**STRESS CAMP DAY #4**

The final day was upon us. as i said, we went to bed at about 6:30. so, add 8 hours for sleeping and you have us getting up at about 3:30 in the AM. the kids had no idea about this, of course. all they knew was that it would still be dark when i woke them up. i figured we had about 6 hours of hiking ahead of us, plus an hour for silly stuff- snacks, breakfast, broken limbs-which would get us to the station at 10:30, and seeing as how we were supposed to be in between 9 and 11, i figure that was about perfect.

The only problem was that at what turned out to be 2:15 in the bloomin' morning, some animal started screeching so close to the hut that i could have sworn it was inside it. you could have set your clock by this animal- it would screech like every 60 seconds, which, once it wakes you up, is just enough time to hope that maybe it finally left this time, then it would screech again. loud. i sleep kinda light in the woods, so i'll wake up just before i'm being mauled by a bear instead of as i'm being mauled, so i thought that i was the only one awake, but the kids started whispering to eachother, so i figured i'd get us moving in a few minutes. then one of the guys sat up real quick and said really loudly "alright everyone, ryan's outside blowing his whislte to get us up, so let's get going!". there was a short silence, and i was like "dude, i'm over here. that's not me..." i think he was a little overzealous to get home. since there was now no doubt that everyone was awake, i decided that we may as well get going, even though it was an hour earlier than i had planned. turns out that it took longer than i thought it would (i know, i really need to get better at knowing how long it will take us to go distances. the 6 hours that i guessed was already including a bunch of extra time, though- i thought it would only take us like 4. live and learn...), so i think God woke us up early so we'd have time.

There's really not much to say about hiking the last bit, other than it was still raining and quite cold. i had been pretty skimpy on the snacks, but since it was the last day, i gave out a bunch of them. we didn't eat breakfast until after the sun was up, so it was probably about 6. probably the hardest part of any hike for me is the very end; it's not that i don't like hiking, or enjoy being in the woods, but if we're going to be done, i just want to be done. it's something i should probably work on, cuz i get really impatient and keep looking for civilization. when i could finally see roofs through the trees i expected the kids to go nuts. after all, i was in the back, so they could probably see more than i could. they were so intent on hiking, though, that nobody even noticed. finally i called to the to stop and look up. then they went nuts.

We got to the train station at about 8:30, and sat around in shock until our train came 25 minutes later. We went 3 stops to the station the camp is at, and had one last hike to get home. it's only about a 10 minute walk, but the little pedestrian-trail we're on has this one last bit that is incredibly steep. it's really slippery and has like 5 switchbacks, and is pretty much the absolute last thing you want to do after 4 days of hiking. but the end is in sight, so nobody complains.

When the groups finally make it home, we have to spend about an hour cleaning up our gear- wiping down the rain sheets and the ground sheets, giving back the sleeping bags and backpacks and first aid kids and all that. crossing the line into camp was wierd for me. for 4 days i had been responsible for these kids' health and well-being: spiritually, phyisically, mentally, and emotionally. they had relied on me to teach them how to build a fire, how to put up the rain fly's, how to read the maps. but once we made it home and they saw their classmates, it was like i didn't even exist anymore. it's not like i'm a socialite and i get my sense of worth from their attention, it was just a really sudden shift from being somebody to being nobody. i totally understand; they wanted to share stories and stuff. it was just kinda funny that it happened so drastically and completely. of course, it got better after a while, and now when i come on campus and i see my former teammates, we have this understanding, this shared experience that can never really be fully understood by anyone else, even you guys, who have faithfully slogged through these entries. so it was totally worth it.

Coming back was totally like culture shock. people would ask me how it was and i just told them to ask me in a few days. i walked home in a daze (my car battery had mysteriously been emptied of it's power while i was away), and went to bed at 6:30pm. i woke up 12 hours later, and went to mister donuts. and life slowly resumed its' pace.

**edit**
I thought it might be fun to make a collage of our maps, so here they are. the days are marked in red or blue, depending on the day. i wish i could get it bigger, but i can't. so just squint really hard.

