Table of Contents: Click on the Story/Student to Read

Abashnag by Carter Kratkiewicz…..
Setting Up the Tent by Sam Goodnow……
Lost! by Caleb Chew……
Alexa by Nathan Hillsgrove……
The Food! Will It Ever End? by Jonathan Chernoch……
Singing After See-Farry by Bella Iacaboni.....
Emo Piper by Piper Harrod…..
Nadya by Nikolai Syssoev…..
Hoshi by Sterling Kelly……
Margaret by Ben Dale……
The Water Crew Disaster by Aidan Cyr……
Chewonki Sculptures by Gwen Ream……
The Gulch by Luke Chapdelaine……
Gamila by Ben Gambuzza……
Canoeing by Emi Strazdis…..
S’mores by Naomi Sierra…..
Luca by Abigail McNulty……
Zoey by Sam Dorian……
The Gulch by Jordan Remar……
The Treacherous Climb of the 007 by Katherine Helmer……
Water Crew by Michaela Nickerson……
Asdis by Chase Davenport……
Shawn by Rachel Guerriero……
Chewonki by Thomas Kilian……
Zoraida by Christian Bradley…...
My First Night as Chewonki by Jacob Slarskey……
Nafritiri by Forrest Pailes……
The Gulch by Jack Templeton……
Hike by Ben Church……
My Seedfolks Chapter by Sophia Hager……
Amelinda by Coby Goodrich……
The First Night by Connor Smith……
Amalaswintha by Dustin Grey……
The Cormorant’s Walk by Anna MacDonald……
Chewonki by Ally Wolski……
Chloe Okyrhoe by Julio Donahoo……
The Gulch by Charlie Gettys……
The Gulch by Haley Brennan……
Anna of Byzantium Influence Essay by William Follett……
Anna Dalassena Essay by Emma Hynes……

Abashnag
By Carter Kratkiewicz

I was getting used to the city I had just moved to, Cleveland. I did not like it at all! Nobody talks to you and there are many people you don't want to talk to. It seemed then very different from India. I was walking with my Dad to our apartment, when I saw it. It was a very strange place for a garden. It was in an abandoned lot filled with trash! I showed my father this. He was as surprised as I was! I asked if we could take a look but he said tomorrow; it was getting late. I think he was scared of the big black man with the pitchfork! There were some nice looking people who were chatting cheerfully.

The next day, we went over and looked at what the people were doing. We saw another Indian man planting strange purple vegetables. He said that they were called eggplant. They didn't look like eggs to me! My father started talking to him while I walked around. I saw so many different kinds of flowers, vegetables, and people! I saw a Vietnamese girl, a black woman, and a white man all gardening and talking. Usually the immigrants don't interact. I found a spot I thought was good sized and decided I would grow there.

At the store I wondered what I was going to get. There were so many choices! I finally decided on potatoes since potatoes are one of my favorite foods. The next day I went to the garden and planted my red potatoes. I wasn't sure how much to water them, but I figured the more the better. So when I watered my potato plants every day, I gave them plenty. It felt like forever until they were ready to harvest, but tomorrow would be the day.

"Hello," I heard someone say right behind me. I spun around. "Oh! I'm sorry! Did I frighten you?'' said a girl about my age. Twelve maybe.

"A little bit. But it's okay. What is your name?" I asked her.

"Jasmine. What is your name?" she asked me.

"Abashnag." I told her. We started talking and I told her I was growing potatoes. She had to go and said she would be back tomorrow with something to plant.

The next day I went down to the garden feeling excited and nervous. As I quickly dug up my first potato, I could tell that something was wrong. They were black! Potatoes are not supposed to be black! I had no idea what had killed them. I was so devastated I started to cry. When Jasmine came, I showed her my potatoes. She told me that she had done research and knew why my potatoes were diseased! I was watering them too much! I was so happy that I had made a new friend who was helping me with my new potatoes. She left to go put skewers in the ground for her morning glories while I started planting new potatoes.

"OOUCH!" I heard someone yell. I looked around and saw a man hunched over holding his hand! I ran over and asked what happened. "I just got bitten by a raccoon! Take my cell phone and call 911! It might have rabies!" he said as he handed me his cell phone with his unhurt hand. I dialed 911 nervously and told them that a man was bitten by a raccoon. They said an ambulance was on the way. Pretty soon the ambulance came and took the man away. That was scary.

The next few days I didn't see Jasmine. I started to water her plants so they wouldn't die (but not too much). I started to see sprouts! The next day Jasmine came and was delighted to see her sprouts.
This time when my potatoes were ready to harvest, they weren't rotten! I felt so proud and good about myself. Next year I might grow flowers.

SETTING UP THE TENT
By Sam Goodnow

One was on the other side of me laughing and crying and the person next to me was laughing so hard he almost fell off the wooden tent platform. Me, I was laughing hysterically so I was dropping stuff and tripping over anything I could see. I knew that if I fell off and hit my arm or my leg that meant one big splinter. I did fall off, but luckily it was not how I just described, that would have been fatal. So laughing and tripping was fun and funny, but the risk of falling off kept me in line. If there was ever a time in your life when you were having the best time and living it up, Chewonki was that and more for me.

So basically how it started was we had the tent bag and Ben dropped it on his foot and Nate started guffawing. Then somehow Nate tripped backwards and then I looked over. I see Nate in a lump in the pine needles laughing and Ben still with the tent bag on his foot laughing along with Nate. If you think that is funny it is only the beginning. Then I helped Ben get the tent out of the bag after the laughter had calmed. We struggled because we could not seem to get and keep ahold of anything we picked up, which of course came with another chuckle. When we finally had the tent lying out we just saw three rolled up pieces of fabric and a bag of poles. I couldn't believe it, ten minutes just to get the stuff out of the bag. Next came setting out the rain fly. Ashley gave us specific instructions not to step on the fabric for the tent. We were tripping, trying to get around it and everyone was laughing and stumbling. It was fun, but by then I could tell in their mind they were saying what a mess this definitely was. Now we almost had the base set up. We had half of the poles set up and then I found out the tent was backwards. So we spent another five minutes turning it around. I fell off the side on to our packs. There went another three minutes of pure laughing. Once we got the rest of the poles in we couldn't believe how slow we were. We where still the only ones setting up. Now I was starting to think that this trip might be a little drag.

The time we were laughing the most was when we were putting on the rain fly. There were four things we had to tie to our tent platform and four things to clip to our tent. So we managed to tie them to the platform after Nate couldn't do it because he was guffawing because Ben had done something funny. So I had to do it for him. Then came the clips. We worked for fifteen minutes trying to get one of them in. Then Emi came walking by. I asked for help with the clips and what do you know, she did each in about five seconds or less. We looked at our masterpiece but there were still some tent poles that we hadn't used. We looked at it for a while the we said "Ohh! So that was what the hooks on the rain fly were for!” So we took the rain fly half off and at this point we were laughing extremely hard and thinking how hopeless we were. Once we had the rain fly on, it was amazing. So much time put in to a thing that was three feet tall and four feet wide. I was glad it stayed standing for the whole time and that it did its job and kept us dry. We were the last ones done, but that was okay because I know we had the most fun.

The first words I heard when we were done with our tent were, "Gather Round the Campfire." And of course we started hollering the Sponge Bob song, "Gather Round the Campfire." I couldn't believe at that moment that we had been in Chewonki for about two hours and had already had the times of our lives. It was only the beginning, I thought to myself and I had learned so much about myself and my friends. It had been the greatest start to school I have ever had and will ever have. That is my great memory of Chewonki and one of the best memories of my life.

LOST!
By Caleb Chew

''Who cooks for you, Who cooks for you, Who cooks for you all!'' Is what I heard as I woke for a third time due to the freezing wind that whipped at my face, because Connor needed air in the tent, so I’d huddle down in my sleeping bag to try to get away from it during a rough first night at Chewonki.

"Hey Caleb, are you awake?" said my tent mate Connor.

''Yeah," I replied, still very tired.

"Well, get off me!" he said angrily.

"Oh sorry," I said, as I looked up and realized that my feet were on his neck and my head was on his feet.
"Connor, do you need to go on a see-far?" I said, just realizing I had to use the bathroom.

" Well, kind of, do you?"

"Yes, so let's go," I said, as I searched around and grabbed my flashlight and headlamp, and Connor grabbed two flashlights and a headlamp. Next we unzipped the tent quietly and Connor stumbled out of the tent. I followed him and zipped it up again.

"Caleb, do you want to leave a flashlight on the tent platform and shine it out towards the woods?" Connor asked.

"Sure, why not. We'll also leave one on the fire pit," I replied. And with that remark our real adventure begins.
Then Connor marched down towards the fire pit to leave the flashlight, as I turned on the one on the tent. "Connor, wait for me at the fire pit," I whispered, trying not to wake anyone up, as I walked down. Connor was waiting with the shovel and bucket in hand.

"Caleb, turn your Headlamp and flashlight on, and let's get going." After about a minute walk I said,
"This spot looks good, but Connor do you think we came too far out from camp?" I asked, getting a little nervous because the moon gleamed through the trees in an eerie way. I couldn't see the flashlight that we left back on the fire pit, and I didn't recognize this part of the woods (even though it was only my third see-far in the first day).

"No it's fine, just find a tree and come back when you're done. Ready? 5,4,3,2,1, and lights off." And that's when my troubles began!

"O.K. Connor, I'm ready," I said as I tried to march my way back through the thick brush that I kept tripping over. My eyes finally adjusted to the darkness when I got back to the waiting spot. To the left there was a slumping pine tree that had a little path towards the waterfront and there were some baby trees to the right of me. Then straight ahead there was a giant pine tree that shrouded my vision to see any further. I had assumed that Connor had gone down the little path so I hid behind a bush to try to scare him, but I soon realized it had been a while and Connor hadn't been seen!

"Connor, are you okay?" I asked into the complete nothingness of the forest ahead. Then I thought to myself should I pursue him further into the forest, or should I head back to gather a search party? And after a long time of arguing with myself, which I never do so you could tell something was wrong, I chose to continue further to try to find him. Later I'd realize that was a very bad decision!

As I looked around and continued further I could see the headlines now, TWO ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOYS LOST IN THE FORESTS OF A YOUTH CAMP IN MAINE! BODIES FOUND CRUSHED UNDER A BROKEN TREE TEN DAYS AFTER THEY WENT MISSING! Just thinking about it made me shudder. Then I realized I was already all the way down at the water front, because the I saw the big rock that had flattened cattails on it and the mud pit and the big broken branch that concealed the spot where we got water. I also recognized the path that went from the 10-foot drop where we entered the waterfront all the way down to the water. "Connor are you down here?" Suddenly, what I thought was an animal, I heard a muffled shout like, “aouhhhhgph...” So, I hunched behind a bush because I heard twigs cracking nearby.

" Caleb, are you still here?"

I jumped up and said "Connor, there you are. I've been searching for you forever. How did you get down here?" I was so glad I wasn't alone anymore because it seemed to get darker and darker by the minute. "Nevermind, let's head back to the Camp now."

When we finally reached the original meeting area I noticed the light. "Hey Conner I think I see a light over there, so lets head that way." After a few steps I noticed that branches started getting in our way and slashing at our faces, and they were getting bigger too.

"Caleb, I don't remember there being this many branches."

"Me neither." I said as we tried to traverse through the rough terrain. "I think I see a light through the bracken that way. Should we press on or try to maneuver around to the other light?" I said as we stopped to decide what to do. I took a second to look around to see that we were about fifty feet to the right of the waterfront, and that I think we had gone too far away because the forest wasn't as open for people to walk through and had a lot of unrecognizable things. Then I realized for the first time we hadn't gotten any closer to the camp looking at the gleaming light of Connor's flashlight on the firepit (I think).

"Caleb why don't we just go back and try to circle back around towards the other light?" Connor asked after a long pause.

"I think we should press on because we know there's a light the way we're going and if we go back we may not be able to see either light. No matter what we can't split up." Then after a tough argument under the shine of the bright full moon in the little clearing on top of the big boulder the decision had been made to press on.
The branches just got thicker and thicker to the point that the only way to walk was to get down on the ground and do an army crawl.

"Great idea to press on Caleb!" Connor said who was now furious.

"Well at least we can still see the light." I said looking up to realize that you couldn't.

"Really? Because I can't see one." "Oh, just be quit and let's get up now, and I knew it! Now that we're up we can see the light, ha!" I said proving that I was right.

"Yeah, well, you should see a light considering that there are four shining at us."

"What? There are not four... oh, well let's just follow the one we were already hunting." Finally after a perilous and tiring journey I saw the woodpile and our fire pit and realized that it was already MORNING when we got back and saw that all the lights were kids' flashlights in their tents. Then after some calming down I realized I had only an HOUR of sleep, and we were off to the barn!

Alexa
By Nate Hillsgrove

I am walking with my mom towards the Gibb Street garden. She is pushing Mr. Myles, her patient that she takes care of during the day. I don’t really want to go. I want to be sitting at home watching television or listening to the radio. But my dad isn’t home and my mom needs to take care of Mr. Myles. We finally get to the garden and I’m bored out of my mind. I am a twelve-year-old girl from London and I moved here a couple years ago. Then I start to think. I might be able to make some friends in the garden. I think it’s a good idea and I try to stop looking like I’m going to drop dead right here on the sidewalk but I’m still a little mad at my mom.
It’s a beautiful sunny day and the garden is pretty crowded. I scan the area briefly and I see a few younger kids about my age. I am disappointed to see that they are all boys other than a Vietnamese girl tending to her lima beans. “I wonder if she speaks English,” I think aloud.

I leave my mom and Mr. Myles at their flower garden and start walking towards the girl. She doesn’t see or hear me as I stroll up behind her. “Hi,” I say and the girl nearly jumps out of her skin. “Great start, Alexa,” I think bitterly.

She whirls around like a tornado. “Why on Earth did you do that for?!” she explodes. “You could have given me a heart attack!!”

I stumble backwards into someone’s lettuce just as the owner of the lettuce screams up the street in his taxi and slams on the brakes. The sound of squealing tires and the scent of burning rubber fill the air. “Oh crud, I’m dead,” I say as I scramble out of the lettuce.

I figure I should probably run because it looks like the lettuce garden just got bombed. A Haitian man steps out of the taxi and starts shouting at me for wrecking his lettuce. All eyes turn to me as I struggle to fight back tears. The man keeps coming and this guy is MAD. Is it my imagination or can anyone else hear his blood boiling?

“Do you know how much that lettuce means to me?” the man asks me as he tries to hold back his anger.

“I’m sorry, really, really sorry!”

I realize that I have seconds before this guy goes insane with anger. With tears streaming down my face, I run as fast as I can out of the garden. I sprint down Gibb Street and hide in an alley.
After what seems like an hour, two figures appear at the entrance to the alley. It’s the Vietnamese girl and a boy that I don’t know. I try to press myself closer to the wall and I squeeze in behind some trashcans. I am clearly having a bad day because the trash cans topple over with a metallic SMASH! This sends the boy and the girl running at me. I try to get up but my skirt is caught under a heavy trashcan. By now, the boy and the girl are standing right in front of me. They roll the trashcan off of my skirt and help me up. I wipe away my tears and calm down by breathing in and out slowly. The girl speaks up and says, “I’m sorry that I scared you and got you in trouble.”

I think for a couple of seconds and ask, “Do either of you know who that man is?”
“Um, yeah, that was my dad,” answers the boy sheepishly. “He gets paid to take our baby lettuce to this restaurant”

“Okay, well I should probably introduce myself. So my name is Alexa and I am twelve,” I say.

“I’m Kim and I am nine,” says the girl.

“I‘m Virgil and I am eleven but will be turning twelve in three months,” says the boy.

“Let’s go back to the garden because I need to water my lima beans,” says Kim.

“I’ll make sure my dad doesn’t bother you,” says Virgil cheerfully. “And there’s a vacant patch of soil next to Kim’s lima beans so you and I can go get some seeds at the store later.”

“That sounds great!” I exclaim happily as we walk out of the alley.

We reach the garden and thank goodness Virgil’s dad isn’t here. My mom and Mr. Myles are nowhere in sight too. “They probably went to get some more seeds,” I reassure myself.

Virgil and I sit down against the wall and wait for my mom to return. We watch people gardening and I start to fall asleep. Then I see my mom and Mr. Myles entering the garden. I jump up and run towards her with Virgil behind me. “Hey mom, can Virgil and I go to the Gardening Warehouse to buy some seeds that I can plant?” I ask.

“Sure honey,” she replies. “Here, take this.”

She hands me a twenty-dollar bill and I say, “Awesome!”

The Gardening Warehouse is three blocks away and it’s almost six o’ clock according to Virgil’s watch so we race to the warehouse. The neon pink sign of the Gardening Warehouse looms above us as we walk through the automatic sliding doors. We head directly to the seeds and bulbs section which takes up about a fourth of the store. We skim the large selection of plants until.... “Leeks!” I exclaim loudly.

“What?” asks Virgil?

“Leeks, that’s what I’m going to grow!” I respond.

“Why?”

“Because the name sounds cool.”

Virgil starts to laugh and I join him. I snatch two bags of leek seeds from the shelf and we run to the garden tool section. I pick out a trowel with flowers on it. Then we run to the checkout counter. We pay the woman at checkout counter and run to the street. By now we’re extremely tired so we walk to the garden.
As we walk I ask, “Virgil, do you like the garden?”

“Yeah sure, but I don’t think other people like it because I always hear people complaining about that they have too much extra crops.”

“I know!” I exclaim as I brainstorm a great idea. “We can have a farmer’s market type thing for the garden so that people can sell their leftover veggies and fruits!”

Virgil glances at his watch. “Oh no!” he yells. “We have to get back to the garden soon or people will start to leave.”

We sprint back to the garden. We tear into the vacant lot that houses the Gibb Street garden and I shout, “May I have your attention please!”

A wave of embarrassment floods over me as all eyes turn to me once more. “Um, I have an idea that you will probably like,” I say nervously as I try not to start mumbling. “I’m sure that most of you have part of your harvest that you are not using, right?”

Almost all of the people’s heads were nodding. “So instead of wasting them, we could set up a market somewhere in town so we can sell the crops or give them to the people that don’t have the money to buy food,” I say with more confidence.

A cheer erupts from the small crowd before me.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I say and I smile. “We can start building stalls tomorrow.”

I see Kim in the crowd. She winks at smiles and me. “Thank you for listening!” I shout and I walk towards my mom. As my mom, Mr. Myles, and I head home, a feeling of exhilaration comes over me and suddenly I can’t wait until tomorrow.

The Food! Will It Ever End?
By Jonathan Chernoch

Chewonki was great and all but there was 1 major thorn in my side. THE FOOD!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The food, unfortunately, mainly consisted of gorp, lukewarm gunk, or a charred and blackened substance that might once have earned the title of food. On a rare occasion we had wraps but supplies were minimal.

The most annoying meal was lunch. And for 1 reason and 1 reason only. GORP!!!! Now on most occasions that would be fine except for the fact that Applewild is a nut free school. So the P becomes a C. Chocolate. And there isn’t a food I’ve come across that’s worse than chocolate. So once I suffer through breakfast I usually don’t eat much until dinner comes a knocking (with an axe in each hand).

The horrible problem with breakfast wasn’t the food itself, but the size of the servings. They were so small that I couldn’t believe we wouldn’t be getting 2nds. We’ll starve, I thought to myself after eating a miniscule lump of cold, grey oatmeal with a few molecules of thick brown maple syrup and brown sugar thrown in.

