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 to blast each other to bits until finally one was destroyed. After the momentous event of a ship's ruination, another branch from the foliage that surrounded us would take the fallen ship's place, and I would continue down the trail as the battle raged on around me. The yearly journey to the rolling caribou hunting grounds on the high tundra was passed that way. Though weighted down by my wet clothes, rifle, and a backpack full of gear, I never failed to make the miles more easy as we traveled up the path blazed by moose and bear. picture of caribouYears later, and some still before the present, after we had moved from the woods to the city to the country, some friends from school and I were enrolled in a video production class. It was nearly the end of the year, and we were all wondering what sort of large-scale final project we would be assigned. One morning, the teacher had us screen a tape of a local station's daily news program. We then discussed it, critiqued it and examined different cinematic techniques the production crew had used. Then the teacher cleared his throat and told us our last assignment: we would write, direct, star in and produce a single edition of a nightly news program, such as we had just watched. We all hated the Nightly News. Faced with the (imagined) terrible prospect of becoming, if only until the project was completed, like the overfed, overpaid, feeble-minded, superficial, insincere personalities that starred in the local Nightly News, we looked urgently for a way out. Of course, our premonitions were unfounded; we had only to succeed in creating a professional, intelligent program to best the local newscast, but we were so caught up in our hysteria that it seemed any sort of competent reporting would make us 'just like them.' But after watching a particularly good 'News Hour with Jim Lehrer' on PBS that night, we came to the conclusion that news wasn't all that bad, and worthy of our efforts. The next day we assembled around my kitchen table, eating pizza with our own added moose sausage, and scanning the newspaper in an attempt to come up with some newsworthy material to report. After five minutes we were out of ideas, and once the …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