**STRESS CAMP DAY #3**

I woke the campers with what became my standard wake-up call: “STRESS CAMPERS!! RISE AND SHINE FOR ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY!!” It was not a beautiful day at all; day 3 dawned much the same as day 2 had ended- gloomy and rainy. All the kids were wet, although some (boys, mostly) were more vocal about it than others. Various kids had not taken my advice to heart, and had left their boots or packs or clothes poorly guarded against the rain, much to their chagrin. It's all about delayed gratification, man.

Thanks to the fact that we ate the cursed pancakes the day before, our breakfast for the morning required no fire, just some water to make the powdered milk into liquid milk (gas milk??). In addition to being wet, everyone was cold, so once everything got packed up, we just started hiking. The trail seemed strangely familiar from the night before, and it wasn't long until we reached the point where, the night before, we had chosen to turn back. It was really only a slight uphill, and from the other side, if you looked down maybe 20 yards, we could see the white stripe of the guardrail. The road really had been right there.

If we had made it, it was my plan to sleep there, using the guardrail to tie up one side of the ground sheets, and putting rocks on the far side or something. It seemed like a good enough idea at the time, but it may not have been in reality. It all depends on whether or not I was dreaming. See, I would have bet a thousand dollars on the fact that during the night, some girl got up, wandered down the hill with a light for a ways, turned the light off for a bit, then turned it back on and came back up. Pretty much your typical “nature call”, as we called them. The reason I remembered it was cuz it freaked me out- the girl was making a lot of noise in the bushes, and it woke me up pretty well. Come morning, I ask around to see who it was, mostly to comment on their dedication to going to the bathroom in the middle of the night- there is no WAY I would get out of my warm downy sleeping bag in the middle of the night to pee. I don't care if I have to go the dreaded “number 3” (diarrhea), it can wait. But nobody would fess up. Apparently, there had either been an animal rummaging around in the vicinity of our camp, masquerading as a girl with a flashlight, which is unlikely, or I had hallucinated the whole thing, which is much more likely.

This all comes back to the finding of the road. During that very same night, I thought I had heard the sound of a car or 2 going by- further fueling the idea that we had been within spitting distance of the road. The problem with that is, people drive like Jehu up there, which is normally ok, since they are on tiny, windy, semi-paved roads, but could have been a bad thing if we were sleeping where they would normally be driving. All this to say, if we had been sleeping on the road, we might have ended up being 10 speed bumps for some drunken bluecollar, driving home in the wee hours of the morning. But, that is all contingent on my being lucid, which is doubtful.

Once we hit the road, we hiked at light speed. The map and reality did not exactly agree, which became more and more common as the day wore on. On the map, the trail crossed the road, and continued on the other side. In reality, the trail hit the road and stopped in a disconcerting fashion. I made my best guess, using my horrible sense of direction and my dubious cartography skills (see “the disaster of the summer death hike”) that we could walk on the road for a while, and if our trail didn't appear, we could at least bushwhack up to the ridge that it should be on. A trail did, in fact, appear, but in a strange place. It was marked with these little brightly-colored plastic stakes that are used as a method of demarcation between prefectures, which was the only part that made any sense to me. We stopped for breakfast under a high-tension power tower, in a fog so thick we could barely see 30 feet in any direction, which is frustrating when you don't know exactly where you are and are trying to get your bearings from the landscape. The weird thing was, the only place on the map where the trail crossed the power lines was way further than I thought we were. But, unless there had been new power lines built recently (unlikely), there was no other place we could be.

The main frustration on this part of the hike was going up. Well, going down too. Pretty much, everyone was sick of hiking, but especially sick of going up. The slow gals had become the really slow gals, then they became the ridiculously slow gals. We didn't really have the luxury of waiting for 20 minutes at the top of every semi-challenging hill; we did have a deadline to make, and we would not make it if we kept up the pace we were at. The guys were really good about volunteering to take the girls stuff every time we took a break, and the girls very humbly allowed them to bear their burdens.

Crisis! One of the girls, the slow girls, no less, had a weak ankle that she had been protecting for the whole trip. In a moment of confusion, however, she twisted the other one really bad, and so was basically only capable of shuffling, barely even able to take her feet off the ground. So, one of the guys took her pack. It was really hard for her (she cried a little, sad that she was the “weakest”) but it turned out to be good for everyone.