But one damp, cold, grey (and quite unpleasant, I might add) morning I decided to get up and tromp down through the sea of crisp, dead pine needles and leaves to warm up by the toasty fire. As I warmed up, I learned, to my great delight, that we would be eating scrambled eggs. I crowed with triumph. I would finally get to eat something worthy of the title food. But as I cracked a seeming never-ending supply of eggs, my joy turned to horror as I learned that we would only get to strategically position 1 tiny lump of cheese after everyone had gotten some eggs and had sat down. We would not be eating scrambled eggs, but an evil imposter under the same title. I stood restlessly in line waiting for my miniscule serving of pale yellow, lukewarm ick. As I stood, I watched in utter confusion. How could people even think of eating this stuff? To my greater bewilderment the disgrace to foodkind appeared to be disappearing. At this rate there wouldn’t be any left for me. At last I reached the front of the line. Ashley dished me out some gunk, letting it fall on to my plate with a wet “plop”. I watched my meager lump of cheese do pretty much nothing. I beseeched that poor lump of cheese to melt just the tiniest bit, to make this meal at least somewhat edible. And do you know what it did: NOTHING!!!!!!

But enough about breakfast, let’s talk about dinner. Now dinner usually was either slightly warmer than air temp. (Which wasn’t very warm, thank you very much) or burnt beyond recognition.
The macaroni should have been renamed lukewarm off-white elbow shaped gunk. It was so bland water would have been more flavorful. When Ashley spooned some of the white goop out of the large blackened and charred bowl into my small green one, it looked like the cheese would never come off the bowl even with hours of scrubbing it with dry dead pine needles (yes, pine needles).

But dinner had 1 significant advantage. It was home to the only hemi-demi-semi decent meal (it was also home to probably the worst, but that comes later). BURRITOS!!!!

My burrito was superb but it took so long to actually get it that end of the world had probably come and gone. As I stood rather impatiently in line, the already limited supply of meat and cheese dwindled like tacos on taco day. The line inched forward like a half eaten slug. When I finally reached the front of the line I piled on as much meat and cheese that was possible and devoured it. That night I went to bed (well, sleeping bag if you really wanted to be specific) knowing that there was a %16.7647655490387544 chance that they would feed us something edible tomorrow.

Now this is the part where dinner grows large pointy horns and teeth. The last supper we would ever have to eat at Chewonki they tried to pretend they were feeding us something nice. But it was merely a transparent façade. I actually thought they were going to give us something good, for a while that is. As I prepared my pita pizza, I smeared the sickly red tomato paste on to my pita bread. Then I carefully positioned the small white blocks of cheddar. Then a dash of garlic powder and it was done. Then I sentenced it to charring on the open flame. When it was done, it so blackened that I couldn’t tell whether it was actually pita bread or a charcoal briquette they slipped in while I wasn’t looking.

You would think the food problem would stop when we left Chewonki but oh no. On the way home they stopped to get us ice cream and it was probably some of the best I’ve ever had. But about halfway through I realized that my ice cream was hollow. Oh well at least we got something delicious.

Singing After See-Farry
By Bella Iacaboni

It was the 2nd to last night at Chewonki and me Anna, Abby, Emi, and Rachel all went on a see far in the dark, cold, scary woods. We had just shoved our way too cheesy macaroni down our throats and duffed and scrubbed all of the incredibly goopy nasty dishes, I grabbed the flashlight and we all trembled into the woods. As we walked into the woods paranoia hit me, it hit me hard. I was so anxious to get out because I hate when there is nothing to see but darkness. The darkness increased continuously, making it very hard to see with a single flashlight. We were all next to each other and demonstrated the "Wizard of Oz" walk, which was walking in step together with wide, sideways steps. To the girls, I must have seemed okay, but I was scared. I have seen so many horror movies, that I thought at any moment a Freddy Krueger-like figure was going to jump out and cut me up into little itty bitty pieces. We walked out far enough that if we flashed our flashlights back at camp they might be able to see a tiny little glimpse of it, if anything.

We did double see-fars because we talked the whole time and it was just an excuse to get out of doing chores. We turned out the flashlight and it was so incredibly creepy because we were in an unfamiliar wood. We all did our business and then I was bored, so I blabbered off something random.

"My singing voice is suckish," and then I said, "Pffft."

Abby said, "sing" and I refused. She insisted, "Sing now!" in an angry tone.

So I sang because I felt like it was my only option. I sang "Bottom of the Ocean" by Miley Cyrus, which I love.
"I'll draw a map, connect the dots, but all the memories that I've got, what I'm missing I'll keep reliving." I sang in a medium pitched voice. I knew that I didn't sound good, but they all said I was great so I was thinking in my head that maybe they needed hearing aids!!!

"Now that I just sang, to sing, Abby should sing."

"I can sing Amazing Grace." Abby replied softly. And so she did. On the second verse, Anna, Emi, Rachel and I all joined in. We were all hanging on to the same tree, which must have looked odd. Good thing no one else was there.

"I once was lost, but now I'm found. . ." we sang. We weren't so loud that anyone else could hear us, but it sounded pretty good when we sang together. There was one flashlight on, on the ground so we could barely see each other at this point. After that we all started to walk back and on the way back I started singing "These Four Walls" by Miley Cyrus and Nikolai, who was sitting around the campfire being very childish and jumpy asked, "Who was just singing"?

I replied, "Me, Oh, I'm sorry. Did you puke?"

And he said, "Noooo, you're really good! Will you sing again?"

So I thought maybe he needed hearing aids too! So Nikolai continued to ask me to sing and finally I exclaimed "Not alone" so we all sang around the campfire or all the girls anyway.

After about three or four verses everyone dropped out and it was just me, I ended up singing all alone, but I couldn’t stop quivering for about fifteen minutes after that. I finally felt better about my singing voice and even if I am awful it feels good to know my classmates wouldn’t make fun of me for it.

After that it was almost bedtime so we brushed our teeth and said our goodnights, and we were off too bed but Rachel and I kept singing because I sing when I'm happy. I was singing "Butterfly Fly Away" by Miley Cyrus, it sounds stupid but its not. “Party in the U.S.A” also by Miley Cyrus, "Waking up in Vegas" by Katy Perry, "Face in the Hall" by the Naked Brothers Band and a bunch more. Oh yeah and Rachel sang "Hey there Delilah" by Plain White T's

The next morning Ashley, our friend and instructor woke us up by singing. I don’t know what song it was but she had a great voice. Through out the day all of us continued to sing (especially Sam). So, Chewonki helped me overcome two of my greatest fears, singing in front of large groups of people and heights. So thanks, Chewonki!!!

Emo Piper
By Piper Harrod

Chewonki. There are so many highlights and funny moments, but one stuck out more than all the others…Emo Piper.

It all started the first night. (After we had filled our bellies to the top with delicious burritos, we all joined in telling stories about the bus ride here and how good the G.O.R.P was we ate earlier that day.) (I was sitting wedged between Ben and Ally next to the blazing fire because I was freezing.) Tom, Christian, Aidan and Charlie were sitting directly across from me on the not-so-cool flat bench. Just kidding.

It was monstrously dark out, pitch black really, and we were plotting desperately to avoid cleaning our dishes. Tom took out his cannon DX camera and started taking pictures of everyone in the group. His focus was on that awesome fire at first. It took him a few tries to capture a good picture but the final outcome looked like it should have been on the front of a magazine, maybe National Geographic. (The flame of the fire was bright orange and kindled in the darkness.) Then, suddenly, his attention was on me.

A flash in my face is not my idea of fun, so I positioned myself to give him an evil glare. (I crossed my arms, put my hood on and let my hair fall in my face.) I thought it would scare him off but it just caused him to take even more pictures! Man was I mad. I was so infuriated that I sprung up and stormed over to him and ranted, “What are you taking pictures of?” He yelled, “Emo Piper!”

At first I was completely bewildered and surprised by this antic. I responded by saying, “What’re you talkin’ bout?” (He responded by shoving his camera in my face. It took me a moment to focus my eyes on the brightly lit LCD screen.) What I saw was me angrily staring back looking quite evil. Yikes! I started laughing and everyone else joined in. They all tried to control it so they wouldn’t hurt my feelings, but I just thought it was funny.

There were remarks like “nice picture” and “is that you?” followed by laughter and the occasional snort from Charlie. I couldn’t believe how upset I got at Tom initially. It was true though, he was right. I really did look emo. “Emo” is “Goth speak” for emotional.

Over the course of the next few days at Chewonki this happened more than once. At the dumpster when we were learning about recycling, at lunch when we were eating salami and even in the morning when the last thing I wanted was my picture taken. It still happens today at school but of course he doesn’t have a camera handy. If he did, he would still be looking for the perfect shot.

Don’t get me wrong. It was funny and still is. I enjoy getting a good laugh every once in a while. Chewonki was a great experience and I loved every second of it. Tom and every one else got a good laugh that day at Chewonki…

Nadya
By Nikolai Syssoev

I come to U.S. a long time ago, from Leningrad, after the Soviet Union broke up. I’ve led a good life here, but better in Soviet Union. I think Mikhael Gorbachev is stupid. I had a good life, but he and his stupid ideas make me lose all, country and even husband. My husband died near the end of the war in Afghanistan, a “Vympel” Spetsnaz soldier whose truck was hit by a ruchnoy protivatankoviy granatomyot; or what Americans call an RPG.

I’m not a social person. I’ve never been a social person, at least not here, in America. Back in the Soviet Union, I had a lot of friends and everyone was nice and helped everybody. But here, everyone seems to be shy and no one talks to anyone else, unless they’re good friends. The only person I talk to is Sam. I like Sam. He is Jewish. I always liked Jewish people. He likes to start conversations and it seems that he is always happy.

Perhaps the reason for me being un-social is this: when I first came here, literally in the first weeks that I was here, a teenager who probably watched too many TV programs about the Space Race, ran over to me, hit me over the head with a brick, took my purse, and ran away, calling me a ‘dirty Soviet astronaut’ in the process.
After that situation, I didn’t go out much, and when I did, the only reason was probably to go to the supermarket. When I went out, I never talked, only to ask the cashier an occasional question. Then I met Sam.
I was walking home from my daily run to the supermarket, and I suddenly saw a large shadow right in front of me. Events from my past flashed in front of my eyes. As I was reaching for my husband’s Stechkin, which I always kept in my purse, the shadow must’ve realized what I was doing and said, “Stop.”
I looked up and actually saw his face. He didn’t look at all like a psychopathic killer, so I calmed down, a little bit.

“You are?” I let the question hang.

“I am Sam. You are foreign, correct?”

“How did you know that I am foreign?”

“I guessed. I’ve seen how you act. Definitely not like an ‘experienced’ American. You’re Russian, judging by your accent. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Are you scared of something?”

“That is my personal business.”

“You can tell me. That’s my job. Understanding people.”

He chuckled. I thought about telling him. Maybe I shouldn’t. I thought about it a little more.

I told him what happened.

“Hmm. I know someone who was in a situation like that. Her name is Sae Young.”

“Interesting.”

“She is foreign, like you. Korean, I believe, or maybe Vietnamese.”

It became quiet. Sam looked like he was thinking about something.

“Paradise,” he suddenly muttered under his breath.

“Excuse me?”

“Come with me,” he said, “I know just the right place for you.”

I walked after him, holding my hand in my purse, on my Stechkin, just in case. We went through many blocks, at least a few kilometers. Suddenly, the city’s social status began to decrease rapidly. The streets and even people became dirtier. We turned a corner, into an alley, and my eyes narrowed, my hand closing around the Stechkin in my purse. What was this man named Sam doing? Maybe his name wasn’t even Sam.
But we kept walking, into a narrow walkway that I had not noticed before. It was some kind of vacant lot. No… it was a garden! People were milling around all over the place. There were fences, little walkways of stone, and someone had even put chicken wire to protect his part of garden. Everyone planted something different. One person had cauliflower and eggplants, another had sweet peppers, while a taxi driver, I believe, had baby lettuce that was growing very well.

“This is Sae Young, the woman I told you about,” said Sam, pointing to an Asian –looking woman.
“Hi,” she said shyly and with an accent, waving a frail hand. I just nodded and politely smiled in return.
“Well,” said Sam, “We only have a few spaces left, so you’re lucky. This garden is very high in demand.” He chuckled again. What a merry man.

Sam showed me around the garden, and I met most of the people there. A young boy and his uncle were growing sweet peppers. If I remember correctly, the boy’s name was Gonzalo, but I cannot remember what his uncle’s name was. The only people’s names that I remembered were Gonzalo’s, Sae Young’s (whom I regularly talk to now), of course Sam’s, and a young black boy’s named Royce; who does lots of service for the people of our garden.

After I learned everything about the garden and most of the people there, I thought about which plant I would grow. I decided on beets, so I could make my specialty Russian soup, Borscht.

The weather was cool, with full sun; perfect conditions for growing beets. I grew them because of my Borscht, but also because they were easy to grow (if the soil and weather are right, which they were, in this garden), and in my opinion, delicious.

Everything changed for me. Sam was right. The garden really helped me. I began to feel calmer and much less paranoid. It felt good to say that this was “our” garden. Like Sae Young said, it felt “almost like a family”.
After coming to the garden everyday for a few weeks, I noticed that most of the people there had very bad, old, plastic shovels. It was getting nearer to the winter, so the ground was cold and hard. For the people with old, cracked plastic shovels, it was hard to break the icy ground.

I came with a solution. That night, I went to a wholesale warehouse and bought twenty good, hard, metal tipped shovels. It ended up being a lot of money, but I felt good that I was helping my “family”.
The next morning, I loaded all my shovels into the trunk and backseat of my car and drove them to the garden. The nice black boy named Royce helped me unload the shovels and lean them on the wall of the vacant lot. I had to go to the supermarket to get groceries, so I couldn’t stay.

When I came back, I noticed everyone using the shovels I bought. For the first time in a very long time, I smiled with true happiness.

Hoshi
By Sterling Kelly

I've always been the best at everything I do. If you knew what my name means you could tell that I would have a big reputation to live up to. My name means star, and I have been living up to that name.
I'm a thirteen year-old immigrant from Japan. I don't have many friends, as I am the only immigrant from Japan in my school. They also all think that I am a know-it-all and think that I think that I'm the best at everything. But I don't. It's just that my parents think that I should be the best at everything.
After a while it began to become really depressing, talking to no one all the time. All of the school counselors said that I should enter all the sports I can, but I am already doing all the sports available!
I'm not trying to say I never had any friends. A few years ago, I had at least twenty. But those people weren't real friends, and the friendship we shared turned into hatred towards me because they thought I was the best at everything. This happened to all of my friends but one. His name was Tuan. He was a kid my age from Vietnam and he was very intelligent. Being an Asian immigrant like myself, he could relate to the things that I had to go through. He also had parents with high expectations so he knew how it was to have everyone wanting him to be the best. He was the best friend I could ask for, more of a brother than a friend. Everything was going well in our friendship, until tragedy struck.

One day, while he was coming back from school, he was killed in a car accident. I was completely devastated. When I went to his funeral, I sat in a bush, trying to believe that none of this had actually ever happened. This is when my downward spiral to depression began. I didn't talk to anyone. I did nothing besides be the best at everything like my parents always told me. I began to walk alone for the rest of the daylight hours after school.
One day on one of my lonely walks, I walked past the Gibb Street garden. When I looked over I saw Gonzalo from my school picking beautiful red peppers from a plant in the garden.

"Hi, Gonzalo," I said, straining to be as cheerful as possible.

"Oh, hi Hoshi," he said dropping all of the things that were in his hands to walk over and talk to me.

"What are you doing?" I inquired.

"Just working in my garden, picking peppers and things like that. How 'bout you?"

"I'm just walking around the neighborhood. Is working in the garden fun?"

"Yeah, and you meet a lot of people from around the neighborhood here. You see, over there talking to the built guy working with the tomatoes, that's our third grade teacher Miss Fleck. It goes to show how small our world is."

"This sounds cool. Maybe I could come over here after school. It sure could help use up all the free time I have when I'm done with all of my extracurriculars.”

On that note, I walked off back to my house. I decided to run the idea by my parents. They didn't really care if I did it or not. But we reached an agreement. They said that I could as long as I stayed the best.

The next day, after my extracurriculars, I went to a greenery. I looked for seeds that I could plant. To my surprise, I found Mitsuba, an herb I used to grow in Japan. I also found some gardening tools. I walked to the cashier, paid for the seed packet and the gardening tools, and sort of skipped out of the greenery overflowing with glee, the most I had had in a long time.

When I went to the garden, it was very hard to find a spot. I found a place near one of the corners where a lot of cats stayed. I ended up planting behind an old Korean woman planting some peppers. After a while, when I was beginning to sow the seeds, she noticed me and we broke into conservation (no matter how choppy).

“Hello, little girl. Where you come from?” she said, and I knew she was a recent immigrant.

“I’m an immigrant too. But I’m from Japan.”

“I from Korea.”

“I heard that is a great place. Well, I have to get back to work. Bye!” I said, ending the short conversation. I immediately went back to work. After I put the dirt back over the holes, I watered it to make sure the soil would stay moist. After it was all finished, I went home on my normal walk, only this time, instead of being depressed, I was happy knowing that I had plants to care for and to bring home for food.

During the first few weeks of planting, leaving school and heading to Gibb Street was a little awkward. It messed up my schoolwork because heading to the garden so early deprived me of time to do my schoolwork and to study for tests. I began to get A-‘s instead of A+’s. When I began to continually come home with an A- my parents almost made me unable to go back to the garden, but we made a compromise so that I could still go, but I had to finish my homework and studying first.

Going to the garden so late was very hard and treacherous. But finally after fifty days, the leaves on the Mitsuba plant became a dark green, which signaled that they were ready to harvest. I called Gonzalo over to see my plants.

“Nice plants,” he said. “But what are they?”

“These are Mitsuba plants which are delicious herbs when you harvest them. Hey, you can have some of this to put on food. They are very good seasonings.”

“Oh, thanks Hoshi. I guess you’re nicer than I thought you were.” He turned and walked down the street back to his house.

I walked back to my house carrying my herbs, the happiest I had been in a long time. The reason I went to the garden finally came into fruition, just like my Mitsuba. I had made a friend in Gonzalo.

Margaret
By Ben Dale

"Margaret, get to school," said my dad.

"Ok Dad," I said back.

I don't like going to school, but I have to. I don't have many friends at school. They all think I’m weird ‘cause I’m from Switzerland. I don’t understand why they think I’m weird, but they do. My only friends at school are a Vietnamese girl named Kim and an African American janitor named Wendell.

Wendell and Kim coaxed me into this community garden that Kim started. I don't know why I joined, but it could be that my dad was a farmer back in Switzerland. It could have also been that I just wanted to hang out with my friends, who knows. But now I'm a twelve-year old Swiss girl working on a community garden growing swiss chard. I have been at the garden for two months now and have met a lot of new people.

I started to grow my chard in October. I only grew chard because it's the national vegetable of Switzerland. It took my swiss chard about 55 days to mature, so I started helping around the garden a lot because I didn't have many other things to do. I come from a country that has 7.7 million people in it so I'm used to being around people. I like people. I met a nice boy named Virgil, an African American who asked me where I was from. I didn't answer because I didn't want to tell him I was from Switzerland, but when Kim walked over I felt brave enough to tell him. Than I started to help him water plants and other things like that.

