A different kind of senior trip

This week, I’ve been following my oldest son’s senior trip on social media. I’ve also been thinking how different it was from the trip I took when I graduated high school.

Earlier this week, Robert and four buddies drove a pickup truck 2,000 miles to Zion National Park in Utah. Thirty years earlier, my entire senior class caravanned 200 miles to — drum roll, please — Panama City Beach, Fla.

So far, Bess and I have heard from Robert twice since he hit the road. On Sunday, he texted me a description of the meal one of his friend’s grandmother cooked them in Mississippi.

On Thursday, he texted Bess a sentence fragment summarizing a hike he’d taken. He’d actually used an exclamation point.

Fortunately, several of his companions have posted photographs on Facebook, including a waffle the shape of Texas, the world’s largest Bowie knife, and road signs welcoming them to the Lone Star State as well as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

There’s also a shot from the top of Angels Landing, a steep 1,500-foot climb along the narrow spine of a cliff, with sheer drop-offs on either side.

It’s rated one of the world’s most dangerous hikes, claiming a hiker’s life every year or so.

Robert shared this interesting fact with Bess the night before he left home, being kind enough to add that there’s a chain connected to steel poles along the hike that you can grab for stability if you’re the kind of person who needs that sort of thing.

He also calculated the odds of death at about one in a couple thousand, which sounded pretty safe to him and pretty risky to his mother.

Later that evening, she asked me to tell her again why we were letting him do such a thing.

I pointed out that one of his four friends was actually his church youth group leader and a responsible adult, in addition to being an experienced outdoorsman.

“He’ll remember this trip for the rest of his life,” I said.

And that’s when I realized that I don’t remember much about my own senior trip.

I do remember telling my parents that my entire class was going to some beach in Florida to celebrate our graduation by engaging in such popular activities as fishing, swimming, volleyball, feeding seagulls and building sandcastles, and then feigning a yawn and acting unsurprised when they actually said yes.

As it turned out, we didn’t build any sandcastles, but we did construct an impressive wall around our motel swimming pool using empty aluminum cans.

I also remember that every night we’d walk down the beach to a large hotel and join thousands of other kids, with thousands more looking down from balconies.

Maybe this is a slight exaggeration, but the crowd was massive and electric, with the sense that something unexpected was going to happen and it probably wasn’t going to be good for everybody.

One night the mob formed a huge circle around some Goliath toting a handle of Jack Daniels. He called for an opponent, and a little guy with kung fu moves jumped in the ring and went down fast. There was blood in the sand. Then a larger, more traditional fighter suffered the same fate. Then another.

At some point, everybody started fighting everybody. I turned around and saw a big guy with his fist cocked at my head.

“I’m on your side,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, and dropped his hand.

And that was my senior trip, where risks seemed greater than one in a couple thousand.

About now, Robert’s headed from Zion down to the Grand Canyon. I’m thankful he could take this trip.

And glad we didn’t have Facebook and smart phones when I was his age.

This story was originally published June 17, 2016 at 9:37 PM with the headline "A different kind of senior trip."