The ever-elusive hut was again set as our goal. As we hiked further and further, I realized that I had really displayed my lack of wisdom and experience by thinking we could make the hut by the night before. Not only were we going up and down every hillside in the world, but there were a few parts that were ridiculously steep, and one part that was steeper and more slick than the rock climbing we had done the first day- only this time there were no chains. I was in the back, and I got to these cliffs and was like “wait- the kids went down HERE?! Is that even possible?!” There was no way we could have made it down in the dark. We would have had to stop somewhere. I was still leading at this point, and there were a few times when I really had no idea where I was going. The group would stop, and I would mosey up to the front to see what the holdup was. Invariably, there would be a fork in the trail. Examining the map, I would see that our trail should have been going due south. A quick compass check would reveal that one path was going south-east, and one was going south-west. WHAT?! So, I made educated guesses based on the condition of the trails. Scary stuff. But, as I’ve often discovered, Jesus often spare me and, more importantly, the kids, from making decisions that really have really bad consequences. We never got lost.

Well, not really lost. There was this one time....

According to the map, we were going to take our trail until it connected to another trail, and upon meeting it, we would head back in the general direction we had just come from, but on a different trail. The kids really “wanted” a bushwhacking experience, so we decided that instead of doubling back, we would just cut across. We were supposed to bushwhack for about half a kilometer before we found a trail, but in reality, we went about 50 meters and found a trail. A nice one, too. Where the crap were we? Could this be our trail? I decided that I would scout it out, and give the team a chance to have a breather. If we continued in the same direction we had been going before we started bushwhacking (south, for those that are interested), our trail just ended up connecting to our original trail. Going the other direction, however, it wandered in and out of valleys and ridges, never really varying elevation much. After a bit, I thought I saw some corrugated metal through the trees, and as I drew close, my heart sank, and I looked despair full in the face. There was a shelter, all right. It was about 6 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and 4 feet tall, basically a sheet of metal stuck in the ground on one side and held up by 2 thick sticks on the other. If this was the “shelter”, there would be a mass mutiny. The kids would probably have melted into the ground and refused to take another step. The world would end. I just stood there in utter disbelief for probably a full 60 seconds. I looked around a little, and realized that if this were the hut, there should have been a peak just past it. I hiked beyond it, using every last ounce of willpower I had to believe that we were headed for a different shelter, but still secretly dreading the worst. To my relief, the peak never made its appearance, giving credence to the hope that I was in the wrong spot. As I jetted back to the group, I decided that we should go back to our original, pre-bushwhack trail, and just get to the hut the conventional way. I didn’t say a word about the faux hut; 98% of me believed that there was something better coming, but 2% kept wondering if that’s where the actual trail would take us too. So, I went back to the slowly freezing team, never said a word about the hovel I found, and led them on to the actual hut, which was less than 30 minutes from where we were.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures of the hut itself. Years before, it may have been structurally sound, but through the years, had fallen into disrepair. Different parts of it leaned at different crazy angles, and there were a few places in the roof where the corrugated metal had rusted through, which let the rain in. More importantly, in my eyes, at least, it was only a short distance from a stream, which meant that we could refill our water supply for the first time since the morning of the second day. We were at the point that I knew exactly how many liters we had and was rationing it out to the kids. While 2 guys were hiking down to the stream with all the water bottles, some of the kids were building a fire, some other kids were making lunch, and some guys were putting up rain fly’s so the rain would run off, I got out the maps to see if we could stay in the hut that night. By my best guess, we had only gone about 4.5 kilometers that day, a far cry from the 12 we did the day before. There were about 7km left, and we were supposed to get “home” between 9 and 11, which means we’d have to start hiking at 3-ish, which means we’d have to get up at about 2. I shared this with the kids, and asked them what the wanted to do. If they chose to spend the night, we would be getting up REAL early, and hiking for a lot of hours before the sun even came up. If we chose to press on, we’d have less hiking to do, and we could get more sleep. And, of course, we spent the night in the hut. I’ll admit, even I didn’t care how far we had to hike the next day- all I wanted was to sleep inside.

