut. All 16 of us who were on retreat fit into the large Creekside Cabin, which was great and meant that we weren't broken up into smaller groups but spent the entirety of the time together - great team building and bonding time.

When it got dark enough we headed down to the fire pit and built a small fire to sit around and play the obligatory "This-is-an-object-that-represents-me" game. Having forgotten something truly unique, I was forced to use my running shoes (which I was conveniently wearing) as my keepsake and explain what running meant to me. After that it was "most embarrassing moment" time, which Stephanie won hands-down with her story about losing her tube top on a roller coaster and having the ride's camera document the experience in its entirety.

Then we headed down to the field to lay in the grass and look at the stars. It is always so incredible to me when I get out of the city and see the sky at night, filled with billions of points of light. We could even see the Milky Way, which is something never, ever seen within Phoenix city limits. Whenever I see the stars that way - the way they were meant to be seen - I always think about what it must have been like for ancient peoples centuries ago, to be able to see that and be in awe of that all the time. I always resolve to spend more time in the mountains when I get back to Washington.

Literally not 35 seconds after we reached the field to lay down on our backs and look at the stars, the most enormous and bright shooting star I have ever seen in my entire life shot in a yellow-blue bolt across the sky. I honestly thought it was a firework going off at first. It was so incredibly close you would swear you could have touched it.

So we lay down on our backs, all 16 of us, in a huge circle, heads together, talking and laughing and swapping favorite lines from funny movies and TV shows and screaming in unison whenever a shooting star fell across the sky. For me, it was the absolute highlight of the retreat. It was both a wonderful and a sad experience for me - lying there, looking up at the stars with 16 of my favorite people in the world, I suddenly realized that this was the last time I would ever get to do this: the last Honors Devils retreat, the last time at Camp T.

It instantly put a pit in my stomach and reminded me that I'm growing increasingly aware of how quickly college is drawing to a close. Life always has its phases, and there have been lots of them, but school has always been a constant up till now. It's always been there, and the friendships and people that it fosters by association have always been there as well. Facing the fact that those things are about to fade away and be replaced by a much more serious world certainly makes you feel, well, small - especially while looking up at the Milky Way.