The next time I came back, one of my chard was missing. I was freaking out because I didn't know who had stolen it. Thankfully, when I got home that night my father had it. My dad was so happy that I was growing chard that we got along great for the rest of our lives.

The Water Crew Disaster
By Aidan Cyr

I am sitting by the fire drying and warming myself, reflecting on what had happened this afternoon. In Chewonki there are three crews that you are put in. The three crews are wood crew, cook crew, and water crew. The crews rotate once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In my crew were Charlie, Ally, and Sterling. That afternoon we were the water crew. Of course we had to do it during the lowest tide of any crew in our encampment.

As we gazed out we saw a bunch of egrets on an exposed boulder in the mud. There were the bloodworm fisherman out on the flats with their boats and buckets. It was a dim afternoon and smelled like clam.
Anyway, since there was mud in between us, the water crew, and the lovely salt water, we elected two volunteers to go get the water. Deciding who was going to get the water didn't take long. It was decided that Charlie and I were it [which is weird because we both had short boots and the others had tall boots] but we were just as happy as anyone because we sort of wanted to, well, let's just say we wanted to be boys. For all we cared, we could get dive bombed by five different bees all at once and we would still have fun, I think. Anyway, we got out there and the mud wasn't that bad. It was about two inches deep, so we kept trudging on for about five feet until I started sinking. Being the smart kids we are, we thought if we ran maybe we wouldn't sink.

"There is no harm done in getting dirty," said Charlie.

I said, "Let's just hope we don't get stuck out there and get left for the crows," being the insanely wacky kid I am. That didn't turn out to be such a good idea. Both of Charlie's feet got stuck and my shoe fell off so Charlie and I were somewhat stuck. WHAT DO WE DO NOW? we thought.

By then Sterling and Ally couldn't resist the temptation of going in the quick mud. They only tromped halfway between the safe area and us. At that point we thought we were helpless. I had my right leg in my shoe and my left leg was pulling with a lot of resistance. I was worried that when I broke free I would fall over from the momentum. But then I got my shoe back on and broke free with a "thwuck". I was able to keep my balance. Then Charlie, then Ally and Sterling broke free too, at the same time adding three more "thwucks". We were so relieved!

We reached the water and crouched on a rock trying to stretch out as far as we could to get to the clean water. I almost slipped into the ocean. That would have gotten messy! But I didn't. By that time Charlie and I had gotten far past the borders of being wet. And Ally and Sterling still were squatting on seaweed at the edge of the mud, snickering at us. They brought their friend Ben, A.K.A. Mr. Chuckles. It really wasn't very fun to us. We were the ones who were wet and cold!

Finally we went to tell Bethany, who was our encampment group Chewonki Leader, about the mud and she told us that it was OK if we didn't get any water right then. We already had enough water for hand washing. So we went and helped another group.

We helped the fire crew for a bit, but that got boring. After that I went to go change for the first time in what seemed like years. It was really only two days. Meanwhile Charlie decided not to change, but to sit by the fire to try to dry his socks.

Instead of changing, I went back down the hill to have some messy fun or try out my new skates [shoes] on the mud. To my surprise it worked. I wasn't sinking yet; I was practically running on the mud.
After I had had my fun I decided to go change after all, for good. I put all of my muddy, ragged, wet and stinky clothes into my extra plastic bag that took me forever to find. I tied the red strings on the garbage bag. Then I put it under the platform and sat there for thirty seconds watching the beautiful fiery red and orange sun set behind the trees and listening to the bustling of cormorants out on their little island.

Then I went back to join Charlie. We eventually decided to go exploring to see if we could find any water. This was somewhat successful. We were trying to find a beautiful dry rock that was easy to access. This was not an easy task because there were very few rocks in sight. We could see three to our right and two to our left. The ones to our left were harder to get to, but better chances of having any luck at all. We decided to recruit Ben who had really been helping us even though he was on wood crew. Since Charlie and I had already had our share of wetness, we decided to let Ben do the harder trek and we would have a somewhat leisurely walk to the three rocks we were checking out.

After we had failed that mission we decided to let the tide come in some more. We sat by the burning fire contemplating which poem we should read at that night's campfire.

Chewonki Sculptures
By Gwen Ream

Today we were going to build sculptures. We had to walk a long way before we got to the location where we were going to build our nature sculptures. My legs felt like they were pony legs after hiking from Fitchburg to Groton. We trotted through the woods for fifteen minutes or so and when we got there, they said get right to work.

The place that we went to was so beautiful. It just couldn't register in my mind that this was Chewonki. At school I didn't think that it would be this gorgeous. When you sat down on the ground it was comfy, but there were ants crawling up, down and all around me. There were so many pretty things, like the fact that we were on the ocean. You could smell the saltwater and all the beautiful trees like the red pines. When you look up they were so towering.

I was, of course, going to make the easiest thing ever, so I decided to construct a teepee. And let me tell you, it wasn't that easy trying to get that one stick to stay in place and then let others lean on it. The stick was about six or seven inches long and thicker than my thumb. It took me awhile, but I kept trying my best and sooner or later I got it. There were only about eight sticks in my teepee because it was very, very, very hard to keep it up.

After I was done I had to work on my Chewonki journal. A Chewonki journal is what we got from our teacher and it has all our activities in it and we had to write about our activities.
After I was done, I went and sat with Naomi on the rocks, and a few minutes later Sophie came down too! We had to tell Sophie that she shouldn’t be depressed because she missed her mommy. I did too, but all I wanted to do was make her feel better. We told her that tomorrow was going to go by fast because it was her birthday and we were going to do the gulch, go canoeing, and milk the cows. It was going to be an awesome day and she shouldn't be sad on her birthday.

After we had that talk, we were just talking about how much we loved it here and how it was so beautiful. One second later Ben Church fell into the water! It was hilarious, but I also felt bad because we weren't back to the campsite till five o’clock or so and it was eight thirty in the morning. But I thought that my legs would fall off because it looked like it would be so cold in thirty-degree water.

So after we had a good laugh or so Miss Caldwell called us up to look at everybody’s sculptures. First we saw Julio's. His was a lean-to, but it had fallen down so that was the end of it. It was unique because I don't know what a lean-to is anyways.

“Next!” Miss Caldwell said. The person who was next was Katherine. She had done an under-the-sea theme and it was really, really unique. I mean, nobody would have thought of an under-the-sea theme. It was just so favorable. She made the sunken ship out of sticks, bark, leaves, and a little piece of lichen and she added all the little details around it like shells.

So after that we went to Ben Church’s. His was a house in the tree. He decided to make that because he wanted to make a house that was in the air. I thought it must have been hard to make it because you had to make all those sticks and nature items stay in the tree.

After that we went to Sophie. She had made a spit, which is a thing that you put chickens on to cook them. Sounds yummy! That was unique too, because I don't think anybody would have thought of that and it is interesting to see that you can actually make that out of sticks.

After that it was my turn. We all know what I made, a poor quality teepee. My heart was racing with fear because I have stage fright and when I get in front of a crowd I get really, extremely nervous. When I presented it, I was humiliated because everybody made something cool and I constructed a horrible teepee.
So moving on. Next we went to Carter's. He made a bark house, and to me that was something that a 1st grader could make. But I shouldn't be talking because I made something just as lame. And Jordan made almost the same exact thing.

After it was Jake's turn, and let me say his was intense! It was a castle with a huge stadium where a princess could sing. It was awesome! I don't know anybody that could make that big of a project in 30 minutes. And nothing fell down! I mean, when you took a look at it, it was like the Jonas Brothers’ concert stadium!
Next we went to Naomi's campsite. Well, not the actual campsite, but she made one out of sticks, leaves, and everything else. It was amazing!! She had all the little details and everything on the campsite.

We only had a few more. Next was Sam's football field. My opinion was it looked like a baseball field more than a football field, but he did a really good job.

After, we went to Coby's boat and I have to say it actually looked like a real boat. I mean, he had all the details, so it was really good. I don't know anybody else that knows more about fish and boats than Coby.
Last but not least, we went to Luke's. He had made a cute little smiley face out of rocks, leaves, and I think some bark. I thought it was adorable, cute, and something that nobody else would have thought of.

We were finally done, but we still had to walk back. We packed up our stuff and left. Before we went to our next activity, we stopped at another campsite and ate gorp. Gorp is made of fritos, cheerios, chocolate chips, pretzels, and raisins. So after we were done eating we were off to our next activity and that was our time making our sculptures.

The Gulch
By Luke Chapdelaine

It's time to get up, I thought to myself. I'm in a tent at Chewonki in Maine. I'm freezing because it's six o'clock in the morning and I'm outside. I'm also very worried because in a couple of hours I will advance across the Gulch.

The Gulch is a rope pulley across a cliff above water. People that have visited Chewonki have said it was really deep and scary.

I got up, got changed and was ready to eat breakfast with my group. I walked to the campfire as my group started it to keep us warm. Unfortunately, breakfast was yogurt, and plain Cheerios without milk. I choose not to have the yogurt, so my Cheerios were very dry. After breakfast we packed up for the Gulch and for the activities after the Gulch. I packed my camera, my rain jacket and my toothbrush.

We started hiking to the Gulch. We stopped at the tree house. The tree house is one of two bathrooms at Chewonki. There we used the bathroom and brushed our teeth. Then we strolled to the Gulch. On our way, my friend, Jordan, and I were debating whose dog was better.

"My dog is better because he is small, white and fluffy," I said.

"My dog is better because he is big and cuddly," said Jordan.

"Your dog is too lazy to play with," I pointed out.

"No, your dog is too wild to sleep with," said Jordan.

"That's a lie! I can sleep with my dog, Percy," I said.

We went on about our dogs all the way to the Gulch. This conversation helped take my mind off the Gulch, and how scared I was. When we got to the Gulch I looked down. Luckily, it wasn't as deep as I thought. Matt, our instructor, explained how to put a harness on and attach them to the carabiner. I observed carefully as six or seven people went across.

Then it was my turn to cross. I was so nervous, I almost didn't proceed. I could not think of anything brave or daring I had done in the past; this was my opportunity. I put on my harness. I was scared like crazy. I attached myself to the carabiner still wondering if I should go across.

Finally, I was walking backwards. One more step and I am off! I took that step and I was hanging by a rope. Frantically, I pulled myself across the Gulch. I heard my group cheering for me, and at this point, I realized I could do it. When I got to the end I was thrilled and proud that I had crossed the Gulch.

GAMILA
By Ben Gambuzza

When you are a twenty-nine year old Israeli nobody respects you. When you are a Muslim Israeli everyone hates you. That's how it is for me. One day I looked out of my apartment window and saw thirteen people out in a garden that they have been cultivating. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be happy all the time. I saw the little Japanese girl that I know from the lobby. I guess her name is Kim?

When I moved to Gibb Street I did not imagine it would be like this. The streets are filled with the joy of people. I do not get it. They know they only have one time on the earth. They have nothing to be happy about. Maybe they are happy 'cause they have family. I once had a family, but they did not care at all about me. My mom's name was Monica, and my father's name was Horus. They died in a car fire in the month of January by slipping on the ice and ramming right into that Ford F150. I could have killed the driver of that automobile. My parents’ little Toyota never stood a chance.

When I think of my parents I think of that garden. The fact that they stepped on me like that goldenrod Leona planted. But once in a while they would treat me well, like watering the goldenrod. But not very often. If they were to plant a garden I do not know what they would plant, but I know it would be a spice or something potent.

That day I decided to go to the store and buy some fresh elephant garlic. While I was at the supermarket I saw some watering cans, too. I looked in my Brazilian pocketbook to check if I had enough money to buy three of them, and I did. Four ninety-five for each watering can. I went to the checkout, paid the cashier, then left to go back to my apartment.

When I got back I noticed that the British woman, named Nora, was the only one in the garden. I said to her, "What are you planting?"

She responded in her very soft-spoken British accent, "Hello Gamila. I am planting hollyhocks and snapdragons". I thought to myself, "The plants looked like poppies to me, but what do I know about it"?
I went into my apartment and unwrapped the elephant garlic, got a shovel from my apartment closet, went down the building stairs, then back to the garden. I went to the gate of the fenced-in garden, opened it with the key I had, and then got my shovel and started digging. While I was there I saw Nora again and she asked me "What are you planting, my dear Gamila?"

I responded, "Elephant garlic. I also bought some watering cans for all of us gardeners.”

She said, "Oh, how nice that is.”

"Dank" (thank you).

I started planting some of the garlic cloves with my little dirt shovel, digging every dirt hole. For every clove of garlic I planted, I filled up my watering can with cold water from the water faucet on the side of the apartment building. It was almost five o'clock, and I had been planting my garlic all day. So I packed up my shovel, watering can, the rest of the garlic, and went into the lobby. But when I started up the stairs I realized I had forgotten to give Nora her watering can. So I went back to the unlocked garden gate and took another watering can to give to her. She accepted it and I went back up the stairs to my apartment where I would rest for the night, and wake up at seven o'clock in the morning to continue my planting.

The next morning I woke up, got dressed, and then went outside with my elephant garlic. When I entered the garden I realized that Nora's hollyhocks were gone. It looked as if someone had pulled them right out of the ground. Who would do such a thing? That day I decided to go to Nora's apartment and ask her if she knew what happened to her plants, or who did it. But when I started into the apartment room I found her crying on her bed. I tried to talk to her to ask what was wrong? She exclaimed: "Why did they have to do it!? Why!?" I was guessing that she knew what happened. I said to her, "Don't give up. You still have your snapdragons and you can plant the hollyhocks again." Now, as for me, I felt happy all of a sudden because I felt like family to Nora. It also felt like Nora was my mother and I was helping her out and giving advice to her. She started to calm down with her crying and thanked me for the advice. After that little glitch, both of us went out in seventy-degree weather and got two blueberry flavored ice creams and we were both happy. (I learned something about that garden, and it is every good friend is like family.)

CANOEING
By Emi Strazdis

We pushed off from the water bank with a startle.

"We are off!" I yelled as we started paddling. We glided across the glossy water with the bone-rattling air rushing to meet our bare faces.

It was the most perfect day for canoeing. The sun was shining, but once in a while a cloud would cover the welcoming sun and make us all cold as stone.

The wind whipped through the trees. The wind made all of the flags on our Chewonki campus look like they were dancing, making them seem like they wanted to just fly away from the pole, way up high in the deep blue sky, just brushed with cotton ball clouds.

I had a quite interesting group. My whole (academic) group was exuberant about canoeing. I was with Dustin and Abby. Now Abby, being the most bubbly and sweet person here combined with Dustin, who is a very big klutz. . . Well, let’s just say it was a very big mess.

We all had trouble coping at first, but then we worked together and were the fastest canoers in our group!
We all had experience at this. . . or so some said. Abby went to a canoeing camp. I go with my family canoe camping every year, and Dustin . . . said he does it for fun!

That is when we wanted to switch positions. I would take the middle, Abby the bow, and Dustin the stern. Dustin said he had experience, but I guess he had NONE!

So there we were, very bummed out, with Dustin steering us all over the place. Mrs. Gregson said that we were not allowed to steer so we just paddled.

As soon as we came over the corner of some water grass we crashed into Caleb’s canoe and got stuck in the grass all in one split second. All because of our amazingly experienced stern.

Once we got to the shore, we were dripping wet and tired. Then we found out that we had to carry our boats up to the shed where they were stored. We tromped up with our canoe and set it down with a thump
I found out that cooperation and teamwork are both important things in working with someone. Also, to believe in people more.

S’mores
By Naomi Sierra

“Ok guys, we’re going to go on a scavenger hunt!” our counselor Matt told us. Immediately after many people shouted “yes!” or “I knew it!” and numerous other things that showed that they were excited, and that they understood what was going on.

A smirk curled up on my face because I understood, too. We were going to find s’more sticks! (For cooking s’mores of course!) We had been asking all week to have s’mores on Sophie’s birthday, and it was her birthday. We were just about to start dinner, so it was a good time to tell us. Matt then told us what we already knew and explained the characteristics of a perfect s’more stick, but we ran off before he could finish.
We sprinted up the rooted trail and soon found ourselves surrounded by almost a circle of trees, looking at a mound of sticks. We dove into the pile and searched every stick. Then, one by one, we ran down the hill, some of us trailing behind, and some of us tripping, back to the campsite.

When we all finished looking, we had to go through inspection; Matt had to check if it was a perfect s’more stick. It had to have a pointy top that was thinner than the bottom, be free of anything extra sticking off, and it had to be about two feet long. If it wasn’t “a perfect s’more stick”, he would send you back into the woods to keep looking. He sent a couple people back… I was one of them.

Once we had all finally found the perfect s’more sticks, we had dinner. It was macaroni! It was delicious. Even though I’ve never made homemade macaroni in the woods, it was the best macaroni I’ve ever had!
Soon after, it was dark, and the only thing lighting the night were the stars, moon, and the cracking fire we all circled around and stared at. It made us all feel comforted, like we were home again. It was really relaxing and I could tell everyone was comfortable. We all laughed, ate our gushy, chocolaty s’mores and sang the “campfire song” song as we stared at the stars.

It was so nice! It was almost like it was a movie. The crackling fire blazing orange and red, reflecting in our shiny, gleaming, happy eyes came to life. Everybody toasting marshmallows having a good time. The stars like glitter falling from the pitch-dark night sky. And even the water was sending a scent to us that was almost cold or stinging, but refreshing; it tingled in my nose. Everyone was probably thinking the same thing by then.

‘Wow. This is so amazing. I’m so glad I came.’

Then Matt surprised us! He took us out to the edge of the marsh and showed us all the constellations! We saw the Little Dipper, the Big Dipper, Draco the Dragon, and even the Milky Way Galaxy! I wanted to shoot to the stars and just float around up there! Then again, there were so many stars there was probably a thick wall of them that would stop me.

When we finally walked back to our tents, dazed from the glowing, fluorescent stars, we got into our sweats, bundled up into our sleeping bags, and Ms.Caldwell started a new chapter in the book she had been reading to us, Things Not Seen by Andrew Clements. I softly started to be lulled to sleep, and the last thing I remember was thinking how lucky I was to be there, and how great that day was.

Luca
By Abigail McNulty

I moved to America when I was seven. Now I'm twelve and my life is so boring. My mother wants me to be whatever I want to be when I grow up, but what my father wants me to be is a completely different story.
He doesn't care about what I want to be. All he wants me to be is a business man (preferably one that makes a lot of money). And then there is what my sister wants to be, which is a lawyer! My dad couldn't be happier (except the fact that my sister is a freshman in college and she is hiding the fact that she actually wants to be a singer and she is really in the drama program at Julliard! My father thinks that my sister is at Harvard Law!). My father is always bragging to people about how perfect my sister is, Clara this, Clara that. It annoys me so much. He doesn't even think to mention me.

My dad doesn't even know that I love art and I never want him to find out, because he would just say, "But remember Son, that will never get you a reasonable career. Being an artist won't make you any money. How about being an accountant or a business consultant?" (in complete Italian of course). I would always get annoyed by the comments that he made on what I did wrong. He thought it was the most horrible thing that my sister wanted to be a singer so she quickly lied her way out of the fight. I thought to myself, there has to be some mistake. He isn't my dad; maybe the stork brought me to the wrong family because I obviously am nothing like them at all!!!