The cooks did an excellent job, the fire people did an excellent job, everything was really done great. We had tons of food, including this ham stroganoff stuff that was seriously the best thing I have ever tasted. I would make it at home for a regular meal like every week, it was so good. Because it was the last night, we could pretty much eat everything except one snack and the breakfast. Anything we didn’t eat we would just be carrying, so, even though it was really hard, we all ate as much as we possible could. So delicious….Then, as it was getting dark, we got set up for the night. I had the kids repack their bags as much as possible, so we could get a quick start the next day. There was exactly enough room in the hut for all 10 of us to lay out- there were a few roof-drips that had to be fixed before everyone was happy. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as we all got into sopping sleeping bags, then we all slowly drifted off. Everyone was wet, cold, and exhausted, but also full, content, and sleepy. It felt like midnight by the time everyone was asleep, but I snuck a peek at my watch just before I faded off myself:

6:45pm.

And so, the last night of stress camp found the team sheltered from the incessant rain, but still quite far from their goal. Will their leader accurately gauge how long it will take to hike home the next morning, or will they find themselves lost, and hours late home? Does the blasted rain ever stop? Find out….

**STRESS CAMP DAY #2**

As the night wore on, i became more acutely aware that it was raining, mostly due to the fact that there was a large sheet of plastic mere inches from my face that reverberated soundly with every raindrop. i had my watch alarm set to just after sunrise (actually, i had it set to about 5:45am, which was, conincidentally, just after sunrise). the kids got up pretty happily, and with only minimal grumpiness , got to work on packing up their stuff. i set about making pancakes.

Pancakes, for all you non-hiker/camper types out there, are a really bad idea. at least, says me. i like to get up, hike for a few hours, have some granola, and keep hiking. pancakes require, among other things, a fire; also vast amounts of patience, which was in short supply. last year i personally carried the pancake mix, as well as the 2 frying pans for the pancakes, all over the world, so this year, i decided we were going to make those pancakes as soon as possible, and that meant morning 1. it wasn't too difficult for me to get a fire going, even though it was raining, seeing as how i managed to wrap a bunch of the unused wood from the night before in a garbage bag. planning! so, we ate pancakes.

It was fairly cold and windy for the next bunch of hours, and we pretty much just hiked. we did find what was to be the only wildlife on our trip, and one of the girls tried to eat it, much to our amusement. as lunchtime drew near, the trail we were on got worse and worse, to the point where "they" had laid down almost a kilometer of sandbags to keep the trail from getting so washed out it was completely unusable. it was my plan to have lunch on the top of this trail, but some of the girls in the back were having a really hard time (feeling like they were going to throw up, shaking uncontrollably), so we chilled for lunch mid-way. as we were eating the sun came out for what was to be it's only appearance all of stress camp (and actually, it hasn't been sunny yet since then either). we stripped down to our shorts and t shirts, and enjoyed the brief respite from the fog, but after about an hour, the sun went away, and we had to take a pit-stop for everyone to get their raingear on again.

So far, so good. it's about 4:30pm, we've been hiking for a good solid 8 or 9 hours, and we've averaged about a kilometer an hour. the thing is, i know that there's a hut ahead of us a ways, and it'd be awfully nice to get there and be able to stay out of the rain, which, at this point, has returned with a vengeance. i consult a little with my assistant leader, and she doesn't think we should go for it. i think we should. we agree that we should tell the kids what's going on, and let them decide for themselves. the facts i gave them were that there was a hut that we could make it to, but we would really have to work hard, and it was still a long, long ways off. they (somewhat predictably) chose to push on as long as it would take to reach the hut. the fateful decision had been made.

Usually the leaders allow the kids to lead the group, while keeping track on their own set of maps where the group is, but i decided that i would lead the group at this point, just so we wouldn't get lost in the dead of night. i tried to set a fairly high pace, hoping that the incentive of the hut would speed up some of the slower members. it really didn't work, even for a little bit. night fell like a brick, which it does in the mountains, and we soon found ourselves in a world that existed only within the confines of our flashlight beams. with the dark and the fog, it makes it difficult to see more than a few feet in any direction. the danger of that, of course, is that i would miss a signpost and walk us down the wrong side of the mountain, but Jesus was looking after things and, thankfully, that never happened.

