It’s funny how the lessons I need to learn have a way of presenting themselves in a rather obvious fashion. It is also funny how scary some lessons really are.
Two days ago my husband and I went on a tour in Charlottetown, PEI. In talking to the tour guide about our trip, he immediately commented ‘you must be teachers’–after all, who else has a month to go traipsing about the Maritimes?
As I stood in line for the restroom pre-tour, I thought damn, I may never get to do a trip like this again. Maybe I should go back to teaching. Perhaps if I taught high school it would be different. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I took a deep, cleansing breath, knowing that even if my book is an epic failure, at least I have a backup plan.
We went on the tour, the tour was great. Time passed.
The very next day–yesterday, actually–I spent some alone time driving the back roads of PEI (tthough really, they’re all back roads here) and came upon a little parking area marked ‘The Swimming Rock’. So I pulled over, camera in hand, happy to have somewhere to safely leave my car while I went off in search of red cliffs to photograph. While I did get the one photo posted at the top of this post, I didn’t stay very long or enjoy my visit at all.
Why? Teenagers.
I suppose I should have known that anywhere somewhere out of the way with the word ‘rock’ in it would attract roving packs of unsupervised kids. I’m not sure why this is, but even where I grew up there were lots of places with the word ‘rock’ or ‘cliff’ in them that were magnets for kids–and when I used to be a kid, I went there, too. And while I wasn’t ever particularly unruly, my friends sure were.
But I am not a kid anymore. And I’m not unruly. And if I’m being honest, giant groups of ill-behaved teenagers super piss me off. Two of them were making out, six or seven of them were generally hooting and hollering about said making out, and another two boys were ker-plunking large rocks (well, really, dried chunks of clay) in the water. They left before I did, screaming as they went, tires spinning out on the damp–yet still beautifully red– mud.
I really, really don’t want to be in charge of people of that age. Never, ever again.
That is both very good to know and very scary. I have no backup plan.