Then one day when I woke up I decided that it was time to get some fresh air. So I went outside trying to think of a new art project that I would start or something to draw. As I was tromping through the leaves I saw a garden in the alleyway by the street. There were only a few people in the garden because it was mid-fall. But there was a girl digging in the garden. She looked about my age and she was Asian. (She kind of looked like she would be nice, I thought to myself). So I built up enough courage and I walked into the garden. The girl didn't look up when I walked in, but an older man did. He was sitting on a bucket that seemed like it had been smeared with dirt on all sides. He got up and walked over to me and said,

"I haven't seen you around here. Are you coming to plant something?"

I looked him in the eyes, like my father had taught me to do and answered him, "I, I, I, I'm just looking" I bet that old guy thought I was pretty shy, but I just didn't want to be put on the spot like that. Then the old man said something under his breath, but I heard the word very clearly. He said "paradise" and just then I looked up at him and I said, "That's exactly how would describe it" and I walked out of the little garden knowing exactly what I was going to draw this afternoon. But first I stopped by the little shop at the end of the block and got some eggplant seeds to plant in the garden tomorrow.

When I got home, I searched the house for the right eggplant seeds that I wanted, the seeds that I always planted in my mom's garden back when I lived in Italy. When the eggplants were ready we would make fried eggplant and it was always exploding with flavor! Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the jar where my mother kept her seeds for her garden. I walked over to it and pulled off the elegant top and looked through the handmade, blown glass jar that my mom loved so much. There they were, the Rosa Bianca seeds. I was so happy to see them. They were an old friend that I hadn't seen in what seemed like ages. Just looking at those little seeds in the shape of kidney beans brought back so many memories. As I was holding these seeds I was picturing the shape of the eggplant when it is fully grown and the tints of purple, and streaks of bright clear white. I was remembering the smooth round outer layer of the eggplant, and how it was so round. Then I remembered the picture I was going to draw. So I went upstairs and got to work.

The picture I wanted to draw so badly was of my mother showing me how to plant the Rosa Bianca. This memory made me get misty eyes as I was thinking about how my grandmother was the one other person in that very clear memory. She had passed away when I was seven years old and she was the best grandmother you could probably ever have. She knew that I wanted to be an artist and she supported the idea very much, and when she passed away it was like I lost a part of myself. My mom tried to cheer me up by planting the eggplant that I loved, but it didn't work. I just wanted to see her face again, but I knew I wouldn't be able to do that ever again. Then I stopped the water works before my mom would see and I started to draw.

The very next day I went to the garden with my head held high, ready to face that old guy and say that I did have something to plant, and I was going to plant it right now. But when I turned the corner to where the easygoing garden had been there was a big party! I didn't understand, but then I noticed that this was just a cookout with all the people from the garden. They were gathered around a campfire and there was a grill to the right of the get-together that had a delicious aroma coming off of it. I looked at the grill and noticed that they were making grilled chicken and steak and a few other meats that I didn't recognize. I walked to the little patio and found the old man I had talked to earlier. He was sitting in an Adirondack chair against the brick wall. He looked up at me as I walked closer. Then to my surprise he smiled at me and then got up to walk towards me. I never really realized that Americans could be so nice because I usually kept to myself when I encountered people I didn't know, unless they talked to me. (Usually they were surprised that I had an Italian accent when their accents were very amusing to listen to). Once the old man walked to me he said,
"Did you bring something exuberant to plant, son? I was surprised by your choice of a plant; I'd never thought to plant Rosa Bianca before. Partly because I don't know how and I could never find the seeds." It took me by surprise when he called me son and that he saw the seeds in my hand and knew exactly what they were even when my thumb had been over the label. I answered him and said,

"I got them in Italy and we still haven't planted them so I thought I would," I said to him bravely.
"Well, that seems like a good idea, son. Say, I was just wondering if you would teach me how to plant them. I wanted to know how to plant those seeds along with many others for a very long time."

"I would be happy to teach you how to plant the Rosa Bianca seeds. It was one of my favorite things to do when I was little."

So that night I taught Mr. Sam how to plant Rosa Bianca and he had the time of his life. Even though he was old he seemed like a little kid again. Mr. Sam planted pumpkins in his little section of the garden and they were as big as a person. Well, maybe not that big, but these pumpkins were very, very big. As I walked home from the party I stopped at the little market and bought some eggplant and brought it home for later, when I would make fried eggplant.

When I woke up the next morning, I smelled the sweet smell of fried eggplant. Wait, fried eggplant! Oh no, my mom was making the eggplant that I was going to make to bring down to the garden, darn it. I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen and there was my mom making the fried eggplant just as I had predicted. So I sprang into action.

"Mama, what are you doing? I bought the eggplant to make fried eggplant for the garden party!"

"I know, Luca. You were telling me all about it last night when you got home, but you were really sleepy so I don't know if you remember or not. You wanted somebody to make fried eggplant for the garden and you were going to bring it to the garden today. So I thought that I would make the fried eggplant for you and you could take it to the garden when I'm done." I was really confused about her story, but I did vaguely remember telling somebody about last night, so I believed her story and got some cereal and had breakfast. When the eggplant was done I brought it over to the garden.

When I got there the garden was back to normal. It was the same way as when I met it for the very first time. When I brought the eggplant into the garden everyone's head sprang up from what they were doing. I walked all the way to the back of the garden and put the fried eggplant on the table, and everyone walked over. When they did I piped up and said,

"I brought this because it's my favorite food ever and it's made out of what I grow in my little patch of the garden, and I thought you guys would enjoy one of the Italian dishes that my mom is really good at making. So dig in!"

As I said this the Asian girl came over and said to me,

"Thank you Luca, this was really nice of you. I'm Kim and I just wanted to say, welcome to the garden." I wasn't sure how she knew my name, but I went with it and she introduced me to everyone in the garden. One boy about my age named Gonzalo was very friendly and he was telling me how he got into the garden, and just then I thought about what he was saying and said,

"This is just like one big happy family!" This was my family and I liked it that way.

Zoey
By Sam Dorian

Hello, I'm Sam's wife. Well, at least I still hope I am. You see yesterday I was at home when I heard a scream. It came from the garden. I rushed over and found Sam lying on the ground. I called the ambulance. It came over right away. I went with him and that's what happened.

I visited Sam today. I sat next to him and asked how he was. He said, "Plant squash," then he fell back. I thought he was just going back to sleep, but I felt his pulse, and there was none. I started bawling my eyes out.

Now I'm going to plant squash for Sam. I went online and found out that summer squash grows fast, so I'm going to grow that. I have to water it everyday or two. Also, it says squash that are small and tender have the best flavor out of them all.

I finally went to the garden today. I couldn't believe all these people were different ethnicities. I lived in London. There were 60,720,708 people there. Our flag was just like the USA's flag; it was red, white, and blue.

This is how I met Sam. I came to Cleveland on my vacation and I went and saw the marvelous garden. Then I saw Sam and it was love at first sight, and I never went back to London again. When I was there I met a girl named Kim. She said she started the garden.

"Ya, right."

But everyone says she did, so apparently she did. She and I always talk. I'm right next to her in the garden. I guess I'm kind of like her new gramma.

I met Kim one day when I saw her getting mugged, and I rushed over, and saved her. Also I met the man who helped Sam. His name was Bobby Joe Jackson. He's really nice because he always helps with the garden. I think I'm going to let him live with me.

The next day I saw the rabid raccoon about to attack someone. I quickly picked up one of my squash and threw it at the raccoon. The man came over and said thanks. I said, "You're welcome." His name is Gonzalo and that's how I met him.

The next day I went to the garden and there was no one there! I was surprised. But they must have heard about the raccoon. I decided to put a stop to the rabid raccoon.

The next day I went to the garden with my shotgun. Everyone was watching me through their windows. The rabid raccoon was eating my squash. He turned around and leapt at me. I pulled the trigger, but it was jammed and the gun smoked out, and then I ran away. I told Bobby-Joe Jackson. He said he would come with me the next time I went, just in case another gun got jammed. I looked out my window and saw all the vegetables were starting to rot. I told Bobby Joe Jackson we had to act fast.

So the next morning Bobby Joe Jackson and I went to kill the raccoon. When we got there, there was no raccoon. I turned around, and saw the raccoon about to jump on Bobby Joe Jackson. I pulled the trigger and a bullet shot out and hit the raccoon. I was a hero! Everybody saw it from their window, and they rushed out to water their plants so they didn't die. That's what happened to me.

THE GULCH
By Jordan Remar

We're walking out to the gulch. Some people are running there, ready to conquer the gulch, and some are nervously walking, looking terrified, dragging their feet. We are on somewhat of a trail with trees sticking up in various places. The sunlight beams down on to the brown leaves, which are being kicked around by my fellow sixth grade classmates. I am excited, but somewhat nervous. I heard that it was really big from the people who had already gone over it. I am really nervous that I won't do it. As we are walking, everyone is talking about the gulch. As we are talking, we start to see an opening in the woods.

Then the question comes up, "Is this the gulch?”

Matt, our camp counselor, says, "Yep!"

As we come to a stop we all look down at the gulch. The gulch is well, just what its name suggests. Someone exclaims, "That's it!?".

I think I speak for everyone when I say that it wasn't as big as we thought. If you went to the middle of the gulch you could unstrap yourself and just jump into the water. Luckily it was high tide so it wasn't as deep down. At high tide it's only about thirty-five feet down. By the pictures, it looked like it was at least two hundred feet deep!

After we all look back up, Matt explains the process of crossing the gulch. First he talks about the carabineer. Then he shows us the harnesses. There is a waist harness and a chest harness. The waist harness you put on like a pair of pants. The chest harness is a little more complicated than the waist harness. You have to do what they call the superman. You stick your arms like superman and then Matt put it on. After that, he shows us the pulley system. After you do the gulch you would send your stuff back on your helmet by a rope. When you go over the gulch you're attached to a rope so if you want to come back someone will pull you back. After Matt finishes explaining, he makes the order of who would go first.

As we are deciding who would go first, Ms. Caldwell goes over to the other side by walking. So we decide that Ben Church would go first and I would go second. There are two ropes attached to you, one leading to Ms. Caldwell on the other side of the gulch and one next to Matt on our side with someone holding it.

After Ben gets strapped in he starts to go. As he goes further, Ms. Caldwell pulls in the rope and Matt lets out some rope. As Ben goes out his feet leave the ground. It is as thrilling as watching a movie. I am relieved that I am not Ben. When he gets to the median of the gulch he lets go and just dangles there, letting the carabineer hold him up. That is a pretty powerful carabineer. Then he starts pulling himself to the other side. As he heaves himself to the other side, I start putting the harness on.

First I put the waist harness on. That is pretty easy but, the chest harness is a lot more challenging. The helmet with the gloves comes across the gulch. When the helmet is all the way across, I take the gloves out and put them on. Then I put the helmet on. It takes a little bit of time to adjust, but I finally get it just right. Then I get nervous when Matt starts to strap me in. My life is in the hands of that carabineer. Before I start, I look across the Gulch. I see the sunlight in patches scattered around on the ground under the pine trees and the leaves reflecting the sunlight.

As I start walking out, it is as stimulating as being chased by someone in a game of tag when you don't know if you're going to get away. Right when you are wondering when you're going to reach the end, your feet just start to dangle. I think that my heart skips a beat. After I pull myself together, I start. Right hand over left hand, over and over again until I finish. The cable is at an angle that at first you go down and then you go up. Right when my friends tell me that I was in the middle I let go! I feel bad for the carabineer for having to hold my whole body in the air, but I guess that's what it's meant to do. As I am dangling about thirty-five feet in the air I finally pushed myself to look down. It looks so much deeper than thirty-five feet.

As I look around, it is amazing how gorgeous it looks EVERYWHERE. The sunlight reflects off the calm water so I can see my distorted reflection from the slightest waves. As I remember that people are waiting to go, I start to pull myself up. Going down is pretty easy, but going up is ten times more challenging than going down. My arms feel as if they are burning. When I finally pull myself over ground again, Ms. Caldwell takes a picture of me with my head hanging down facing her.

When I get to where I can stand up, Ms. Caldwell unstraps me. As I get both the chest and waist harness off, I glance back at what I just crossed. It is hard to keep my balance because I haven’t been on the ground for a while.

As I trample over to the edge, making sure that I don't lose my balance, I look at the other side of the Gulch. As I look over at the other side, I feel a big pat on the back from Ben. It feels good to be on ground again.
As I regain my balance, I go over to the tree that holds up the metal wire. It is a typical big tree with patches of Lichen and uneven pieces of bark covering it. For the rest of the time, I mostly sit on a big fallen tree with broken branches sticking out of it, slanting up slightly, cheering on my other classmates. That was surely the best thing I did at Chewonki.

The Treacherous Climb of The 007
By Katherine Helmer

"And this," Matt, our counselor began, gesturing with his arm to a fairly simple- looking combo of a rock wall and a large cargo net, "is the 007, or The Cargo Net."

I looked at Sophie, my 'climb buddy', who was staring back at me. We silently agreed that The Cargo Net was to be our first step into our 'Creative Challenge Zone', as Matt called it. We listened as Matt explained all the other climbs, how to execute them properly, and what the rules were. My thoughts however, stayed with the 007. Finally, Matt said the magic word, and we all fanned out all over the Barn to the unique and challenging climbs. It was abundantly clear that we all had planned ahead of time.

Sophie and I walked warily towards the 007. The climb stood before us, almost radiating the excitement that we felt, but my excitement diminished slightly. Even up close, it looked barely a few inches taller than I was. Not remotely frightening, in my opinion. The hand/ footrests were colored with light and dark blues, reds, and yellows. These continued up a wall, from the floor almost to a balcony, whose railing was part of where the ropes were tied. The cargo net was on an angle, and the many ropes were held in place by a well-polished beam (as I figured out later) that was almost parallel to the balcony.

You were supposed to climb up the rock wall, and swing your legs over to the cargo net beam, then climb down the cargo net, or do it the other way around. It seemed harmless. Seemed harmless. I looked at Sophie. Sophie volunteered to try it out first. She scaled the rock wall, but then, after sitting on the beam, she couldn't swing her leg over the long beam and onto the cargo net. After persisting tenaciously for about two minutes, she finally resolved to climb down again. After Sophie's experience, my confidence seemed to dissolve. Uh oh. I lowered Sophie down, and offered to, in my opinion, give a shot at the now seemingly impossible task.

I lifted my feet and hands to hoist myself upwards. Confidence timidly seeped back into me as I carried myself past one, two, three sets of footrests. But my confidence fled yet again without further ado when the fourth grip wiggled. And jiggled. And with a tiny squeak, the grip rotated about a half-inch. Though a small amount, it was enough to get my legs vibrating. I looked down at the footrest, which led my eyes down to the floor. YIKES! I must have been up at least 6-8 feet. I saw Ms. Caldwell ramble over to me.

"Keep going!" she encouraged. I seemed to gain new energy from Ms. Caldwell's words, and I ascended the rest of the rock wall.

When I finally got up to the top, I tried swinging my legs over. No luck. From down below I heard a "You can do it!” I smiled and tried again.

Ms. Caldwell called up, "See if you can grab onto the balcony! That way you'll have something to hold onto." I was glad of any advice I could get, so I held on to the balcony, and.........YES! I GOT ONE LEG OVER!
Next came my other leg. I WAS FREE! I quickly descended the cargo net part, and put my feet on solid ground, serenaded by the cheers of Sophie and Ms. Caldwell. As I walked away from The 007, I hardly dared to believe that my feet would ever leave the ground again

Water Crew
By Michaela Nickerson

"FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUDGE!" I blurt as I lurch over the seaweed-encased stones.
The sun's final rays are cascading over the hills. Tonight Piper, Tom, Christian and I are the water crew. Which is why we are schlepping barrels and barrels of this arctic water up to our campsite.

My friend Piper and I are trying desperately to make our way over the treacherous field of slippery rocks and weeds. The water black, and glacially cold, waits, silent as the coming night. We step along the darkened banks as the arctic water laps at our toes threatening to carry us to a sopping and cold future. The seaweed lies dark and unmoving, waiting for boots and sneakers that wander too close.

An explosion of color is reflected on the water's sinister surface. Pink, orange, green, blue, and purple paint a mural above our heads. The images are slightly distorted from the ever-present breeze. Piper plunges the barrel underneath the surface.

As I step over to help her, the seaweed claims me. It seems to occur in slow motion. My feet slide out from underneath me, my body twists and my hands slam down on the slippery stones. As I gasp for air, I begin to laugh and soon others join me. The merry ringing floats over the trees. I wipe my hand on my tan cargo pants. Then I step down, wedging my boot-clad feet in the cracks between each charcoal colored rock and carefully help Piper carry the sloshing vessel up to the rocks. Tom and Christian appear on the boulder that rises above us. We look up and shove the barrel in to their hands. We glare at them, daring them to say no.

After about a minute of our little staring contest they grudgingly take the barrel, which is now merely three quarters full.

But our job is only half done; we still have to select a passage to read before we begin supper. As Tom and Christian heave the last bucket up the rocky slope to the campsite, I follow their path, sidestepping pebble after pebble through the cloud-colored maze. I peek over the top of the hill and see the EQ wanagan where the poem book is stored. I trot over to the EQ and out of the corner of my eye I see Tom and Christian join Piper on the boulder looking out across the water. They are all enjoying some heavy-duty relaxation. I lift the EQ's lid, revealing its contents. I fish through the box, finally catching the plastic bag that encloses the poem books. I place the lid back on the wanagan and return to the inlet. We flip through the book seeing poems so different they could have been written across the world from each other. Finally we come across a poem called "Mountain Stream", and after re-reading it multiple times we have our hearts set on it. I close the book and lay back on the boulder, its surface rough and chilled.

After what seems like an eternity, the cook crew calls. Dinner is finally ready. We each gather our pizza slices and add our toppings. We each set our piece of pizza on the fire until our cheese has melted and our sauce is hot. Like a game of hot potato we juggle our pizza into bowls. Then I open the green book and begin to read.

Asdis
By Chase Davenport

In Iceland, we have many crazy rituals. That's part of why I moved. I get tired of routines very quickly, and my mother reprimands me for it. Trust me, you would want to leave if your father made you go trout-fishing every day from April 1st to September 30th every year. Eventually I had to come up with a scheme to get out of that. And then there are the beer-fests, which are absolutely horrible. I also tried to get out of those, but Father wouldn't have that.

The only thing I really miss from Iceland is the beauty of the landscape, with the exception of my family. Our house was right up against a luscious green mountain with wild strawberries growing all over the place. I used to go out there all day and eat delicious strawberries right by the hill. And if you're sitting there reading this thinking, "How can this be the truth, she's talking about Iceland?", think again. Iceland is actually a very green, vegetative country.

And if you're also thinking how could I pick up the complicated language of English so quickly, I didn't really. I've been here for about 10 years. I left when I was 30 and haven't thought about going back since. That was until I saw the garden.

Every day I take a walk around the block to wake up my systems, and so every day I walk past a rat-infested, vacant, trashy lot. But things have changed lately. One day I walked past the lot and I saw a little Asian girl planting some type of bean that I could not identify behind an old, broken-down refrigerator. I missed my walk for a couple of weeks because I was taking an English class at Ohio State University, and when I came back I saw a beautiful garden with an integrated mix of people, which is good because there’s been a lot of racial tension around here these days.

This garden I saw reminded me of Iceland. It reminded me of the luscious, green mountain with the wild strawberries growing all over the place. It reminded me of sitting against that mountain all day long eating delicious strawberries and enjoying the beautiful day. So I joined.

