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Outside Magazine December 2003

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Ski Naked (cont.)

AT FIRST, LIFE aboard the SS Good Life is placid—everybody goes to sleep, sprawled on top of each other. Around nine, the pale winter sun streams through the gray-tinted windows and the bus heats up like a sauna. The kids, looking like adolescent vampires who've been caught off guard by daybreak, begin to stir. They crack open cans of Mountain Dew, the antifreeze-colored elixir that fills in for coffee among teenagers, and the world suddenly becomes less fuzzy.

"I've never been more than an hour west of Hastings!" somebody shouts from the back of the bus.

"Dude," replies somebody else, "we're gettin' outta Dodge!"

Hastings, population 24,064, is less than an hour's drive north of the geographical center of the United States. Today's Hastings residents, many of them descended from German-Catholic immigrants who settled in the 1870s, have digital cable and high-speed Internet access, but the town remains old-fashioned: Farmers still drive their tractors slowly along the shoulders of the road, and the best place to hear news of the day is downtown at Bert's Rexall Drug. Hastings is solid Bush country, but it's even more solid Nebraska Cornhuskers country. There's a highway named the Tom Osborne Expressway, after the fabled Huskers football coach who won three national championships and is now a Republican congressman from Nebraska's Third District, which includes Hastings.

A little more than half of the St. Cecilia senior class is on board the Good Life, and everybody is from either Hastings or a farm nearby. All in all, it's a typical group of heartland kids. Among them is Katie, an alpha girl with an X-rated vocabulary who is constantly in the doghouse for acting up. Julie is a smart tomboy who rarely takes off her black Vans stocking cap. Tyler is a stylin' football star with spiked, gel-slicked hair. Drew is a class clown wearing a let's hump T-shirt. And then there's Nathan, a quiet and well-groomed seminary-student-to-be. He and Liz Sondag head up the class's openly pious wing, a group that other students sarcastically call the Holy Rollers. Since we left Hastings, Nathan's been sitting all alone, silently speed-reading the New Testament.

Meanwhile, Tim Russell, the Good Life's onboard chaperone, is at the front of the bus, still snoozing. The rest of the adult-supervision posse—Mark and Blair Driscoll, Ann Russell, Dave Bialas, Colleen Vacek, and Susan Sondag—are in the SUV. Judging by their happy smiles when we see them on the highway, they're glad not to be amid the Good Life's din of complaints, dumb jokes, funk, and noise, which gets louder as we roll into midmorning.

"Are we going to make a rest stop soon?" somebody whines.

"You better not fart on me again," one kid warns another.

"What time are we going to get to the condominium?"

"Did somebody just say condom?"

Everybody laughs.

"Watch your language back there," barks Russell, who by now is wide awake.

"Sorry, Mr. Russell!"

"Hey, Mr. Russell, will you play a CD for us?"

A rock-and-rap mix CD is passed forward, and Russell slides it into the player. The bus sound system starts rattling from the metal-rap racket of Linkin Park. The kids shout out the surly, angst-ridden lyrics.

"Mr. Russell, now play song number ten!"

Linkin Park's crunchy guitars are replaced by mariachi-style horns. It's Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire." The kids seem to like him just as much as they do the rappers.

In a fit of inspiration, a sweaty guy named Jeff starts playing air guitar. Chuck does an oddly contrapuntal kung fu chop in the aisle. And a redheaded goofball named Grant sticks his fist in his mouth. Then he grabs a giggling girl next to him and sticks her fist in his mouth. Those sitting nearby chant, "Farther, farther!"

All this and it's not quite 11 a.m. The students rev faster as we thump across the unevenly jointed highway. A few miles west of the town of Ogallala, we roar past a sign that reads leaving nebraska—eliciting cheers. Fifteen seconds later, another sign zooms into view, welcoming us to COLORFUL COLORADO.

By 10:04—Rocky Mountain time!—we hit a service stop, the Colorado Welcome Center at Julesburg. The kids file out of the bus, and several immediately light up cigarettes. (On this trip, smoking is allowed for anyone who's 18; drinking is not.) The others head for the restrooms or skulk to the vending machines for a resupply of chips and Dew.

We're still 250 miles from Breckenridge, but already the prairie seems different. The amber fields look wrinkled, and little hills and valleys—the first signs of the earth starting to heave up into the Rockies—extend into the distance as far as you can see. Three boys climb the staircase to a second-floor observation deck to soak in the view.

"Where are the mountains?" one says.

"Yeah, I was expecting the Rocky Mountains to be a little rockier than this."

"I was thinking the same thing. That John Denver was full of shit, man."

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