A few hours after dark we had our first (and only) really bad fall. we were coming down the side of the mountain on a hard-packed-clay trail, which in rain turns into a really dirty slip-'n-slide, and he tripped or slipped or something, and tumbled head-over-heels down the hillside. he probably only did about 4 or 5 somersaults over a distance of maybe 5 or 6 meters. i was in the back when it happened, and all i really saw was his flashlight doing crazy things, then one of the girls screamed. he wasn't moving. i booked it over to him, honestly not thinking he had been paralyzed or anything, but not sure if he was conscious or not. turns out he was just stunned. he hit his head pretty hard on something (maybe his own pack), but he was ok. he actually stopped on the very edge of a very sharp drop-off place. it wasn't a cliff or anything, but everything got a lot steeper about 2 feet beyond where he was. proof that God looks after us.

"The Fall" happened before we were even at the half-way point for the hut, and at that point i mad the executive decision that we were not going to make it to the hut that night. Corey's fall could have happened to any one of the kids- they were getting too exhausted to hike smart. the next big landmark on the map was a dirt road, and i figured if we hadn't found a good spot by then, we'd sleep there. turns out neither of those things happened. the trail just kept going, and it was kind of a crappy trail- tons of little bushy bamboo everywhere, and we were always either going up or going down. and where was that stupid road anyways!? we hiked for what seemed like an eternity, and it was getting to the point where kids were leaning up against trees for support and falling asleep standing up, or stepping over a log on the trail, then sitting on it and falling asleep. i called a break, and took one guy with me to scout ahead to see where the road was. in the meantime, the group circled up, shared some ritz crackers, and fell asleep on eachother's shoulders.

Me and yuta, the fellow scouter, hiked at a pretty good clip for the next 15 or 20 minutes without finding that blasted road. eventually i had to set a limit to how far we would go, so i said that if the trail went up one more time, we would call it quits and sleep on the trail. it was a hard call to make- part of me was convinced that it was right next to us, but we couldn't see it due to the dark and the rain. but, the trail started going up again, so we turned back. on the way back to the team i kept my eyes open for a good spot for sleeping, but never really found one. there just wasn't a section of trail that was flat long enough to sleep 10 people.

My solution was to have the kids pair up (guy/guy and gal/gal, of course) and share a rainfly, using the other one to cover their packs and stuff. we didn't have supper, and the kids didn't even ask for it. as soon as they had their stuff out and their fly's up, they crawled in and passed out. they didn't know it, but it was all of 8:30 in the PM. it was a little awkward for me, since i had to share with the assistant leader, who is a married woman of 42, and whose son was in my group last year. i have a mummy bag, which means it is exactly big enough for sleeping, not for other things like changing out of my nasty hiking clothes and into nice dry sleeping clothes. we sat next to eachother, facing opposite directions, and both said "don't look, ok?" it was a matter of survival! but it was still weird to be sitting partially naked next to someone's mom, talking about how far we had to hike the next day. we fought in our sleep all night- there wasn't actually enough room under the fly for us both to stay dry simultaneously, so one would wake up getting rained on and roll back to the center, displacing the other person out into the rain, who would wake up and roll back to the center, displacing...you get the idea. all night.


The sun set, and the rain fell, thus ending the second day. All told, they had travelled roughly 12 kilometers in about 13 hours of hiking. But what would the next day bring? And why hadn't they found the road yet? Were they lost, or just stupid? Stay tuned...

**STRESS CAMP DAY #1**

Life had been a little hectic, and my pre-stress-camp prep had not gone well. in fact, i didn't even start packing until past midnight, and it was pushing 2 when i finished. it's a little different than just packing to visit the fam for 2 weeks; by the time i decided to quit i looked like a dog who is about to lay down somewhere- standing in one spot turning in circles. the fateful day dawned, and i headed to CAJ to meet my group. the support staff has all the food, maps, and random stuff (whistle, compass, knife, rope, etc.) and we had to go through a checklist with every kid to make sure they had everything. the kids were trying to cover the fact that they were nervous, wondering if they knew what they had gotten themselves in to, and i wondered if they could see through my facade as well as i could see through theirs.

