Study with leisure

A personal account

(Editor's note: Diana Reagan attended the Pingree Park Field Studies Program. For more information on the annual Colorado trip, e-mail kreppond@sbcglobal.net.)

Hippies, ticks, tree huggers. Professor Kent Reppond, a class of sixteen, two vans, and a road trip. Welcome to Biology 1411: Introduction to Botany.

There are promises of early mornings and seven-hour hikes. Reppond warns us to increase our red blood cells. I'm wondering if I'll come back alive.

In the two days it takes to get to Pingree Park, Colo., I learn everything I need to know to build alliances. I try and forget I'm on a class field trip. We count the cows or "moo mine" the long pasture stretches in the flatlands of Texas. Our sustenance comes in Mexican food restaurants and McDonald's. We long for the motion sickness to stop.

The winding roads and rocky paths up to Pingree Park cause Reppond to ask, "Is the trailer still with us"" The threat of our luggage roaring down the white rapids doesn't even faze us, we've come too far.

Pingree is more than just a Colorado State University campus. Here the grass is green. Over your shoulder there are mountains and hummingbirds as abundant as the mosquitoes in my back yard. The entire time I was there, I looked out to the mountains thinking this is surreal. Something this gigantic and this beautiful can't really exist. Here I forget it's 90 degrees back home. I like this sweater weather. It inspires a haiku.

The grass is greener
No ozone warnings; silence
I need a wool scarf

The hikes are used as classrooms for Reppond's lectures, but he doesn't keep us long. He uses this time to show us botanic specimens: parenchyma, collenchyma and sclerenchyma sharing a nearby rock or the dicot state flower of Colorado, the columbine. Then we are off on the four-hour (round trip) hike. One of our destinations was Cirque Meadows where we saw the clouds descend around us like an eerie B-movie. (I kept looking over my shoulder for "triffids.")

Another hike, Crown Point, promises an 11,500 ft. change in elevation. It's straight up a rocky path and my Converse' are taking the fall. This is the first time some of us have seen snow. It covers the ground around us. We walk around in circles until we decide we can't make it to the top. I was scared I'd get struck by lightning. The closest I want to get to St. Elmo's Fire is the movie.

If you can imagine your favorite song repeating in your head, that feeling of contentment that you never want to go away, this is how Colorado made me feel. The real challenge of the class is parting ways with students and faculty you now consider family. It's hard to spend so much time with someone you have to leave behind. Seven days is barely enough time to take it all in.