Category: Non-Fiction

By Sean Callahan

It’s September of 2015, and my cousin is determined to show me how to ride a longboard properly. I want to do it, but I can’t get my legs to come to an agreement with my body on how to balance before they send me falling to the pavement. I preferred staying on my bike, where I had the most control, and was least likely to become the next traffic collision. I’ve been practicing as much as I can lately. I’m trying to keep my balance on the longboard, but the little bruises on my elbows and knees reflect my repeated failures.

I fall again, and again, and again. But each failure let me see what I was doing wrong. As my mistakes go away, I’m finally able to get down our street without falling. My cousin decides I’m good enough for going down a hill. My nerves are tensing as we approach the dip of the hill. My brain is tingling with paranoia and my eyes are darting around in all directions. I can see straight down the path around the storm drain, the lines of pine trees, but I’m still worrying about running into an unsuspecting car. I grit my teeth together, hesitating, but forcing myself to trust my cousin. She’d gone down this hill plenty of times without accidents on her own longboard.

Sure enough, the ride isn’t as terrifying as I thought it would be. With the help of my cousin, we keep an eye out for cars, and I slowly glide down the hill. When I know no cars are coming, I close my eyes and feel the Fall wind embrace every inch of my face. It overwhelms the sun’s heat, making me forget that it was eighty degrees outside. The wind invades the inside of my T-shirt. As I slow to a stop at the intersection of streets, I sigh happily.

We do more streets, more hills around our neighborhood. Then, we came to a long hill leading straight down to a street on the right. In front of me, waiting at the bottom is the curb of the sidewalk and an enormous bush. Instead of making the turn my defective longboard decides to let me bounce off the sidewalk and hug the bush. My cousin laughs. I scowl, brush off the dirt and twigs, and go back up to do the hill again. Two more tries and I make the sharp turn. I feel childish, as if I am claiming every street as my own territory. I do the same thing with many other hills and streets, and I boast about it to myself. You can finally longboard without becoming roadkill! You can glide down hills and not die, yay!

When the sun is setting in the horizon, my cousin says she has one last hill she wants to show me. We stop in the middle of the intersection leading to my street, and I don’t see a street I don’t recognize.

“Here,” my cousin says, pointing up towards the line of houses.

But I know she’s not pointing at the houses. She’s pointing up a really steep driveway, leading to someone’s house. I cringe, and angle my neck up at the top of the driveway. I start to walk up the hill and my legs are only gaining inches as I reach the top, showing me how steep it really is.

“You’re not serious,” I say to my cousin.

She places her longboard down on the top of the hill. She demonstrates her going down, and I clench my teeth at how quickly she speeds into the grass of a neighbor’s backyard. She comes back to me. “It’s easy. See?”

I put down my board. My heart is beating faster. I’m certain I’m going to wipe out. I’m going to break my head, I’m going to do a complete backflip and splatter my brains all over the pavement.

“Just do it, it’ll be okay,” She says again.

“I’m not doing this,” I say, shaking my head.

After several frustrated attempts of trying to get me to do it, my outraged cousin takes back her longboard, and storms home. That night, I went to sleep upset, wishing I’d rode down that hill.

The next day, after school, I’m feeling the intense need to redeem myself. I go back to the hill alone. I pray and place my longboard down. I put my feet on both sides evenly, take a deep breath, and edge my way to the hills’ dip.

In seconds, I’ve landed successfully in the grass with both head and brains intact. And I laugh, thinking about how stupid I was to believe I couldn’t learn how to ride a longboard.

By Sean Callahan

Be prepared, the Boy Scout motto said. I took this advice for granted when I entered the Boy Scouts of America a few years ago. I didn’t know what to expect when I heard about this legendary ‘Winter Camp.’

When I arrived to unpack the car, my hands were solid bricks of ice, despite my wool gloves covering them. Both my hoodie and winter parka were barely keeping my torso and back warm, while my face tightened from the chilly wind drafts. My feet felt so stiff that I couldn’t tell if they were actually cold by the time we’d finished setting up our tents (I casually wondered whether I had hypothermia at this point). When we’d finished setting up, it dawned on me: I would be snoozing inside a sleeping bag, on the frozen ground, in negative 5 degree weather.

Come next morning, with only five hours of horrible sleep, I’m on clean up duty for breakfast. The boiling water I’d just poured into our dish-washing basin is frozen within five minutes, and my bare fingers have turned blue as I desperately attempt to scrub the (half-frozen) dishes clean with a sponge. I’ve lost my patience after the third pot, and my fingers are pale enough to give the term ‘vampire’ a new meaning.

Although the cold and the cleanup had been atrocious, things began to improve with the company of friends. We spent the rest of the day there doing what teenage guys do best: Screwing around, snow-tubing (and falling) down steep, snowy hills, and drowning in cups of hot chocolate while sitting by the fire. After it was getting close to bedtime, four friends and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to slide down the longest hill in a snow tube together. The tube tipped over, knocking us off right as we reached the bottom of the hill. We laughed for a bit, then began throwing snowballs at each other all the way back to our campsite.

This B.S.A Winter Camp is a frigid wasteland at first glance, but I came to realize that it was more than that. It was a beautiful winter wonderland, full of fun opportunities waiting to be unleashed.

By Sean Callahan

The massive house had a white front porch. There was a garden beside the front steps filled with white and red roses and the prickly thorn bushes. The house had a large backyard with pine trees growing along the perimeter, blocking the other neighborhood homes from view. This is my second home, Maryland.

One year, winter came. I was sledding with my cousins, named Emily and Cara. We were trying to make new paths in the snow.

When we came in for our hot chocolate break, Cara showed Emily and I a video. A man, who looked as skinny as a chair leg, was standing on the railIng of his second floor porch. He dived into the tall mass of snow below, head first. Cara said this was called the Snow Challenge.

She’s lost her mind, I thought. We had a good coating of snow this year, and I wasn’t ready to have hypothermia in my obituary anytime soon. Still, I wasn’t going to be shown up by my cousins. We got into bathing suits, ran the hot showers upstairs (for emergency precautions), and waited at the front door for my Aunt to start filming the challenge.

The dry air seeped through the crack in the door, sending goosebumps up my arms. I touched the glass, and instantly withdrew at the icy sensation. Amid the nervousness and cold, I was actually excited for this.

When we were told to run, my cousins hesitantly went first. Their high pitched screams rang out as they dashed through the garden and into our front yard. I sprinted behind them, lunging into the piles of snow. Emily didn’t get further than a foot past the flower bed before screeching back into the house. Cara screamed, continuing to toss snow into the air. Seconds later, she couldn’t take it, and ran back into the house.

I was the last one, tossing snow up, cheering, and jumping into the air. All the while, my teeth were chattering, I was shaking with excitement and shivering simultaneously, and the cold was now beginning to burn. I ran back in, desperately seeking the hot shower waiting for me. I felt the searing pain of sudden temperature change, but after recovering, I found out I’d managed to stay outside in the snow for thirteen seconds.

A year later, I was the only one who’d chosen to do the snow challenge. This year, I’m going to break my record.