I decided to grow strawberries, of course. I grew them right next to a man in a straw hat for two reasons. First, the man looked friendly enough for a newcomer like me and second, he was growing sweet peppers, and I knew those didn’t take up a lot of space and/or water. Honestly, don’t ask me how I know that. (I’ll give you a hint; it has to do with rituals. Uggh!)

When I went to my area to plant my seeds, I noticed that the ground was not very fertile, and I honestly don’t know how the heck any of those plants could possibly grow under these circumstances. So, I decided to fertilize the garden.

When I came the next day with the Icelandic fertilizer, I was surprised at how few compliments I got. But as I was walking over to my spot next to the man in the straw hat, I actually got one.

“Hi there!” he said.

"How are you doin'?" I replied.

He told me his name was Curtis and that he appreciated how I brought in the fertilizer for the garden and how we needed it so much. The conversation went on, and he told me about how he got involved in the garden. He said that he was growing tomatoes for his wife, Lateesha. It all started when Lateesha broke up with him in high school. He told me about how he grew them for her back then and still does today.

I’m so glad somebody in my life can talk to me.

And with that, I fertilized the entire garden. While I was coming around I saw some plants that seriously needed the fertilizer. You should see these baby lettuce plants. WOW! You know, not to slam the garden or anything . . .

When I went back over to my spot on the side, I laid out my seeds evenly across the fresh dirt. Looking at those seeds brought back too many memories to count. And suddenly I was back in Iceland, sitting against the luscious, green mountain, eating delicious strawberries in the beautiful sunshine.

Shawn
By Rachel Guerriero

"Shawn? Shawn! Where is that boy?! I I I swear ththat I wwwill kill hhim someday ay ay!" Harry Hart shrieked.

"Hey! You know you sta sta stutter when you yell. Wow, it is annoying." Rosalita Hart criticized

"And embarrassing," added Sara Cain-Hart.

"Hey! No mas habla de tu'!" scolded Rosalita. Rosalita was a beautiful Puerto Rican woman with a short temper and apparently no taste in men, considering her husband, Harry, who was a short, bald, pot-bellied man. And when she's mad she starts yelling in Spanish.

"Um, translation please?" my sister, Sara, said.

"Shut up!" Rosalita shrieked.

I've lived in Cleveland all my life. My parents' parents, a.k.a. my grandparents, came over from London. Sara and I are adopted. About a year ago our family- me, Sara, Chris, Mom and Dad- were driving to the beach when a huge sixteen wheeler came straight at us and Dad slammed on the brakes and the truck kept coming and it was going to hit us and... everything went black. I woke up in Intensive Care with Sara looking down at me with tears in her eyes. Mom and Dad were dead. Chris was dead. Gone. Never coming back. My twin brother... gone. Never coming back. I had a broken arm and mild internal bleeding. Sara got lucky. She got out unscathed. Which is why after the accident Sara was sent into a spiraling depression. No matter how hard I try, I can't shake her out of it. Not that Rosalita and Harry, our foster parents help. At all. Or care. Anyways, let's get back to the present.

"Shut up!" Rosalita shrieked. I was hiding in the alley next to our "house" (more like death row). I decided it was time to get back to reality.

"What's all the hubbub about?" I said after I climbed in the window.

"Yy you.. wha wha wha where... Ack! Just go! I mean, go buy us dinner! We- and by we, I mean Rosie and me," Harry said as Rosalita smiled and giggled, "are going to have some spaghetti."

"Organic pasta! Organic organic organic organic!!!!" Rosalita kindly suggested to Harry.

"Where should I go?" I asked with mock enthusiasm.

"Well," Harry started, "I heard there was a garden down the road. Go see if you can sneak some tomatoes. Oh! And be sure to hit Nature's Market. I need some organic pasta." He said unenthusiastically. Rosalita was a health nut with bad eating habits. She only ate- when she ate- organic foods.

"Low in fat," she had said.

" No sugar," Harry had said.

"No taste," Sara had said.

"All right," I said, summoning up one of my best fake smiles.
~
This is insane, I thought. I'm not afraid of the person that I'm stealing the tomatoes from, who looked more like a gangish body-builder than someone who should be planting tomatoes in a community garden. No, I was afraid that my parents would think badly of me for spiraling into a life of crime and deception.

I reached the garden, after 20 minutes. I got stalled by a few gang members and a drunk or two. And this little girl that wanted the monkey key chain hanging from my mini-backpack. Yeah, uhuh, a little girl stalled me, yeah, ha ha, yuk it up, but you try and get in the way of a six year old who wants something you have. We'll see who's laughing then.

Anyways, I reached the garden and made a mad dash for the shadows near the tomatoes. From there I could make out a wooden sign that said "Lateesha's Tomatoes" with a little white banner hanging from it that read "Just Married! Lateesha + Curtis = Everlasting Love" Ick. The big man that I was guessing was Curtis was standing next to a slender woman that I was guessing was Lateesha and they were admiring these big, round, red, fully grown, mature adult tomatoes that I thought might taste like heaven.

Suddenly, with great disdain, I realized I was salivating. SALIVATING. How gross is that? I reached out to touch one of the heavenly tomatoes and realized with a jolt that the man who I thought was Curtis had disappeared.
Suddenly I was on my stomach, wind knocked out of me. I had a face full of dirt and something sharp was poking in my back.

"Let 'im up, Royce. I got this kid." A voice suddenly spoke from above me.

"Alright, Curtis. Call me if you need me." And just like that the... PITCHFORK?! What nut carries around a pitchfork?! That's not weird.

Anyways the pitchfork was no longer on my back and I could breathe again. A pair of dark, strong hands helped me up, but just like that they tightened and I was trapped.
~
I stared into the face that I think was Curtis's. The face had cold eyes that bored into my very soul. Or at least that's what it felt like.

"Be gentle Curtis!" the woman said. So he was Curtis. Huh.

"So little man, why were you trying to take my tomatoes? I know you were going to take one, so don't try and deny it," Curtis demanded. I tried to talk, but I was tongue-tied. "Well?" Curtis demanded again. The woman strolled over and laid a hand on his enormous biceps.

"Curtis," the woman said quietly, "you're scaring him. Let me talk to him." And just like that Curtis dropped me and the woman took his place. Her hands were warm and smooth, and were firm on my arms. "I'm not going to hurt you. All I want to know is why you were trying to take one of our tomatoes. That’s all I want to know.

"There is no reason to be afraid," the woman said soothingly. My tongue untied itself.

"I was just admiring them. Yeah! That's right! Just admiring them. Ha. Ha ha." I laughed nervously. The woman raised an eyebrow. "Okay, okay. I was going to take one. Just one! Harry told me to come and take one, and I didn't want to but-"

"Wait, who's Harry?" the woman asked.

"My foster parent," I replied.

"So you're in foster care," the woman ventured.

"Yeah. Why?" I questioned.

Curtis and the woman shared a look. The woman put me down gently. She went over to their tomato patch and picked a single tomato from the plant and handed it to me. I stood there, confused, palms open with the tomato in my hands. The woman gently pushed my fingers so they curled around the tomato.

"Do you have a name?" the woman asked kindly.

"What?" I said, dumbfounded by the randomness of the question.

"Do you have a name?" the woman repeated slowly.

"Oh! My name? My name is Shawn," I said.

"Well, Shawn, my name is Lateesha. Do you mind if we walk you home?"
~
I started to back away. "Why?" I asked tentatively.

"Well, the streets are dangerous, and I would like to meet this Harry,” Lateesha said. I stopped backing up, but I didn't let my guard down quite yet. "Oh. I understand. Never go anywhere with strangers, right?" Lateesha said. I nodded. "Well, if I can't walk you home, would you mind coming here tomorrow with this Harry?"

"I don't know. Sure, I guess," I said.

"Well, goodbye. See you tomorrow, Shawn," Lateesha called, as I headed to Nature's Market.
Nature's Market was across the street, and it was a small brick building. Simple. I entered.

"Hi there little fella! You're a little young to be here all alone. Where's you're ma and pa? Are you lost? Should I try and find them for you? Do you have any idea where they might be?" A red-haired girl with lots of freckles had jumped in front of me. She was wearing a blue shirt, covered by the standard yellow apron that Nature's Market employees wear. She was also was wearing faded jeans and had piercing blue eyes.

"Look," I squinted at her nametag, "Mary. I'm fourteen. I can be alone. Now if you could just point me towards the pasta aisle I'll grab what I need, pay, and leave and we'll both live happily ever after," I said, with escalated annoyance. Mary looked hurt.

"Aisle four," she mumbled. After that she just walked off with a pouty face to go sulk somewhere else. I headed for aisle four. I found the pasta and headed for the checkout line. I paid and headed down the street, carrying the pasta in a cloth bag.

"It's better for the environment!" the checkout lady had said.

Pretty soon I reached the apartment we live in, and to my horror I saw ambulances, fire trucks and police cars all parked in front of the smoking building.
~
"Sara," I whispered. I dropped the grocery bag and sprinted to the building. Just when I was about to reach the door, a fireman blocked my way in.

"No one passes," he said firmly.

"My sister's in there!" I yelled at him.

"No one passes." he said again, just as firm.

"Sara!" I shrieked. By then I was sobbing. "Sara!!" I screeched. "Sara," I said, once more, barely a whisper, knowing that it wouldn't make a difference.
~
The fire trucks and ambulances drove off, along with the police cars. I was inside the building holding Sara. Luckily, it had been a very small fire, and no one had been hurt. I didn't care. For ten minutes I had yelled at her to never scare me like that again. Fortunately, despite the fact that I'd dropped the grocery bag and lost the tomato, Rosalita and Harry weren't too mad at me.

The next day I remembered what Lateesha said and approached Harry cautiously. He was at the computer, doing "work". If solitaire was work, then he might have been telling the truth.

"So. Harry," I said casually. "Sorry about how I lost the tomato." Harry grunted in acknowledgement. "Hey!" I said. I snapped, acting like I had just thought of it. "Why don't you come down to the garden with me and we can get another one! What do you say?" I finished.

"Say. if you want to stay in this household you get out of my face and get it yourself," Harry said, still staring at the computer screen, occasionally clicking the mouse. Dang. I thought.
~
I was at the garden. I had told Sara the story about Lateesha and the tomatoes, so she wanted to grow something in the garden, too. So I went to Nature's Market and bought a packet of Morning Glory seeds. Luckily, I didn't run into Mary. I got Morning Glories because they grow fast, and the shorter the time we spend in the garden, the lesser chance of getting caught by Harry and Rosalita. So we headed out to the garden and planted the seeds. Lateesha was there, and she was thrilled to meet Sara. And Sara was thrilled to meet her. And every other day for seven days we came to take care of them. Lateesha helped us to take care of the plants when we weren't there, and she still helped us to take care of them when we were there. We formed a very strong friendship. Since Sara and I go to Nature's Market all the time, we had bought a pack of seeds for just about everyone in the garden. The garden was growing. So were our Morning Glories. Pretty soon, they were fully grown. They were beautiful.

Two years later...

"Come on, Shawn!" Sara whined.

"Yeah Shawn, hurry up!" Lateesha said jokingly. We were in Lateesha and Curtis's house. We had lived there for a while. Lateesha and Curtis adopted us about a year ago. Ever since then, Sara and my lives had gotten a lot better. We were going to the garden to harvest Lateesha's tomatoes. When we got there, a weird sense of deja vu came over me. It was because two years ago, I had met Lateesha and Curtis. It was the 3rd anniversary of when our birth parents died. When we got there, we laid a small Morning Glory on a pebble. I allowed myself a moment of grief, but then I came back to the present and looked forward to my new life ahead of me, as Shawn Cain-Johnson.

Chewonki
By Thomas Kilian

Let me tell you a story. It was the last full day at Chewonki and we were about to go canoeing. I had been canoeing before and had had lots of fun doing it. Little did I know this was going to be the worst canoeing experience ever.

We had just gotten down to the shack, or at least that’s what I’ll call it because in essence, that’s what it was. In the shack there was an assortment of paddles and life jackets.

“Find a life jacket that fits you,” Bethany hollered out to us. “It shouldn’t come above your ears or it’ll slip off and we’ll lose you, and we wouldn’t want that would we?” Once we were all fitted with life jackets we went to go get sized up for paddles. “Should come up to about your nose,” Bethany told us. I promptly got the shortest paddle I could find because my stature obviously demanded it. We then trooped out of the shack laden with paddles and life jackets. “Now, how many of you have been in a canoe before?” Bethany queried. All of us raised our hands. “How many of you have been in the stern before.” A few hands went down. “Now how many of you feel comfortable in the stern?” A couple more hands went down. “O.K, now we have that squared away I’m going to put you into groups.”

Bethany divided us up until she was sure there was one experienced person in the group so we wouldn’t be totally clueless about what we were doing. At the same time Bethany was talking about the groups I was hoping to have a friend in my group so I didn’t have to put up with someone else’s nonsense, which I did a lot.
“Alright then,” Bethany sighed, wiping her hand on her forehead. “Now that we have you in groups we can head over to the boats.”

I headed over to the boats with my fellow group members, Aidan, our stern, and Mitch, our bowman. We slowly started to carry our boat down to the shoreline. After a couple minutes of huffing and puffing we got our boat down to the shoreline. One by one all the boats slipped into the water gracefully. I was conveniently in the middle, the position where you can’t do much but sit. I was cool with that. I didn’t feel like exercising too much considering I was exhausted. We started off fine, going along with a decent amount of control and managing to make our turns without smashing into inanimate objects, until Bethany produced a rubber whale.

“This is the squeaky whale,” she said. “If it gets into your boat you’re it.” So off we went again, this time with much commotion because nobody wanted the whale in their boat. As soon as the whale was in our boat, hell upon earth started.

“Go, go, go!” screamed Aidan. We lurched forward suddenly.

“This isn’t the Olympics, Aidan,” I told him. “We don’t have to paddle so fast!”

It was now more apparent than ever that what Aidan had said back at the shack about being an excellent canoer was truly and utterly false. He had no concept of steering and when Mitch told him to switch paddling sides it would take him a while to grasp the concept of switching sides, causing uneven paddling and making us go completely the wrong way. Having the squeaky whale in our boat just made everything ten times worse. I thought nothing of the whale but Aidan just had to get it into someone’s boat.

“Dude, just let it go,” I told him. “No! We got to get it in another person’s boat. That’s the game!”
He started to paddle like an insane chimpanzee on steroids, and as many of you surely know, speed mixed with pathetic steering is just a recipe for an epic failure.

We were slowly gaining on Bethany’s boat, all be it in the most mentally handicapped line I will ever see in my entire life.

“O.K Mitch, throw,” Aidan directed Mitch. Mitch threw and missed. Ka-joop! The whale fell into the water. It sank and floated back to the surface, bobbing there, almost as if it were laughing. We recovered the whale and Mitch threw again and once again, a miss. And again. And again. And again.

By this time we were about 1,000 yards from the first boat and we were losing ground fast.

“Aidan, if you don’t give it up they’re going to get back to the dock in the time it takes us to get over to the salt marsh where they are right now!” I screamed in a blood curdling voice.

“Nooo, we have to get it into their boat!”

At this point the anger in me boiled over. “Aidan you…….(the next three sentences may not have been appropriate for all ages therefore they have been omitted from this copy. If you would like to see the unedited copy viewer discretion is advised. We will now skip to Aidan’s immediate reaction.)”

He looked a little freaked out. “O.K, O.K, we’ll go,” he finally relented. I breathed a sigh of relief. What I said might have been harsh but hey, it worked and that’s what counts. We were finally coming up to where the other boats were.

“See what happens when we ignore the squeaky whale,” I told Aidan. “We actually get where we want to go.”
We finally reached the rest of the boats, and we all came together to form a large canoe raft. Bethany passed around some fruit, and rambled on about the history of the salt marsh we were floating in that very moment.

“And that’s basically a history of Chewonki’s salt marsh,” finished Bethany, just as I jerked out of my stupor.

“Any questions?” she inquired of us. Nobody raised their hands.

“Alright, we’re about to head back. I’m going to pass around the trash bag one more time and you guys can make changes in seating position.” I immediately rounded on Aidan.

“I’m going to steer,” I declared.

“O.K, we’ll see how you do,” he said skeptically.

“I’ll do fine, I’ll do fine,” I replied. I went to the stern and sat down. I had never steered a canoe before, but I figured I could at least do a better job than Aidan did. We started off, me doing the critical job of steering. It was hard work, but I never stopped paddling for one second and never stopped adjusting my stroke.

Meanwhile, Aidan was dragging his paddle in the water, making things even more difficult. But through all this, I kept going and we made it in one piece to Lower Club to gaze at our campsite. It looked rather insignificant from the boats. Just a few khaki colored tents on wooden platforms. But to me it was like a second home now.

After gazing at our campsite for a little while, we headed back to where we were at the beginning, except in a very angry, disgruntled, exhausted, frustrated kind of mood. But hey, don’t we all have one of those days?

Zoraida
By Christian Bradley

It was a Sunday and I got back home from the Cathedral down Gibbs St. I was thinking about the garden that I passed when I was coming back home.

"Come in here now!" That shout crumbled my deep thoughts and I tried to find where the sound was coming from. I found a crack in my room right above my bed. So I got my purple stepstool out from underneath my maroon bed, put the stool on the bed and looked up into the crack. It was just our neighbors arguing again.
I went to my kitchen and was trying to find where all the snacks are.

"Where are they!?" I yelled to my mom.

"Where's what?” she shouted back at me.

"All the snacks and drinks, where are they?" Trying to bring some sense into that old kook.

"Above the sink to the left in the cabinet." That was my dad.

"Thank you." I always want to find my real parents, but these people had to get me from the foster home which was not that bad really. They would always be like, oh but I saved you from the foster home and oh, you would have died there if we didn't help you. They would never understand. So I got my drinks and snacks and went upstairs and went to go back to my room, but right when I was about to step foot into the room my mom yelled out.

"We are going to the garden tomorrow!"

"Ok" I told her. I went to my room and sat on that nice bed and just sat there and watched T.V.

The next day I went back down to that garden and looked at the plants. Some were wheat, oranges, and other types of fruits and veggies. My mom was talking to some guy in a straw hat while I was going to these nice luscious lima beans. There was a stick in the middle of the plant so the vine can go and wrap around it. I jogged to the plants wondering who it belonged to. Then I heard a cry coming from the other side of the garden. I swung my head and saw a Vietnamese girl over by an old man. Hey, I know that man, his name is Sam. I just saw them arguing over there by a big load of the pumpkins. I could just hear what they were saying.

Sam kept saying, "Hey you don't have to do that though." And the girl would be always changing the subject like, "Well, let’s get over it then." Or "Hey, sorry." So then I really wanted to yell over there and say hey this is supposed to be a quiet garden, but if I did that I would have both of my ears chopped off by my mom. So I went to look at that beautiful tinted purple plant. Then I remembered, eggplant! That gave me the idea to have my own portion of the garden so that I can get away from my parents.

The next day I asked my mom and dad if I could go and work at the garden since it was the summer time.
They said YES! They are finally letting me free from their evil clutches! Right when they said yes, I ran down to the basement and found those eggplant seed packets, stuffed them in my bag and ran out the door on Gibbs St. and to the garden I went. Once I stepped foot in the garden I felt light as a feather and free. Just the smell of the beautiful plants gave me a rush of energy throughout my body. They looked so pretty and bright, especially with the sun gazing down at all of us. This was one of the greatest days of my life. After all the admiring of this garden, I went to go find a spot for the eggplants. I saw three spots to go. One was in a shady corner, one by pumpkins and a barrel, and one was in the middle of the whole garden with the sun directly on that exact spot. I did not know where to go because of what I should do for the plant at all. Maybe I should have researched the plant before I got here.

