On the First Friday of every month, YCHS has a half day of classes – how do we spend the other half of the day you may ask… Why doing manual labor on our campus, of course, to continue making it even more beautiful. Last Friday – after a very long week – I signed my group up to work on clearing out the area behind the classrooms buildings. The super secret side mission of this group was to attempt to pull the thousands of cancun vines from the lake. These vines appeared to just be floating on the water and we could just simply pull them out with our ingenius device of long sticks with screws in the ends of them to hook the cancun. We quickly discovered our master plan was foiled by the stubbornness of these vines as they had incredibly strong roots embedded in the bottom of the lake.
I slowly began to wade into the dirty lake (I am talking certain parts of the Muck Hike dirty…. The clean parts though!) to try to get a better grip – as I did this I realized what a wonderful opportunity this would be to spend the first semi-sunny day we had in 8 days swimming in this dirty cancun lake. So, I did a quick little surface dive – thank-you LBD teams and Ryan Lilly for giving me some sort of lifeguarding skills – and began to work my way into the middle of the lake, which was probably around 8 feet deep.
I pulled out most of the loose cancun, but the vines were putting up a good fight – just as I was about to call it a day and swim back with my small armfuls of cancun (which I could float on and elementary backstroke my way in) – my reinforcements decided to jump right on in. A few of the junior and sophomore boys dove right on in, and soon a few of the girls joined us as well as we took a couple “sepos” (machetes) out into the murky water with us and would take turns going under the water to cut the vines in order to harvest the cancun. We spent a few hours doing this exhausting but exhilirating work.
When we were done for the day, we were hosed off and deemed “The Wolf Pack” by Fr. Rich. Needless to say – I am ecstatic to have found a Wolf Pack here on Yap.
The moral of this story is… well, I guess it’s okay to just have a nice blog post about my adventures without any lessons, reflections, or revelations…. And in truth – that is the lesson! Sometimes, we need to stop searching for the deeper meaning, the epiphanies, the revelations – and we just need to let go, dive into a dirty cancun covered lake, and let the world teach us in that unique, special way that only it knows how to do.
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| Casually pulling in some cancun |
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| About to submerge |
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| Break between swimming sessions |
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| "The Wolf Pack" swimmers |
“Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.”
-Charles Dudley Warner
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