I was the leader. i was to provide...basically everything that i imagine a father would have to provide. i was in charge of giving them the information they would need to survive. i had to recognize their percieved limits and safely push them past what they believed themselves capable of. i had to be trustworthy- they had to trust me; to obey me without always understanding why. i had to direct their thinking certain ways at critical points so they would learn the most they could from this experience, rather than just completing it. i had to model every kind of positive behavior that i would want them to have. i had to encourage, push, mold, and direct them. i had to be aware of their wants and their needs, and to be able to correctly discern where that line was. and, of course, all these things come from loving them with the love of Christ, love that believes that they are worth it. it all hit me when i walked on campus and heard one of the kids replying to a friend, "i got ryan as my leader": i was not ready for this.

All that to say, i think all of us were wondering what we had gotten ourselves in to.





a shot of the team looking all fresh and showered (except me. i didn't shower at all for the preceding week so i would feel more at one with the mountains)
Back: Laura, Marian, Mrs. Polischuck (assistant leader), me, Yuta
Front: Yuri, Michelle, Corey, Tim, and Eric.











Moving on: all the groups pretty much take the same trains out from the city, and once we get out far enough, one group gets off at each station. we narrowly avoided disaster on the way there- i told the team to get on a train, and just before it left, i noticed like 3 other groups still out on the platform, waiting for the next train. a quick double-check later and i was holding the door open with my foot and yelling at the kids to get off. i think the kids were worried about foreshadowing at that point.






After hiking a few hours and a delicious lunch of ham and cheese on corn rolls, we came to the entire reason i had made this route in the first place. it just seemed like it'd be fun to go up a rock face, you know? it wasn't too steep or anything, but it was a challenge, and had a great view from the top.






















At this point, after hiking with this team for only a matter of hours, i was very excited about spending the next few days with them. in the climbing picture above you can see one of the guys (yuta soda) has just put on one of the girls' packs. he had gotten to the top already, and he dropped his pack there and went back down to help the slowest people up. this kind of thing became more commonplace as the hours wore into days, instead of becoming more rare as i would have expected. at lunch i had talked to them about the difference between a group (anyone can be in a group) and a team, which supports eachother, and cares about the other members. they were such great kids, i think they would have served eachother anyways.

We made camp fairly early that night, about 45 minutes before the sun went down. it was just enough light to make camp, show them how to tie up their rain fly's in case it rained during the night (which it did), and get a fire going. we had some strange/delicious miso-pork soup stuff, and baked apples with cinnamon&sugar for dessert. the apples are a surprise dessert thing, so the leader has to carry them. those things weigh a TON, and there was no way i was carrying them for one more minute than i had to. besides, i wasn't sure if we'd get a fire going again on another night :D . we spent some time around the fire talking and singing a little, but once it started to rain in earnest i sent them to their bags, where they promptly konked out. it was probably...8pm at that point, but since i had the only watch, i let them think it was midnight.








the sun set, and thusly the first day of stress camp came to a downy, smoky close. spirits were high, which is usually an ominous omen of misery to come...

Alive'd!

more to come after I recuperate

STRESS CAMP!

it's everyone's favorite time of year again!! OH BOY!! by this time tomorrow i plan on being totally passed out in my sleeping bag somewhere in the woods. i totally sleep so well out there. i have a group of 8 kids, 1 or 2 of which i know fairly well, and the rest i at least know the names and faces. it helps that i sub a lot of classes on campus so i get to know them that way. one big thing that will be different this year is that i am the leader. and by leader i mean the weight of responsibility sits squarely, and almost exclusively, on my shoulders. i do have an assistant leader, but i'm actually almost as worried about her as i am the kids. i went out last year with her son shaun. he was a real trooper, and she's a great lady, but she's never done anything more than tailgate-camping, and stress camp is not camping. when i made it to my meeting with the head-of-stress-camp guy, i asked him what my route would be, at least in generalities. he told me that it was entirely up to me, but he'd like me to run it by him first. so, i figured out a route that we should be able to do. for those of you who have hiked much in the "backcountry" of japan, we'll be starting at shomaru station; it's a hike that i've done with my family many times that involves hiking up a mountainside that's steep enough that they've (whoever "they" is) installed these burly chains to help you get up. it's either a really easy rock climb or a really steep hike. but that's what we're starting with. the good Lord alone knows what will come after.


and, in the contined spirit of me posting cool picutres, here's one from JAM today. this is one of my leaders, a really cool guy named josiah pettit. he's a superhero.