"Hey!"

"What?" I whispered to myself.

"Hey!" I swung my head around to see the Vietnamese girl I saw the other day.

"Hi," I mumbled back, seeing if she was talking to me.

"Hey, I saw you the other day and I wanted to talk to you."

"Why?"

"Well, I saw that you saw me and Sam arguing and I just well..." she trailed off and ran away back to spot in the garden. How did she know Sam? I tried to find out what I was going to do before the girl showed up. Oh yeah. I was going to the library to research the eggplant.

Once I got to the library I was trying to find how to find a book on it. I looked everywhere. Upstairs, downstairs, everywhere! I just couldn't find it. Then I asked one of the people that worked there and said to look in the computer. Once I actually found the computer I looked up how to grow eggplant. It said that the plant liked sunlight and the plant had to be trimmed everyday. I went back to the garden again and found the same spots that there were earlier. I finally chose the very sunny place that was right in the middle of the garden.

I took a shovel that was right at the entrance of the garden and dug up a little of the ground and put the shovel back and found another tool called a hoe to flatten the land. Then I put the tool back and took the packets out of my bag and ripped a little bit of the packet and took out a couple of seeds and made little holes with my fingers. Then I put three seeds in each hole and covered it back up and watered it a little bit with the watering can that was also by the entrance.

Two months later and the eggplants were looking great. They were this dark purple and the summer had only one more month till the end. I was just getting worried that the new thunderstorm's wind would destroy all the plants in the garden. It was supposed to happen tomorrow the weatherman said with a sad look on his face. In all that thought, I just remembered: I haven't watered my plants today! I rushed quickly to get all the stuff I needed. First I went to the kitchen and got a bottle of water and stuffed it in my bag. Then I went to my mother and said that I was going to the garden to water my plants.

She said, " But wait I want to come with you."

I looked at her with a puzzled look at her. I responded, "Really?"

"Yes, I would love to come with you." That changed everything about what I thought about my mother. I thought she was a crazy old kook, but really she can be a really nice person, I guess.

"I guess you can come." Once we ran down to the garden with all the materials we went right in. The garden made me feel right in my happy world. Then I looked in the right corner of the garden to see that same girl by her lima beans. I went over to her to say hi when I saw my mom coming after me.
"Hey!" I called after the girl. She turned to me, said hi back and went back to her business. Then she finally said it.

"Do you want to be friends?"

I said, "Yes."

The day has come, the last day of summer. Also the day I have to harvest. When I got to the garden it was hectic. Everybody just running around trying to harvest all their crops while I was trying to find my own plant. Scrambling through people I finally found the eggplant. I already got the harvesting tool and a wheelbarrow and got all the eggplants into the wheelbarrow and out of that madness. I took it all and ran up the street and went home and showed my parents all the eggplant. This was the closest I've been with my parents. That was that greatest day of my life.

MY FIRST NIGHT AT CHEWONKI
By Jake Slarskey

Walking down the tree root cluttered forest floor, I whiffed the salty air of the marsh for the first time. It gave me an impression in my mind of the campground even before seeing it. When we arrived at the campsite, I could only pay attention to my surroundings.

Matt, our leader, was demonstrating how to set up the tents by setting up Ms. Caldwell's tent for her and then we would get to try it with our tent groups. We (Carter, Jordan, and I), were trying to build the tent-- what a sight! Setting up the skeleton was fine, but the hard part was keeping the tent standing. To keep the tent standing, someone would have to wrap a bungee cord around the posts, but Jordan could not figure it out so he got mad and called them the ''bungeges''. The putting on of the rain tarp was fine; the claiming of the territory for sleeping bag spots was also fun. Jordan and I stuck Carter in the middle because he wanted to be next to both of us. We put all of our belongings in the tent that we would not need for a little while, but not the backpacks. We could not put our backpacks in the tent because they were dirty and would take up too much space. In the process of building the tent we found windows that unzipped. We received the glory of being the last group to set up the tent.

While I was on the rocks at the edge of the campground looking at the ocean and seeing the glowing reflection of the sun setting on the water, I had an idea. My idea was to explore the rocks of the campground and where they went. Little did I know that I would stumble on such a unique discovery.

I looked to my right and saw a bunch of rocks plunging out of the salt water screaming to me to explore them.
Climbing down from the boulder, I hopped onto the rocks sticking out of the clear water. The rocks were still damp from high tide. As I hopped from rock to rock, there came another boulder. Strolling to the boulder, I saw something sparkling. It caught my eye and made me question, ''What is that?'' I thought to myself. It turned out to be a broken piece of a hermit crab shell that was purple with a faint yellow glare. I examined it for a while without touching it. As my neck started to cramp, I looked up to see if that would help, and saw a path toward the campground. I took the path, and when I was at the end of it, I realized that I was not that far away from the campground. I wasn't even past the border of tents.

I told people about my find and Sam wanted to go and see it. So we got there by the path and not the rocks. Another thing caught my eye, a book that must have fallen in the water. Sam and I scrambled over to see it and what was in it. It was a quote book like the one the class read before every meal at the campground. We decided to bring it back to the campground and show everybody our finding. Then I decided I would go back to where I found the book and try and climb back. It was high tide at that time, and there was one part where there was no place to put my feet and I was worried about falling in the water, but thank goodness I didn't fall in the water. I was back where I had started, at the big boulder and I got to see the sun set over the ocean. It was truly stunning.

The climbing was behind me now, and the campground chores had ensued. That first night I was part of the fire crew. Matt told us how to make and light the fire. We had to gather and cut branches before the fire was made. The path that the group walked down to get to the campground was the one where we would get the branches and twigs for the fire. There was a terrace effect to the path. Branches that had fallen off trees would be the ones to get, so we weren't killing any living trees. We would drag over the fallen down branches to the campground and gather twigs as kindling, and if we were lucky we would be able to find pieces of birch tree bark for the fire in case the fire was dying at night.

The next stage for the fire crew was to cut and saw the branches to an appropriate size to fit under the grill rack layed on top of stones. We would saw the long branches and if they were thick enough or if we found short but thick branches or sticks, we would use the ax on the wood. Matt then showed us how to light the fire and the correct way to hold the match. We could all enjoy the flickering glow of the yellow, red, and orange flames beneath the grill rack as it shed its warmth on us like a charm and gave us a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. This was all made possible thanks to the fire crew’s hard work chopping, cutting, and bending sticks.

I was tired. It had been a long first day and I was getting ready to have dinner. In town earlier, we had all filled our water bottles for the day. I went to the tent to get my water bottle to have with dinner. After dinner it was time for Highs, Lows, and Heroes of the day. That's when we would talk about our highest or favorite part of the day, our lowest or least favorite part of the day, and our hero for the day. The hero for the day was the person who was like Superman to you that day because they helped you through a tough time. I thought I would get my flashlight for that discussion. I strolled toward the tent about five feet away and unzipped the fabric door to get my flashlight. I got it, but it would not turn on, so I put new batteries in it. I screwed and tightened and tightened and screwed the cap back on. I tested it out before leaving the tent and then I saw it, and screamed!!!!!!!!!! A SPIDER!!!!!!!! I heard laughing in the background, then the door was being unzipped and it was only Carter and Jordan coming to see the spider-- my heroes. We looked around the tent for the spider, but could not find it to eradicate it from the tent. I said, ''It must have crawled out of the tent." We went back to the fire area and did our Highs, Lows, and Heroes of the day. I contemplated saying that my low was seeing a spider but I decided not to.

After all the commotion of the spider incident, I was ready to study the inside of my eyelids. Everyone was in his or her tent trying to get to sleep. Ms. Caldwell had announced that she would read us a story to help us drift into the land of gumdrops and roses. At night it was comforting to hear a story being read to us. Hearing the story through the trees made me and my tent mates feel not so creeped out by the darkness of the tent. Carter, Jordan, and I stayed up late talking and around 10:30ish, we thought, Carter and I decided we would play tent baseball. A couple of minutes later I took underwear, balled it up, and used it as the baseball. We used Carter's neck pillow as the bat. I hung his headlamp on the door and my flashlight in the window. The tent was green, just like the "Green Monster" at Fenway Park, but instead of smelling the freshly roasted peanuts, we smelled sweaty old socks. I was the pitcher and Carter was the batter. I stumbled to make a pitch. The underwear baseball flew through the tent right past the crowd (Jordan and my stuffed animal). The ball came hurtling toward the batter who swung and made contact: HOME RUN!!!!!!!!!! The pitcher wound up for the second pitch, but instead of pitching the ball we, (Carter and I) broke down onto our stomachs laughing. The game only lasted one pitch because we were laughing so hard. The rules were that if you hit the ball it was a homerun because in the practice rounds it was hard to hit. There were no bases, just homeruns or strikes. We were laughing hysterically, and then the game was over. We started to talk some more and the next thing we knew it was morning. ''What a night," I mused to myself.

Setting up the tent, exploring the rocks, being a member of the fire crew, discovering a spider, and playing tent baseball are my memories of my first night at Chewonki.

Nafritiri
By Forrest Pailes

I left my house to walk Fred my dog. He was jumping around playfully leaping from one square of the grey sidewalk to the next, then running up to me and licking my hand happily, all the while prancing about comically. Fred was running around the next corner and begging for me to take him off the leash. I decided that I would just for a few minutes. As soon as I released the leash he bolted as fast as he could. I thought he was headed for the fire hydrant, but he passed it and kept running straight on across the road. I started to chase after him but I knew that I would not catch him because he was an English Setter puppy and that is what he was bred to do.

Eventually, I turned a corner panting hard and I saw Fred joyously running in big circles, with a huge tomato in his mouth, an angry gardener pursuing directly behind him. But Fred was just playing with him; he could bolt at any moment if he really wanted the tomato. Also the gardener had to run on the dirt paths while Fred ran straight through people’s gardens ripping all the plants that his little paws stepped on.

“Fred, come!” I called. He trotted over, the tomato still clenched in his slobbering mouth. The man who had been chasing him walked over panting. On closer inspection he was quite large and African American. He looked very strong. I picked up Fred and held him protectively. I apologized to him.

He replied, "That’s fine, just make sure it doesn’t happen again." I put Fred back on his leash. He immediately started to run for the tomato patch, but the leash held him.

The rest of the walk was uneventful; I walked Fred back down the street. He occasionally jumped playfully on me or the occasional stranger.

The next day I went to the general store and used some of my allowance to buy a pack of corn seed, a trowel and a small bag of topsoil.

I knew how to plant corn because back in Egypt my family had a garden and we had corn in it. That’s why I wanted to grow corn because ever since I came to America I had wanted to grow something and feel the soil between my fingers. Now that was almost impossible because most of the area was covered with concrete, and the stuff that wasn’t was used by gangs, or if that wasn’t the case then it was used as a trash can by the surrounding apartments. So I decided that I would grow corn. It might be the only chance I got.

That day I walked down to the garden, Fred playfully nipping at my heels. This time when he saw the garden he just continued running around in circles like he always did, me having to step over the leash every time he did. I walked up to an empty plot. I heard from behind me:

"You new 'roun here?" I turned around to see who asked and answered,

"Yeah."

The lady who was asking the question had a southern accent, and looked African American. She was wearing a straw hat and had dirt all over her face like she had been working all day. It looked like she was tending some sort of tall gold colored plant.

"What are you growing?" I said.

"Just some of this goldenrod here," she answered.

I turned back to the plot of land and started to lump the dirt into rows like I had seen in all of the picture books. Another man walked over to me and started shaking his head mutely, then he bent down on his knees and started to pat my rows into small domes. I was about to protest when a boy a little older than me came over and told me that that was how to plant corn. Once the man had made one of the domes, he stood up. I tried to thank him, but he just started muttering in a weird language that I didn’t know.

I started turning my rows of dirt into the little mounds like the man showed me and I put four or five corn seeds in each one.

That day I went home and told my dad all about the garden. He always gets worried when I go somewhere with a lot of other adults and he isn’t there. This time he just got really excited and asked if I could take him to the garden on Saturday, so I said yes.

That Saturday I showed Dad the garden. I also showed him my little plot of land where I grew my corn like when we were back in Egypt. He seemed pretty happy that I was growing corn, which seemed to be the only thing that he knew how to grow, because all the plants in our apartment seemed to wilt and die when mom was on a trip for work or something.

Within a couple days the whole family was involved with the garden and Mom was telling all of her friends about the garden.

Soon her friends set up patches near ours. They had plots pretty much surrounding our plot. There were people gardening everywhere. Almost all of the plots were used up save a few that were empty.
I was hauling some water from the rain collection bucket one day. Then I realized that if I could get the barrel closer to the garden then everybody wouldn’t have to haul water as much. So I asked the gardeners for some money to buy some of the downspouts that the water barrel used to collect water from rooftops.
The gardeners gave me the money. I walked down to the hardware store to pick up some of the rain gutters. Then I got an even better idea, I could make a side pipe run over our garden and have holes punched in it so the water would flow out from the holes. Of course I would have to have a valve to turn it on and off.
I raced to the hardware store and found the section with downspouts and bought enough for my original idea because I couldn’t use the gardeners’ money for my own purposes.

I ran back clutching the downspouts all the while.

When I got to the garden I detached the downspout which had originally hooked the rain supply into the barrel and attached my extensions to the original downspout. Then I asked a couple of other gardeners to help me move the barrel closer to the garden. Then I put the extensions into the hole that had originally housed the original downspout.

Almost as soon as I was done with the downspout I saw people using it and commenting on how much easier it was that hauling water from the old bucket. I felt proud of my invention. My dad came up behind me while I was listening to what people thought of my modification.

“How do you think up things like these, Nafritiri?” he said quietly.

The Gulch
By Jack Templeton

It's day two at Chewonki, and that's the day we, 6J, hike to the gulch. Now the hike to the gulch is about twenty minutes long. It's an enjoyable hike, except for the fact that you're really nervous about the gulch. One of those people happened to be me.

Okay, so now we had arrived at the gulch. It's not how I pictured it. I was expecting it to be more forest-like on the edges. I also expected it to be narrower and to have no water around or flowing into it. The gulch is about thirty feet deep, and had mud at the bottom because it was low tide. It was about forty feet across. From one end to the other there was a half-inch thick cable. A gigantic clip pulley that was attached to the cable could hold a fully loaded airplane!! Bethany (our Chewonki leader) told us all about the safety equipment which included two harnesses, a helmet and gloves. It sounded super safe, and it was. There were two harnesses, one for your waist, and one for your chest. Then there was your helmet and your sticky gloves so you don't get wire splinters. I loved the sticky gloves! The gloves I wore were yellow, but other gloves were different colors and padded. The harnesses connected when they were on your body. I have done something like this before when I rock climbed, but the gulch was much more intense and higher than rock climbing. You know those carabiners that you can clip onto your backpack? Well, these are bigger, and they have a screw lock on them.

They were cool!

I am pretty sure I was ninth in line to pass over the thick cable of the gulch. In addition to clipping onto the cable, there were two ropes that latch on to you. They were bolted onto a tree on each side of the gulch. Mr. Padgett went first to demonstrate. When you were latched onto the cable you are looking at the sky with the trees looking down at you. The harnesses were holding you up from the depths of the brown, sticky bottom of the gulch.

It was suspenseful with all that gear on. I strode down to the platform of rocks. Bethany buckled me in and I could just hang there over the rock, right near the edge of a thirty-foot drop. It was a weird feeling. It was very nerve-wracking because you had so much tight equipment on you it made you extremely tense.
Then Bethany screamed, "Go cross that gulch!"

I scrambled as fast as my arms could take me, and my arms started to go on auto pilot wanting to get to the opposite side. It was also shocking when at the beginning my legs dangled. I was going pretty fast as I was headed downward.

When I reached the middle I stopped and everyone yelled, "You are in the middle!"

"Wow! This is kind of fun."

It was actually really awesome. The best part was when I hung there without holding on to anything thirty feet above pure mud. It was my favorite two seconds at Chewonki. I ascended upward on the steel cable towards the other side, as I didn't dare look down, but only at the cable and sky. I was also looking back at the people who had not gone yet. It was harder than you would think. It was kind of like rock climbing without the wall. The hardest part was when I was near the end and I was five feet above the ground. It is really steep. Then a kid hauled me up to the ending tree when I was just catching my breath.

"I made it," I said.

HIKE
By Ben Church

Ready for a hike? I am. I love to hike in the White Mountains. So that’s what it was all about for me at Chewonki, our school orientation trip. Our first little hike was going down to Hoyt’s Point, our campsite.
My pack was on my back. My backpack was a new orange backpack. It has lots of pockets and a lot of space inside. I got it couple of years ago. It was pretty heavy. It had all my clothes. I had one flashlight and one headlamp. It fit nice and snug.

We started at the packshed which is the kitchen and food storage. We trekked on the road that went right down to the baseball field; the dirt road was small and rocky. We were all excited about seeing our campsite. There was a run-down shack to our right. We kept on lumbering down the path. I was carrying one tent down the path. Matt, our instructor, warned us,

"Careful going down the path. It is rocky and steep."

Luckily, we had no injuries. Once we got down to the bottom, there was a bridge that was a tight squeeze. We had to be careful because it was rotting wood. We had to go by two's.

We went across the archery field where the turkeys gathered. There was gate at the other side of the field. We had to hold the gate open for the other people flowing past so it would not close on us. This was my favorite part of the trail. The water was on both sides, and it was a steep, rocky trail. No one fell down, luckily. This was the area that was the see-far zone. When you get to the bottom of the hill, there was a very narrow path that had steep sides to the water. We could easily fall down if we were not careful.

After that there were some beautiful pine trees. There was a little clear area where Gwen broadcasted on me. Then we came to the campsite. It was a great trip.

My Seedfolks Chapter
By Sophia Hager

If you are in a family of seven children and one on the way, you kind of have to be tough. My mother does not work, but my dad works at a company called God's Purchase. His company was located in London, England where we used to live, but they moved to the United States about a year ago.

One day while we were having our free time, I noticed a big group of people down in a lot. I got up on my feet and looked closely out the window. All of those people were gardening! There was a big community garden right outside my family's house! The lot was all covered with fresh soil for gardening and all the plants looked really good. I watched all the people planting and watering their plants just like they were their children, just like how my parents take care of us. I had always wanted to be in charge of something like my mom and dad. I ran over to my older sister, Jinger.

"Jinger! Jinger! There are people out there gardening! I want a garden!"

"Jackson, I don't think you'll be able to. Mom and Dad won't let you go out there alone."

I ran over to mom and dad and asked them to let me have a garden. They thought for a while and finally said,
"Yes Jackson!" Since I was only six, my parents let me go. They knew they didn't have to say yes to the twins because they were only four.

The next day, my mom went to the doctor with my dad and Jinger. They left my sister Jill in charge. They told her that I could go out to the garden, but I had to have one of the older kids with me at all times. I was so excited when I heard that! I had lunch and then I asked Jill if I could go out to the garden. A smile ran across her face and she said yes. Jill said she would take me to the garden, but first we had to go to the garden store. My brothers would have to be in charge now so that we didn't have to take the twins. She brushed my hair and we walked out the door.

The garden store was nice and peaceful and smelled like vegetables. I think Jill had been there before because she knew exactly where the seeds were. The rack was at least as tall as Jill and had about a jillion seeds on it. I looked at cucumbers and peppers and poppies and roses. My brother Carl told me once that roses had prickles, so I ignored choosing those. Then, something caught my eye. Orchids! They were purple and pink and white just beautiful!

