All-Natural Nightmare, Part 6

“Did you realize…that you’re a champion in their eyes?”

Groggily I realized that I wasn’t dead.  More surprising still, awakening to international douchebag Kanye West’s voice on my alarm clock meant I had fallen asleep at some point in the night.  I sprung out of the tent.  It wasn’t yet light out.  The sky resembled a backlit canopy which had been viciously attacked by a holepunch. 

I spent a moment pondering life, the universe and everything.  We survived.  Mortality had been considered and our lives examined as they flashed before our eyes.  Being lost, dehydrated, then hypothermic and exposed hadn’t cost us anything permanent. 

Contrarily, it provided a gift which seems permanent.  Contemplating one’s life in movies always ends with some clown finding religion or regretting actions both undertaken and unachieved.  I never felt that way, I realized.  I doubt my companions did either.  I went into this experience as a convicted lover of science and the world around me, proud of what I’ve accomplished and knowing I’ve screwed up quite potently on multiple occasions.  Lying awake listening to my potential cause of death arcing across the sky invited me to question those characteristics, but didn’t compel me to change my mind.

I kept on pondering this while cooking breakfast and breaking down the tent.  I pondered it while we set out at dawn for base camp.  I continued doing so during our inconsiderately steep ascents and descents throughout the afternoon.  Did I really have that tv moment wherein everything makes sense and everything is messed up all at once?  When we reach base camp and hugged and laughed and yelled and limped to the store to buy ice cream, I was certain I had. 

So as we reach the conclusion to this story, one which was inevitable because, duh, I wrote it, so I must have survived, it becomes time to do conclusion-ey things.  Typically this is the time and place for broad, sweeping generalizations.  What was learned here?  How does one turn a weekend away into easily digestible facts and nuggets to put into print and feel good about?  Live your life such that if you’re trapped in a tent in a lightning storm with your friends, that you emerge from that tent as the same person.  There is no more rewarding experience than performing a potentially last-minute soul search and discovering that it’s been there all along, and that you’re totally satisfied with the product.