‘Field’ Trip
(entry for 1/15/2025)
This event happened in the early spring, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, so am going to go ahead and post this now, while it’s fresh in my head.
My first year in Grand Junction was strange in some ways. The Adventist School there was a lot bigger than the one in Montrose had been (10 grades instead of 8, and two hundred students instead of 30), and, more importantly, at least to this story, there were a few boys who seemed to think they were in charge of everything, instead of the teachers. (My tiny eighth grade teacher in Montrose, Mr. Hoyt, about five foot one and around 90 pounds, would have tolerated that for less than five seconds, and they would have ended up kneeling and kissing his toes. He was just that kind of guy. He could praise you with a glance, and kill you with a look. The teachers in Grand Junction were no match for him.)
One day in March of 1954, with the snow mostly gone but still some frost on clear mornings, three of these ‘ruling’ boys in the 10th grade (I was in the 9th), announced that they had gotten approval for an overnight excursion to an old abandoned cabin on property owned by one of their parents. Not only would we be gone overnight, we would have the next day off from school as well. We all of us, those who were in the 9th and 10th grades, were to go home that night, get permission from our parents to participate, and the next day after school we would go on this Official Field Trip whose purpose was to study history (old abandoned mining cabins), botany (exotic wild plants known only to western Colorado, like the local scraggly sage), and social studies (how to ‘rough’ it with no resources other than a couple of large folding knives and a cast iron skillet. One night only, plus the next day, but it was sure to be both fun and educational. There would be no teachers involved, just students, and the three ruling boys would be in charge.
Uh-huh.
The parents of most of the girls, smelling a possible rat, or at least a small mouse, refused to give their daughters permission to go, but all of the guys, and two of the girls, received the required nods of approval. My parents were very impressed with my new school and were glad to acquiesce.
We were to bring no food or extra clothing. Everything would be provided.
Oh, yeah!
When school let out on the fateful day, those of us who were going gathered on the lawn in front of the school building (which also served at that time as the Adventist Church, though it looked nothing like one) and, after making sure that everybody who was going was accounted for, we set off walking across town to the promised cabin.
(A pic of a very similar cabin is at the head of this post, though the one in the story is long gone.)
It was a four mile walk, of which the last mile was all steeply uphill, so it took about two hours. It was dark by the time we got there, and only one of us had brought a flashlight, so there was a certain amount of confusion, though no one got actually lost.
The first thing that gave us a hint that everything might not quite be as advertised was that nobody had brought any food, nor was the cabin accessible by car, so we couldn’t expect some adult to show up to intervene. The second hint was that nobody had brought a sleeping bag, and the cabin had no beds and could hold (lying down on the floor) at most six kids at a time, and there were 15 of us.
The final clue was that, though there was a pump-handle well on the property, no one had brought a mug or a glass or anything else to drink out of. We drank out of our hands, one of us drinking while a second one held the flashlight and a third person worked the pump-handle.
The one-and-only flashlight’s batteries soon died, so we had to figure everything out in total darkness. There was no moon, and the stars were covered with a thin haze. We had matches, but nothing to light with them, to make a fire, and we wisely refrained from utilizing them for illumination purposes, as doing so would have soon used them up.
Nobody complained, and we were all too tired and hungry (not to mention too grown up) to cry.
There was no outhouse, or any similar facility. The guys peed standing up, against distant trees, without benefit of flashlight. The girls went off, even farther away, to do their thing. It was too cold to do anything more than pee, so no one tried. (Nor was there anything to wipe with, if anyone was tempted.)
As I was the smallest kid in the group, I was allowed to sleep in the cabin, along with the two girls. Everybody else slept outside, on the ground. And the weather forecast promised frost that night, and there were about eight thin coats among the fifteen of us.
We did have the huge cast-iron skillet that had been promised, but no one offered to sleep in it. (One of the ‘ruling’ boys had carried it up, strapped to his back.)
Roughing it, indeed!
I’m still not sure exactly how we all made it through the night, but somehow we did. We were up at first crack of dawn. The guy with the skillet announced that he would cut up and fry some potatoes he had just found in a cupboard in the cabin. They were old and green and spongy and starting to sprout in the darkness, but did we care? No.
How was he going to make a fire on which to cook these potatoes? “Now that it’s light,” he said, “I’ll go find some firewood, and some tinder, and we’ll light the fire with those matches we had last night. Anybody want to come help me find firewood?”
Nobody did.
After about fifteen minutes he came back loaded down with pieces of wood that had fallen out of trees, and shreds of bark that he had pulled off of old cedars and junipers. Then he sliced the potatoes. There were eight of them. He sliced them crosswise, and thick. (Like the more-recent picture below).
There was no shortening or oil or butter or anything else to fry the potatoes in. Did we care? No.
Salt? No.
I think they may have been the best potatoes I ever ate, though they were a bit overdone around the edges of the slices, and a bit raw in the middles. The ‘cook’ received warm congratulations, though nothing else of similar temperature. The potatoes had taken only a half hour to cook. We all ate our fill, and then a bit more, till all was devoured.
Then we looked at each other and tried to figure out what we were going to do next.
Finally the tallest boy, the leader of the leaders, said he had an announcement to make. We stared at him.
“Nobody knows we’re here,” he said, grinning. “The three of us didn’t ask our parents for permission to do this. They don’t know where we are. We didn’t really get permission to miss school today, either. We’re all absent and we will get in lots of trouble. Isn’t this fun?”
Nobody answered him. We were too stunned to think, let alone speak. We simply stared.
“Now that the potatoes are all gone, we have nothing to eat, and if we’re not going to freeze our asses off or starve to death, we’re going to have to go back. If we go back the way we came, we’ll get back to the school before the bell rings for them to go home, so we’re going to go a different way.”
“But we have to go back the way we came,” one of the girls said. “There’s only the one bridge across the Gunnison.”
“We’re not going to use a bridge,” said the leader, with a smug smile. “We’re roughing it, remember? We’re going to swim the Gunnison, and get back too late to get in trouble. At least not today. We should leave pretty soon, in fact. We're going to have to go the long way. The real long way.”
The Gunnison River was not some little creek. At this time of year it was a hundred feet across and at least five feet deep in the middle. And it was swift. For me, at five-two, wading it was out of the question, and I didn’t know how to swim. (It would be another five years before I would learn.) I was too scared to say any of this yet, before we got to the river itself, but I knew I would have to ‘confess’ before we started across.
And I did, at the last possible minute. I walked up to the guy who had made the announcement, and I told him the bad news.
“You don’t WHAT?!?” he shouted.
“Know how to swim,” I repeated.
“Then you’ll have to wade.”
“It’s too deep.”
He heaved an enormous sigh and said, “I’ll carry you.”
And that’s what he did. I sat on his shoulders and he waded across the river, which came up almost to his chin. (He was six feet tall.) When we got to the other side, he put me down roughly and said, “That’s the last time I ever do anything like that for you again.”
“I think this is the last time any of us will ever be allowed to do anything like this again,” I said.
And I was right.
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