"Jill! This is what I want to plant! Or-chids." I said, trying to say the word.

"Orchids. That's a great choice, Jackson," Anna said.

We walked up to the counter. As I looked over the counter I saw the biggest orchid sitting in a pot. It was purple, pink, white and yellow and had the hugest petals ever. I felt the excitement bubbling over as I thought of all the great orchids that I could bring home to my father, mother, my two older sisters, my two older brothers and the twins, Magdalene and Joy. Before I knew it, Jill had paid for the seeds and we were in the entrance to the garden. A spot at the back looked at me and said, 'plant your plants here!' I ran over to the spot with Jill running behind me trying to control my excitement. A man was standing near me with a woman.

"Hi. My name is Jackson. Jackson Porter. What's your name?" I said, hoping to get his attention

"I'm Curtis," he kindly said. "Nice to meet you. This is my wife, Lateesha." Then, he leaned down to match my height and told me a secret.

"She was hard to get," he whispered. "Be careful of those women when you're older."

Jill looked around the garden to see if she could find anyone she knew. She didn't see anyone. She dug a hole for my seeds and I put them in. Next the dirt went over the plants like a blanket goes over a little child. A rainstorm fell over the little dirt pile as I watered it, and I felt the day of gardening was done. Jill and I walked home down the lonely streets of the night. The world felt quiet and empty at this time.

The next day, Mom and Dad came home with Jinger. I told her all about my new garden. She was so exited to see the garden that she ran right out to it, with a tired me running behind her, trying to catch up before she got the garden.

When we got there, I saw out of the corner of my eye people digging with their hands. I walked closer to the part of the garden where people were doing that. A girl named Kim told me that their shovels disappeared. She ran away briskly trying to keep up with a little child. I thought about what my mother would say about this. I got Jinger to bring me to the gardening store to buy shovels for the garden. Before we left the garden, Jinger got a count of the people in the garden who wanted a shovel. That count was 35. We saw that the shovels came in packages of 10. We got four packages and had five left over for home or to donate. We didn't have enough time to go back to the garden because the time got away from us and it ended up being seven o'clock when we were through.

The next day, I brought the shovels over to the garden with Jinger. The smiles that arose from the people's faces lit up the whole garden. My heart was lit up too. I felt so good inside.

Amelinda
By Coby Goodrich

In Germany soccer is a big sport. Here in America, to most people soccer is a dumb sport and one that is almost never in sports commercials, never talked about on the radio, and maybe on the news only when something bad happens to a player. Unfortunately I just moved to America. My name is Amelinda. The only reason I moved here was that my friend Ha, which means ocean or river in Vietnamese, offered me a job as a marine biologist (and I needed money) which is the only thing I like more than soccer. I live in Cleveland in this poor town where people seldom talk to you. My house is small and white. I have a hammock in between two trees in my yard. Every afternoon when I don't have work I take a walk.

One afternoon I walked by this garden with people talking and laughing. I wanted to make friends so I decided to go and strike up a conversation. I walked into the garden and chose the nicest person I saw. I chose this oldish man with a straw hat. He immediately was nice to me and treated me just like everyone else.
The next day I went to work. I drove down to Lake Erie to take a look around. The first thing I wanted to do was know the different kinds of fish that lived there. Fish are my favorite animals. I took the canoe off the roof of my car and grabbed some worms and then paddled out onto the lake. Once I was in the middle of the lake, I dumped the worms into the water. After about a minute, a bunch of walleye followed by a few large mouth bass came and ate the worms. I knew there were many more different kinds of fish, but I wanted to get back to my house so I could watch the Germany qualifying game for the World Cup.

On my way back home, I saw the same garden again. This time I wanted to plant something. I've always wanted to plant tulips so I decided to find my own section and plant some tulips. They were red and yellow. While I watched the game, I thought about my tulips and how I could probably sell them. A week later I snipped the biggest ones and sold them for a $1.50.

Every day I went to work, came back, and checked on the garden and every day I made new friends. Life in Cleveland was getting better.

The First Night
By Connor Smith

As soon as we reached the campsite and set up the tents, I saw how small and damp they were. I knew I was in for a rough night, but I couldn’t have imagined what awaited me.

After a lovely dinner of burritos, we crawled into our tents to bed down for the night. Once snuggled warmly in our sleeping bags, we attempted to sleep but to no avail. After we figured out going to sleep would be harder than we thought, Caleb and I decided to talk quietly in our tent. Caleb and I as tent mates were a good match because we are friends and share common interests so we had a lot to talk about. We talked of Star Wars and school. We also imagined what the rest of the trip would be like. Finally after several long discussions we fell asleep, exhausted from the long day and wondering what the future might hold.

Later that night, as one might expect, I woke up to use the bathroom. But when I tried to get up I felt a strange weight on my chest. I looked to see what it was and noticed a pair of feet lying across my chest. I looked to see what it was doing there and noticed something rather peculiar. While sleeping, my tent mate Caleb had turned himself sideways and was lying with his head against the wall and his feet on my chest.

“Caleb, are you awake?” I hissed.

“Wha? Ya?” he mumbled.

“Get Off Me!” and with that I shoved him off myself none too gently.

“Oh sorry,” he mumbled. “Hey Connor, need to take a see-far?” Caleb asked.

“Sure,” I replied. And with that settled we unzipped the tent and crept quietly across the campsite.

When we reached the fire pit, we decided to leave a flashlight shining into the woods like a beacon. We walked into the woods a little bit warily. The woods looked a lot scarier in the dark. I jumped at every little noise—the rustling of leaves, the snapping of a branch made my imagination run wild. I thought to myself, could that be a bear?! Do wolves live around here?! Are those footsteps?! When my mind was on the verge of exploding with anxiety, I exclaimed. “This is far enough!” And with that, Caleb and I selected trees and relieved ourselves. Then it was back to our tents and the warm comforting darkness of sleep.

It must have been an hour or two since my see-far when I woke up shivering. Not even the warmth of my thick sleeping bag was enough to keep the cold out. I tried to go back to sleep, but I was just too uncomfortable.
Finally I decided I wasn’t going to get any sleep until I put something warmer on, so with a great effort I hauled myself out of bed and began searching. I wanted to just put on my warm clothes and go back to bed, but I had forgotten where I had put them. I decided a good place to start looking would be my backpack. I unzipped the tent and crawled out. Then I began frantically tearing through my backpack. The cold night air sent a shiver through my body. Soon my hands became brittle and numb with cold and turned dark blue, but my fleece and hat were nowhere to be found. I crawled back into the tent and searched around there, but all I could find was a flashlight and headlamp from our earlier excursion. I thought about using one to locate my hat or fleece, but decided against it for fear of waking my tentmate Caleb. I got down on all fours to search, but again found everything but what I was looking for! Once I thought I had found it, but upon further examination found it was just a dirty shirt from the day before. I started to worry. Had I dropped it on the hike up? Would I be able to find it again?! These thoughts ran through my head renewing my sense of urgency, but I continued to find nothing but ripe day old clothes and books. After about ten minutes of frantic searching, I gave up and decided to make do without. I could always get Caleb to help me look in the morning. When I put my head on my pillow I felt something sharp poking me in the head. I reached into my pillowcase to see what it was and found out that it was the zipper of my fleece! Then I remembered I had stuffed my pillow with my warm clothes to give it some bulk. After bundling up, I was finally able to get back to sleep.

I got about an hour more sleep before waking up again. Caleb was already awake, but was being nice and letting me sleep.

When we were both really awake we decided to talk because judging from the lighting there was still about an hour or two before we could get out of our tents. We talked about lots of stuff, much as we had done the previous night. After about an hour of talking I realized I was still really tired so I stopped talking and tried to go back to sleep. It was just then that our counselor Ashley came by with the wake- up call.

“Get up!” she said. “We have a big day ahead of us.”

Oh Brother!

Amalaswintha
By Dustin Grey

Back in Oman, it didn’t matter how much money you had or how selfish you were. But here in Cleveland, when you have a lot of money like me, everyone hates you. I was a very rich and successful merchant that fled Oman to escape the drought. When I was younger, my father, Theodoric, said to me before he died years ago, “My daughter, my beautiful Amalaswintha, escape the droughts, leave the mountains, and live a good life in America, but don’t give people any money. You must earn their respect.”

Last year, a garden began to grow in an empty lot down the street. One day, I went and investigated it on my way to work. It was beautiful; it had pumpkins, flowers, lettuce and many other plants.
A girl named Leona said there was an open spot near hers in the garden, so I started to work the dirt. It felt great to be doing something besides being a chef at a five-star restaurant and making thousands of dollars and serving jerks.

I always had two hundred dollars on me at all times, because I’m a filthy rich high-class woman. Some hobos on the street were asking for money and saw me and asked me, too! So I pushed them out of my way to buy some seeds for my garden. Then, I bought my seeds, went back to the garden, and planted and fertilized my alfalfa.

Later, everyone was standing around a man named Sam. Sam was explaining that instead of passing around a hat for donations to the garden for better tools, we should pass around a funnel with tape on the bottom to hold it shut to collect the donations.

I was against this but I put in fifty dollars, and it felt great! Then I bought a canopy to protect us from the rain. The next day, my alfalfa started to sprout, during a rainstorm!

Leona and I became good friends, and a man named Curtis then said, “Your plants are looking mighty good and healthy!”

“So are your tomatoes!” I called back.

Later that night, I bought fertilizer for everyone’s plants. I also gave everyone two hundred dollars, which everyone just put in the donation bin under the canopy.

If this garden hadn’t started last year, I wouldn’t have friends, just my old job as a chef. Because of my money, everyone has great tools, fresh plants, and plenty of vegetables.

I had been in the garden for a week, and finally I met Kim, the founder of the garden. She was nine-year-old Vietnamese girl who planted lima beans. She said that Wendell, the second person in the garden, was growing corn, and taught her to put a ring in the dirt around the base of the plants she’s growing so that water will be trapped in the ring. I thought it was a good idea, so I did it too, and it held in water for the alfalfa.

I went to work and quit my job. I was looking at small shops for sale, and one was cheap, and across from the garden. So I bought it, harvested some alfalfa, and went to work on fixing my new shop.

I had an announcement to make in the garden.

“Everyone listen up! Since I have been in this garden, I have learned a lot. I learned how nice Americans, and all other people are, and how you should give them respect the way they give it to you. So, I have decided to open a shop across the street, and with your permission, will sell all your crops and then give all the money to support the garden. I need a name for the shop. There will be a bin where you can put in ideas, and tomorrow, I will have a person who is a watcher randomly draw the name for the shop. The watcher who will draw the name is Florence.”

The next day, all the names were in and it was time to draw the name for the shop. Everyone was there, and Florence came over and pulled out a name.

“The name of the store is, The Seedfolks Shoppe!” she called to the people in the garden, and an uproar of glee burst out of everyone.

I said, “Now, let the celebration begin!” There was a huge party in the shop, with Buffalo wings from Wendell, crawfish from Amir, and salad from everyone.

In the morning, we harvested our best crops and put them in the store. The customers were already waiting for our first day as shopkeepers.

The Cormorant's Walk
By Anna MacDonald

An ocean of relief flooded over me as I stepped off the treacherous beam, better known at Chewonki as the Cormorant's Walk. The barn erupted with applause, or was that in my head? Either way, I was proud of myself, and my partner Bella was clapping. It wasn't over yet, though. I switched carabiners and walked slowly and carefully across the creaking, old wooden landing at the top of the barn. Once in the safety zone I completely unclipped my carabiners from the awfully uncomfortable harness around my waist. I zipped around the corner, avoiding the odds and ends that filled the loft in the barn, such as stacked chairs and old tables. Rushing down the stairs, it was high fives all around.

It was our second day of Chewonki, and my group, 6G, had all headed out to the barn for some rope climbing.
It was about halfway through the climbing session when my partner Bella and I had stopped to catch our breath. I glanced around. All of our friends were having a great time; we were too.

"You want to grab a quick snack?" I inquired, turning to her.

"Definitely," she answered in a hurry. We were ravenous with hunger as we practically inhaled the flavorful G.O.R.P, better known as trail mix. Washing it down with a long gulp of water, our stomachs were full and our thirsts quenched.

I shifted my helmet, tightening it a little.

"Do you want to go on the Cormorant's Walk?" I somewhat blurted out. This was something I had been pondering since the minute we got in the barn. The Cormorant's Walk is a long beam that stretches across the top of the barn.

"Do you?" She looked a little surprised.

"Umm," I paused for quite a while, "well, I am afraid of heights, but it looks really fun and maybe I could overcome my fear," I said, trying to sound less scared than I actually was.

"Okay, but you're going first," she said, sounding like she had made her final decision.
As my dad would say, I must have looked like a deer in the headlights. I stood stone still and took a big gulp. Come on, do it! Take a big girl pill. It's really no big deal! I thought.

"Okay, sure. I'll go first." I had said it. I was going to do the Cormorant's Walk! "Ashley?" She was our Chewonki leader. I checked with her to see if I had permission to go.

"Whenever you're ready," she told me as I reached the top step. I walked swiftly over to the landing at the top of the beautiful, rustic looking barn. It was full of loud, boisterous, laughing sixth graders. I wished I could have joined them, but right now I had to prove something to myself. As I attached the carabiners to my harness, I was practically shaking. Ashley checked my carabiner to make sure it was secure. I approached the beam which was a good three and a half feet off the platform.

For a moment, all I could do was stare at it. There is no way I can stretch my leg to get on that thing. I told myself. I'm not the type of person that you might call "flexible." Finally after many horrible attempts to climb onto the beam I was up. I stayed low for the first few moments, slowly releasing my choking grip from the pole.

Next I grabbed the rope which attached me to the sturdy metal cable that was keeping me from falling (one of the words we weren't allowed to use in the barn.) As slow as a sloth I stood up, trying desperately not to look down. I could hear a few people cheering me on. One step. Then another. A few more. Before I knew it I was halfway across.

This is when I made the mistake of looking down. A couple of people scattered across the floor cheered me on again. The beam was slowly getting thinner and my confidence was building. Then something struck me. How do I turn around? As I came to the end I stopped dead in my tracks. My heart must have skipped a beat as I shifted my weight. Turning one foot and then another, I realized that it wasn't all that scary.

I went much faster on the way back. When I came to the end, I took a big gulp, and pushing down the "nose knot" which kept me from falling, I crouched down. I pulled the nose knot a little more, clutching the beam at the end. I hopped down.

"Good job, Anna!" Bella called up to me.

I smiled down at her. When I was in the safety zone I unclipped my carabiners and hopped off the step up to the landing. I felt so happy, proud and relieved to have done it. The best part was I had conquered my fear of heights! Now we have to do the gulch...

Chewonki
By Ally Wolski

It was our last day in the middle of the woods with my class 6J, Bethany (our Chewonki leader) and Mr. Padgett, our librarian and a 6th grade advisor. We were having so much fun with all of our friends, out in the fresh air. We were both sad and happy we were leaving, sad because of all the fun we were having and happy because we would get to see our parents and flushing toilets once again.

It was morning, and as I said it was out last day, we had just gotten out of our tent in the cold Maine air, after packing up. We had cereal and yogurt, and as a special treat we had hot chocolate. We completely devoured our food and hot chocolate while sitting next to the now dying out campfire, which turned into hot coals and ash.

We cleaned up but didn't wash anything because we were going to wash it in a few hours at pack out before we left that day. When we were putting the dishes in the netted bags, Bethany shouted "PLATYPI MEETING!!!" we all gathered on the logs that were around the dying coals, in the fire pit, that’s where we sat when we ate. We stomped our feet twice "Platypi, platypi, here we are the platypi."

"Do you guys wanna carry down your packs or the wanagans first?"

Most of us answered packs so packs it was. We all ran and grabbed our packs that we had shoved all of our stuff into earlier that morning right after we woke up. I was having trouble getting my pack on, and so was everybody else. So one person held up the other's bag while that other person got under the bag and their arms in the straps. I was having a hard time getting my hip belt to buckle because my brother had used that backpack before me. He had broken the hip buckle so now the only way that you can get it to stay is if you squeeze it really tight, which I couldn't do.

"Mr. Padgett!" I yelped and as he came over I asked, "Could you squeeze this really tight so it stays?"
"Sure, I'd be happy to." So he did and finally it stayed. We walked over to the rest of the group and as we did my sleeping pad and sleeping bag fell off the front of my pack where they were clipped on.

"Um, Mr. Padgett?" I questioned.

"Yes?" he replied.

"Uh, could you help me, my stuff fell off?"

"Sure," he said. He put my sleeping bag and sleeping pad back on and clipped the strap, tight.

"Thank you," I said.

"Your welcome," he replied.

"Can I have your attention please?!?" Bethany shouted in an English accent. By then my bag was already hurting my shoulders. Bethany continued in her English accent: "I have found an Under Armor shirt, black, and long sleeved. Is it anybody’s?" It was silent.

"I'll take it!" I shouted.

"Okay, here ya go." Bethany walked over and put it in my bag. "Alright, lets get movin!" she yelled.

We started walking towards town, which is the center of Chewonki. We were walking there to drop off our packs at the bike rack. (We started walking down the dark, rocky, and bumpy path.) Ben started singing repeat after me songs from summer camp. Piper and I did the repeating part, but we sang obnoxiously. After a song or two we were out of breath, so we took a break. Ben, Jack, and I didn't make the smartest move ever, we sat down, with our big eighty-pound packs on. Luckily Jack sat on a log so he could get up, and by this time the rest of the group was already walking away.

"Jack, can ya help me up?" Ben questioned.

"Yup." (So Jack gripped Ben’s arm, stood sturdily, and gave a big tug, Ben jumped and the started walking off with me still sitting there struggling to get up.)

"Hello, a little help here!" I shouted to Ben.

"Oops sorry," he said as he jogged back to me. Then he helped me up, I jumped as he pulled.
"Thanks," I said as we ran to the rest of the group.

(As we got to town and out of the woods, there was a big opening in between the trees, and there was a lot of light compared to on the path.) Then right next to us on our left was a gazebo.

"Ooo, Ooo!" Piper shouted anxiously "I wanna go on the gazebo thingy!" So she jumped up on top of it flailing her arms in every direction. Then we all started laughing.

"Okay, come on guys," Mr. Padgett said. So she jumped off and we walked to the right on to (a winding path made out of old discolored planks of wood.) At the end of the plank bridge we ended up at the big porch where we first met when we got dropped off at Chewonki. But we didn't go up the stairs that led to the porch, instead we took as left towards the pack shed where the bus dropped us off a few days earlier.

"Are we almost at the stinking bike rack?" Tom said in his most miserable voice.

"Not quite yet," Mr. Padgett replied.

"Ughaaaaa!" Tom groaned. We turned to the right walked through a parking lot then took another right and we were there. (Tom ran as fast as he could, and threw his bag down, that I'm pretty sure was bigger than him, then jumped on it, and sighed with relief.) Every body else, including me did the same, we all lay there for a few minutes, and dozed off a little bit.

"Alright guys if ya gotta go to the bathroom you remember where the composting toilets are connected to the big porch in the tree house." Everybody but Piper, Ben, and I ran off. We just stood there lined up in front of Mr. Padgett, there was an awkward silence so I said "Hey" making the end a long A, I had been saying that to Mr. Padgett all week to try and get him to say it back, it worked because now he says it all of the time. Then he said it back, just like I did, Ben, and Piper giggled, he had been saying it back to me all week just like me and finally I wanted to know what was up.

