We can do hard things.

I constantly talk to my students about perseverance and doing hard things, but sometimes on these trips there comes a point where things are just so overwhelming that hitchhiking home starts to sound like a good plan. 

Every time we pulled over those first couple of days, we’d open the door to the camper and it was like the camper ghost, Catherine (Marcus’ concoction), had had another tantrum and threw things across the room, pulled doors off hinges, and yanked drawers from their homes. 

Part of the problem was that the spice rack bungie cord (you have one of those, right?) no longer contained any bungie. As Jason said, “It’s like eight year old underwear. No more elastic.” This resulted in all of the spices jumping ship every time we hit a bump, which in Colorado was constantly. In fact there were miles of interstate where we couldn’t drink, read, or even think because we were bouncing, not driving down the road. Needless to say, the combination of jostling, jumping, and lack of support, led to the camper floor being covered in a variety of fragrant spices no less than three times. Much like a sandy beach, but a spicy camper floor. Sweeping everything up the first couple of times was annoying but by the fourth time, I’d had it. I grabbed that underwear waistband, yanked it tight, and tied a new knot. Okay. One problem solved. 

While the spice thing was annoying, it wasn’t actually a problem. Not compared to say the fender rubbing on the tires, the splitting tire tread, broken drawer (the face had pulled away from one of the sides), or the other drawer that somehow had thrown one of it’s guide rails and hung precariously out of its resting place marring the adjacent cabinet door and eventually ripping it from it’s hinge. The kitchen was where Catherine really did her finest work. 

These things just kept appearing like little gifts the longer we bumped down the highway. We managed to modify the fender and swap out the cracking tire with the spare early in the day. But when we finally arrived at our stop, I just needed a dang minute to regroup. Especially after seeing that the spare tire was now a husk of its former self and we were cruising on just three tires. I struggled into my damp swimsuit and tromped to the pool barefoot over the crushed gravel ready to physically and mentally cool down in the pool. I’m not sure if I screamed aloud or just in my head when I was met with a padlock, but I am certain that my hair stood on end while fire shot out of my ears. Grabbing my flip flops from the camper I set off for a walk instead, but not before being informed that in addition to the kitchen carnage and the catastrophic tire failure, the water pump not longer worked. Sometimes you just have to remove yourself from a situation. And so I did. 

Eventually we replaced the door’s hinges, reattached the drawer slide, screwed the other drawer back together, reattached the drawer brace, somehow got the water pump working again, and got five brand new, super fancy tires.

Like most things, after a few days of space, not everything was as horrible as it at first seemed in those first couple of days. For instance, we saw an enormous dam up close in Black Canyon of the Gunnison and heard the roar of the milky blue river from atop the canyon walls. Marcus started using the phrase, “That’s where cowboys stand,” to denote any tall overlook where a lone cowboy on a horse might stand. We got to wind through the breathtakingly beautiful Rocky Mountains with their snow capped peaks, colorful striations, and otherworldly formations. We even got to soak some of our stress away in a hot springs pool that was cradled in a majestic canyon with views of said snow capped mountains, in Ouray, CO. 

During those moments of sheer joy, I was reminded that hard things are all about perception and our response to that perception. I let the challenges take over. To be sure, the beginning of the trip was not all sunshine and rainbows. But neither is reality. We survived. We solved the problems. It got better. Yes, it started out really hard and I wanted to catch a flight back home. But I didn’t because I can do hard things. Especially with these hooligans I call my family.