Flying Squirrels and Travel-Sized Toothpaste

A week before The Trip

By Jacob Turner

At least for me, a trip becomes real when I realize I need to buy travel-sized toothpaste. Last year, when I traveled to the Galápagos with this class, the realization struck me about two weeks in advance; today, a week away from my RDU to San Juan Frontier flight, I’m thinking about when to go to CVS.

Admittedly, toothpaste realizations happen in parallel with much more anxiety-inducing realizations that we haven’t heard from a contact in a while or that we don’t know what we will do on any given day. This stress is inevitable and in my opinion, there is a twisted sort of fun in the week-long pre-trip crunch–which is part of the reason I’m posting this blog at 8 pm.

We will be fine, our coaches assure us. Things work out, and things will go wrong (and right) in ways we couldn’t plan for, nor should we try to. Regardless, as the trip closes in, the energy of the class has changed.

A recent high ropes course, for example, got us out of our respective teams and shells a little bit. There was one section of the course, the Flying Squirrel, where every member of the class was hoisted in the air by 6-7 of their classmates via a man-powered rope pulley. At that moment, our lives were almost “literally in the hands of your friends,” as a staff person told us quite seriously before Gerard found himself floating Peter-Pan style 20 feet above the Carolina Outdoor Education Center. It’s quite a bit easier to say “hi” before class after that shared experience.

Photo of students doing the high ropes course

If you want good pictures from your ropes course, do it with a bunch of photographers and videographers.

It’s also quite a bit easier to work together. As our work moves from planning to execution, I’ve felt more moments of flow, productive disagreement, and fun. On the design/dev team specifically, there’s nothing like collectively designing a logo or choosing a color palette to bring a group of design folks together (and occasionally apart).

We are on the cusp of even greater changes as we spend 24 hours a day working and living together for a week. Many of the faces we’ve seen on Zoom (our local producer, Hermes, our sources, the students from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón) will soon become real, life-sized people.

This is when the class goes from MEJO584: International Reporting to the Puerto Rico class I took my senior year. When I think back to last year, I can remember doing the same ropes course. I can remember sitting with my story drenched in the back of a source’s Jeep. I can remember going through dozens of logo iterations. Those moments are the reason I decided to take the class again, and now they’re happening again.