WORTH IT

Friday night Isaiah Kottke, Brandon Tussy, Ryan Zamroz, Andrew Penniman and I spent the night at the beach. Here's the story.
Ryan and I left Master's around 8 thinking that the other guys would already be there by then. It turned out that the other guys spent too much time at Tussy's school in Thousand Oaks and ended up leaving after Ryan and I had already been on the road for at least an hour. Knowing that It'd be a while until they caught up with us, we went to a convenient store to buy some snacks and look for a Ralphs. We got the snacks and found the Ralphs, but Penniman and his crew had just left. We chilled for a while until they got there. Even then, Penn wasn't sure where the place was; he had a perfect spot in mind but he didn't know how to get there. We drove back and forth for a while until we finally found the spot we had been searching for. To our dismay, it had been taken by a pack of high school girls. See, the place they had taken was perfect because it was between two big sand dunes and the wind didn't blow through there. Since we couldn't take the perfect spot we set up a few dunes down. We then realized that our spot sucked, and we wanted the perfect spot.
I tried to make a fire for a while but every time it'd get going the wind would pick up and snuff it out. All we were getting was smoke. I eventually came up with an ingenius idea to make a log-cabin looking design with the firewood. We had paper as the foundation. Penn made a firewood hotdog as he called it (a piece of wood wrapped in newspaper) and set it in the middle on fire. It worked! The wind could not blow that sucker out. Right when our fire had been built and was sustaining itself, the high school girls left. So everyone decided to go down to their spot. I was mad because I had just accomplished the fire creation.
So we set up down between the dunes, got out the iPod dock to put on some tunes, pulled out the towels and took a seat by our new, easily-made fire. We talked until 1:30, when we decided it was time for bed. This is when it got interesting.
I was on the left end, Zamroz was to my right, to Tussy was next to him, and Isaiah was the other book end. All we had was a couple thin blankets and towels and let me tell you: it was freezing. At first, we figured we could take it if we huddled close together for warmth and stayed close to the fire. This was true for a while. We talked even more after we began spooning until about 3:15 when we all fell asleep. It was freezing.
The fire went out. I couldn't feel my feet. The moon was so bright it was laughing in my face. I was shivering and trying to get comfortable on the sand. Eventually, I woke up and began thinking "When in the world is the sun going to come up." During all this I was tossing and turning. When I was rolling over Ryan woke up and said, "Dude, let's go to the car." And I said, "Okay." We ran to the car and it was 5:30. We turned on the heater. Oh man it was great.
Then, Ryan was like "you wanna just go?" I nodded, and we took off. We got back to school around 6:45. I went straight sleep, slept till 11, at brunch, went back to sleep at 12, and slept till 3.
See, you read this and think, why in the world would you want to put your self through all that crap? That doesn't even sound fun! We I got two words for you:
WORTH IT.

That phrase, by the way, has been deemed the phrase of the night.

ERIC DURSO