"How do you mimic me perfectly every time?" I questioned.

"I'm a singer,” he replied.

"Ooo Ooo, will you sing something?" Ben asked.

"Sure," he said. So he began singing "Ghost" by the "Indigo Girls" When he was done we all applauded.

"I have to go to the bathroom now," Piper said as everybody came rushing back.

"Me too," I said

"Okay, but you two better hurry up," Mr. Padgett said

"Alright," Piper and I said simultaneously and we ran off and I tripped over the first step of the stairs, almost falling flat on my face.

"Pshh, are you okay, Ally?" Piper asked

"Yup," I said and we kept on running.

Chloe Okyrhoe
By Julio Donahoo

Kids call me a super freak. So what if I excel in all my classes? It's the way I was born. You see I'm new here in Cleveland so I don't have many friends except Maricela. I was born in Athens, Greece where I actually felt that I had friends. In Greece most people aren't born as smart as me, but the students don't care if you're smarter than them. Here in America, people hate it if you're smarter than them, especially the boys. In Greece, half of the population practices archery for fun, but all people talk about here is a garden. I thought that a garden was a stupid idea. Until Amir proved me wrong. I met Amir on the way home from my archery session. He was walking on the opposite side of the road, when I saw something fall out of his pocket.

"Excuse me sir, you dropped something on the ground," I said shyly lifting my head so he could see who was talking to him. He nodded his head acknowledging his thanks, but something in my eyes must have told him something was wrong.

"What's wrong, young lady?" he asked me in an Indian accent.

Before I knew what I was saying, I explained to him that I was an immigrant from Greece and my father was a businessman. I told him we had to move here in order for my father to keep his job. I explained to him that people here criticize me because I'm a straight A student. I also told him that in Greece people practiced their archery techniques for fun, and that here in Cleveland all the people here say that they plant in a garden for fun. I told him that I had no friends here besides my high school friend Maricela. Then he asked me a question I wasn't prepared to answer.

"How do you know it's a stupid garden?" he asked me in a tone that sounded like he didn't believe me when I told him I thought the garden was a pretty dumb thing to do for fun.

"I don't know that it is a stupid garden because I never gardened in Greece. When I asked people about the garden they said that that I shouldn't even try because it just plain stupid." I answered back to him although he didn't seem to be listening.

"You shouldn't listen to what most folks say about the garden. The garden is just a place for people to plant and forget their worries for a little while. Folks over in these parts know nothing about the garden."

"How do you know so much about the garden?" I felt silly for asking because he must live in these parts, but he didn't seem to notice.

"I had the same trouble you are having when I moved here. When I start planting in the garden my worries were washed away. I think you need to try gardening and see how you feel after.

"Sir, I need to go now but I'll think about it and if I decide to change my mind will I be able to meet you here in two days?" I asked him.

He nodded his head in reply and we both headed off in different directions. I thought about what he had said and pondered it for a minute. If I actually tried, would I have the same result he had when he did it? As I was pondering this, I heard a shout from above me. There was my father once again standing by the window and yelling for me to come in for supper. I answered him and ran inside straight into Florence.

"Good Lord, Chloe Okyrhoe! Settle down and walk more carefully!" Florence said as she started to get up.
"I'm dearly sorry Florence. I hope you are alright," I said as I helped her onto her feet.

"I'll be fine but mind where you're going next time please," said Florence and with one quick step walked out the door.

I hung up my bow and was about to race upstairs when I remembered what Florence had just told me. I thought otherwise and decided to walk up the stairs. I walked upstairs and there was my father and mother standing in the doorway waiting for me.

"Chloe, dear, we have a surprise for you." There in front of me was a Doberman Pinscher, bred to be a hunter.
"Is it really mine?" I asked in amazement.

"Of course the dog is yours. Now what shall name him?"

"I'll call him........ Abrax Okyrhoe?" Abrax means swift hunter.

"Y-y-you're going to train him to be a hunting dog? How are you going to do it? Who will help you train him?" both my parents said sounding afraid.

"Yes, he will be a hunting dog. I am still thinking about who can help me train him." With that I led Abrax to my room and fell asleep. The next day I woke up and headed to Maricela's house. On the way I stooped and bought Blackberry seeds. I heard they live longer than most plants. Today was one of the days that I hung out with Maricela and talked so I brought along Abrax. On the way to Maricela's, I stood stalk still and looked to my left. There in front on my own eyes was the garden. I didn't realize I lived for 6 months about 25 minutes away from the garden. I started walking into Maricela's building, but my mind wasn't on her. It was on planting blackberries. I walked into Maricela's living room and I saw her writhing in pain.

"What is wrong Maricela?" I asked dropping Abrax's leash and running to her side.

"Hospital," she answered. I could see she was struggling to finish her sentence.

I realized what was happening. She was having her baby. I called the ambulance. They rushed her to the hospital. I knew I should of run home, but instead I sprinted behind the ambulance to the hospital. That's another gift I have that people hate- I can run fast. I didn't even need to stop and catch my breath. I arrived at the hospital and while the paramedics unloaded Maricela, I called my mother. I told her I would be late for dinner. I waited for Maricela's delivery and then I visited her.

"How are you doing?" I asked as I strolled in and sat down beside her.

"I'm fine and thanks for helping me," she answered but it seemed that her mind was elsewhere.

"What's the matter Maricela? Are you hiding something from me?" I knew my only friend well enough to know something was paining her.

"She didn't make it," she said in disbelief.

"Who didn't make it?" I asked looking deeper into her eyes searching for a straight answer.
"The baby didn't make it. You went through all that work for nothing. There wasn't any need to help me out." Maricela started to cry.

"You're being too hard on yourself. I helped you for a good reason. You are my friend," I answered as a nurse came into the room carrying a bundle.

"Ma'am, your baby is alive. The doctor sends his apologies for his mistake and would like you to know your baby is a girl." The nurse gave Maricela a look like she had hoped the baby would die.

"I accept his apology. I am very thankful that my baby lived," Maricela said surprised. She took her baby from the nurse and hugged her to her chest. The nurse nodded and said good-bye and stomped out the door.
I said good-bye to Maricela and headed out. On the way home, I walked by the garden and remembered my blackberry seeds. I walked towards the garden and opened my seeds. That is when I saw Florence watching me.

"He died," she said and took a piece of paper out of her jacket pocket. "He told me to give this to you."

She handed me the paper. It was directions on how to plant blackberries. This is what he wrote: 'Dig a hole three inches down. Take the seeds and plant those 3 feet away from each other. Last dig a circle of dirt around the plants and pour water over them. Cover the water with dirt. Repeat the watering process every four days. PS. Make sure to plant them in the sun with a partial amount of shade.'

I looked up to see what Florence was doing but she wasn't there. I realized she must have walked home to mourn Amir's death. Florence once told me her best friend was from India and suffered a serious concussion and had forgotten who she was. Now I realized Amir was this person. I walked home.

The next morning I woke up and took Abrax with me to the garden. I took my dad's shovel and a bucket of water. When I got to the garden, I took the seeds out and set them on the ground, I took my shovel and dug twenty-five three inch deep holes three feet away from each other. Next I dug circles around the seeds and poured water around them. Last I took the access dirt and covered the circles of water. That is when I heard a deep growl. I looked up and saw people running away from an enormous bobcat. The bobcat had claws as sharp as a knife and teeth nearly 2 ft long. I stood up and saw people barring the gate and watching as I just stood there. I glanced at the bobcat and saw someone else..... Florence. Rage bubbled up inside of me and I dropped my bucket. I rolled up my sleeves and charged the bobcat, shovel in my hand. The bobcat let go of Florence's arm and charged at me. I barely managed to sidestep and roll towards Florence. I pushed her into a wide net of thorn bushes just as the bobcat’s fangs bit into my arm. I used my free hand and swung my shovel into the bobcat's jaw. It let go of my arm and howled in pain, but not because of me but because out of nowhere Abrax clawed his underbelly. I rolled under the bobcat's belly and swung the fatal blow at its stomach just as the bobcats clawed my other arm and I plunged into darkness with Abrax leaning over me.

When I awoke, I was in the emergency room with a bandage on my left arm and stitches down my right arm and hand. I saw Dr. Owen Buckle and my parents. To my left I saw a horrendous sight. Florence was lying unconscious and had stitches all down her left leg and arm. I looked at my own left arm and realized that the bobcat's teeth must have gone down to the bone and there were stitches under my bandage as well.
"Your daughter is awake Mr. and Mrs. Okyrhoe," Dr. Buckle said as he noticed me awake.

My mother and father came over and started talking about how worried they were about how they never wanted me to do that again, even if it meant saving someone's life. Instead, I should go head and train Abrax to be a hunting dog. That would give me more protection. I was appalled to hear my parents say that they thought I hadn't done the right thing. I thought about poor Florence and her stitches. I wondered if she would ever look into daylight again or if she was stuck in the darkness forever. All of a sudden Florence's eyes flickered open and she mouthed four words, "You saved my life." seeing that, I fell asleep overjoyed that she was alive.

The Gulch
By Charlie Gettys

After a long trek out I was sitting between a rock and a tree (as we later would joke between a rock and a hard place quite literally) shivering while looking out at the thirty foot drop down onto rocks covered with seaweed from one of the two tall steep sides. I did not expect to have the nerve to cross the chasm which was what I was staring out at knowing how much I fear heights. Just looking down made me dizzy. I was looking out at what was adeptly named The Gulch by Chewonki staff. I was scared. Really scared. Really, really scared.
The only time I was more scared was when I was a-contained-fire-in-my-house-scared.

Though our Chewonki leader, Bethany had said that the cable all of us would go over could hold a heavy airplane a hundred times, I still had my doubts, especially after she shook the cable and it flew five feet or so to the side. So, I decided to be the second to last to cross. I have always been scared of heights and just looking down made me dizzy and want to sit down. I plopped myself down back between that rock and that tree and waited and watched and shivered from the cold, expecting the cable to break any second and whoever was on the cable to plunge to their gory deaths on the rocks below. But they didn't or I wouldn't be here writing this.

Everyone else beside one person and Bethany, who would not be going over had gone. I had shackled myself in the harnesses and had my helmet and gloves on, though I really didn't see the point in the helmet because if the cable broke you would surely perish anyway. Helmet or no helmet, it was just a matter of time, or so I thought. Still, I was not willing to give up without trying my very best.

My harnesses were secured onto the pulleys, suspending me facing up at the sky. It really isn't too bad I thought. So I tried hanging there, suspended on the cable by the two harnesses. I can do this, I thought. My adrenaline started coursing swiftly through my veins. Then I got the all-clear and started hauling myself along that cable with my head towards the far side, but facing up towards the bright blue sky.

I managed to get halfway and even summoned up the courage to let go for a second and just hang there above that long drop down and admire the view of the sky, though I immediately grabbed for the cable. It was awesome. I clutched at the cable, getting ready to continue across the Gulch.

Then I started yanking myself across the thick steel cable again and made it over The Gulch and on to firm ground by a huge gray boulder. When I was unattached from the cable on the other side, I tugged off my chest harness, then my waist harness with a groan and yanked off my helmet and gloves forcefully, dumping them into Mr. Padgett’s hands to send back to the other side, glad to be back on firm ground. Everyone was happy I made it. In the end I happened to be the last one to cross The Gulch that day. I was ecstatic that I made myself go over the gulch. It was a lot of fun and I would like to cross The Gulch again sometime. I am very proud I crossed The Gulch and I will remember the moment I crossed it as long as I live.

The Gulch
By Haley Brennan

"I can do it," I thought to my self, getting ready to go across the gulch. I knew that the scariest part would be working my self up, like I am doing right now. I started to put all of my equipment on including my hip and chest harness and then my helmet. I looked down and threw a stick into the muck. It sank down to the bottom.
“Ewww!” Emma and I both screeched. The gulch looked like a break in the land, coated in mud. I had just watched Chase go before me so I knew it was safe. I knew I could do it. My stomach started to rumble when Bethany said, "It's your turn, Haley". I gulped and felt extremely nauseous. Bethany secured me up to the cable, I dangled from the wire, above the ground. Suddenly she said,"Let go,” and then I just hung there.

Everyone yelled, "St.Bernard, are you ready?!"

I heard a banging "YES!!".

And then I heard everyone yell, "Chicken rope, are you ready?!"

I heard another banging "YES!!"

Then they yelled, "Haley, are you ready?!" My heart started pounding as I thought to myself, "Here I go", then shouted “YES!!!”

Soon I was zipping across the wire, with my hands behind me one by one moving astonishingly fast.
I looked down, The gulch looked like a giant indent in the Earth. It was low tide at the time, and now the area was covered in mud. I could only imagine falling in the mud, how many showers it would take to get all that mud off. Then I looked up and saw the scenery and was blinded; it was so beautiful with the sun shining bright on the water. It was stunning.

Then my group leader yelled, "Stop, stop! You are at the middle!!" And I was instantly back to reality.
So I stopped and then did the dead cow. (The dead cow is when you yield and put your arms and legs directly up, like a dead cow.) It was almost over. I was overjoyed, but yet a bit depressed it was nearly done. Then I continued to zip across the wire, swiftly and having great fun.

Soon I came to a stop when I saw the big oak tree on the right side of the gulch that held one end of the wire. The tree was one of the biggest trees I had ever seen and I knew I was safe on the wire. I stopped, but then my group leader told me to keep on going. I went up as far as possible and then Chase helped me off of the wire. I took off my helmet and had help taking off my hip harness. My arms were so tired that by the time

Chase was done taking my harness off, I was still unstrapping my helmet.

Then once I was done, it was the next person's turn. I had to hold on to a giant rope and pull the next person over. Once that was done, I helped Charlie get all of his equipment off. I looked through the trees and saw a heron. It was a beautiful white bird. The beautiful bird was grazing on the water with the sun shining bright on the water.

Then I cheered on with the rest of the group. We chanted, "EMMA!!! EMMA!!! EMMA!!!" But she decided not to go. We were all a little upset, but happy she was coming in a path around the gulch to join us in our conversation about animals we had drawn before we went across the gulch. Our journey across the gulch had come to an end and all was happy.

Anna of Byzantium Influence essay
By Will Follett

The relationship between teachers and students has always been good. In Anna Of Byzantium by Tracy Barrett the relationship between Anna and Simon was no exception. Simon was like a father to her; he was always kind to her. He was the kind of person you thought you could tell anything. Anna told Simon something that she probably shouldn’t have told him, and this ended up changing Anna’s life. Simon was the most influential person in Anna Comemna’s life because he taught her and told her stories, provoked her to talk treason, and betrayed her to John.

One of the reasons Simon was the most influential person in Anna Comnena's life was because he taught her and told her stories. One of the stories he told her was the ancient Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus: “’Do you remember that story?”’(34) Simon inquired. The story is about a person who disobeys his father and dies. Another story is the story of Niobe. Anna is bragging about how beautiful she is and Simon gets very angry with her. “’Hush!”’ he said. . . ‘Don’t you remember Niobe, who bragged that she had more children than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis?’. . . ‘Yes. . .Apollo and Artemis came down and shot her children with arrows to punish their mother’s pride.’”(15). Simon recounts one of their lessons to teach her life skills (like how not to get killed). Therefore he is her mentor and teacher and has a powerful influence on her.

Another one of the ways that Simon was the most influential person in Anna's life is that he provoked her to talk treason. When they were in the library, Simon asked her, seemingly provokingly, “’What will be your first act as empress?”’(109). He already knows what Anna is going to say, he just wants to hear her say it. Anna replies that she will exile John to the mountains to never return. Simon then provokes her in to saying more bad things about John. He knows that she would like to do worse. He then says: “’That seems rather harsh, don’t you think?”’(109) Anna then says she would rather have John tortured and killed, which is what Simon wanted her to say, thus provoking her to talk treason.

The last reason that Simon is the most influential person in Anna’s life is because he betrayed her to John. When Anna was caught trying to kill John, she thought it was Sophie, but in the dungeons Simon said: “’I did”’(186). Anna, at first, didn’t believe him. She said “’No, it couldn’t be you’”(186). Simon said he betrayed her because he could not see it happen, like Atreus and Agamemnon (167). Simon did do something right. He wouldn’t tell John who attempted to kill him until he promised no action against her.

Simon was like a true father to Anna. He was always there for her and was never away. Simon made Anna feel secure and like she could tell him anything. Anna felt very safe when telling Simon that she was going to exile John because she trusted her and loved her. Even though their relationship was good, Simon still betrayed her to John. This changed Anna’s life by forcing her to spend the rest of her life exiled in a convent. Simon betrayed Anna’s trust and changed her life forever.

Anna Dalassena Essay
By Emma Hynes

Anna Dalassena had a huge impact on Anna Comnena by boosting her confidence of becoming empress. By talking to Anna Comnena about all the great advantages of being empress, and ruling the Byzantine empire, Anna Dalassena makes her a little too confident of being in power. “‘The throne------ the p-p-power,’ [Anna Comnena] stammered. ‘When I am empress, I will be able to deal with people the way I want to. I won’t have to listen to anyone’” (42). Even though Anna Comnena is not yet empress, she is still the emperor’s daughter, and Anna Dalassena makes her feel that she can control or kill anyone at any time. For example, Anna Comnena spoke down to Sophia and Malik and even threatened to kill them. “‘I could have you both put to death! I will have you both put to death! Tell me instantly who that person is, or I will have him executed as a burglar!’” (128) Anna Comnena yelled when she saw Sophia and Malik sneaking outside at night. Anna Dalassena teaches Anna Comnena things she does not need to know, and most of them are untrue. She explains how grand it is to be in power, almost hypnotizing Anna Comnena into wanting the power over everyone as much as possible.

Anna Dalassena teaches Anna Comnena about governing empires and about battles fought, also influencing Anna Comnena’s desire to rule the empire: “She told me about battles, about weapons, about warriors—she had been on so many campaigns with my grandfather and his brother that she knew almost as much about war craft as any soldier did” (33). Anna Comnena admires her grandmother for her success in ruling the empire when her father is away, also inspiring her wish to rule it someday too. Anna Dalassena teaches Anna Comnena about ruling the empire, instead of teaching normal school work to her. “[Anna Dalassena} never referred to books in her tutoring. Rather, she spoke rapidly, telling me about the different countries surrounding our empire, about their rulers, about who was related to whom, about what language they spoke” (32-33). These lessons influenced Anna Comnena’s dream of being empress.

Anna Dalassena lulls Anna Comnena into a mind- controlling trance. She talks to her in a hypnotizing tone, telling her about how great it is to sit up on the throne. Anna Dalassena also explains how people will worship and admire her, and how her words can bring her anything she wants, including the death of her subjects: “See how they will bow down to you, how they will worship you, how they will fear you. A word from you can bring death, or can bring an end to war. Your enemies will tremble, and your friends will tremble too, because they know how quickly the empress’s friendship can turn to enmity”(30). After Anna Comnena was in the trance, she suddenly had visions of herself on the throne in place of her father ruling the empire, then suddenly realizing her huge thirst for power and revenge. Anna Dalassena’s voice was lulling Anna Comnena into a trance. “I saw myself, looking like my father but for the beard, short and dark, yes, but who saw that when you sat in the imperial throne? I saw the heavy crown glitter on my head, the purple slippers on my feet being kissed by kings and princes” (30). Anna Dalassena influences and helps Anna Comnena to become the controlling, revenge-thirsty, somewhat cold-hearted person she is now.