Personal Narrative: Walking Up The Trail

When I was very little, walking up the trail with a pack on my back and the dog at my side, I would reach out and pull leaves from the bushes and trees. I would tear off corners, smooth the edges, and they would be turned into spaceships, flying across a lush alien world. Sometimes the trail, worn down into the ground over time by paws and hooves, would climb its way up onto the crests of ridges and meander across the moist, mossy fringes of muskegs. The rough, black and gnarled spruce branches that grew there were pirate spacecraft, pursued by the sleek birch branches from beyond the muskeg's soggy borders. As imaginary lasers and rockets exploded against the ships' hulls, I would rip off little pieces of bark and let them fall to the forest floor. The stricken ships would continue …show more content…
I can get my mind in order without being distracted by what's going on around me. Then I jump back in and return to what I'm doing with my full attention. If something's bothering me at home, or I'm sick of the pressures of school, I can pick up a pen and start writing or drawing. I leave behind whatever's getting at me and kill time writing to someone about the chickens or remembering my friends and I losing our snow machines in overflow or being avalanched in in the mountains. Writing lets me retreat to a quiet place, so I can get my strength and wits back to face the day. It's taking a vacation, and without being able to do that, I'd die of exhaustion. You can only run nonstop for so long.

I think that without our stories, most of us would be in big trouble. In Cat's Cradle, one of Kurt Vonnegut's characters announces that "When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed." The man then asks a doctor, "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolations of