Thoughts From a Small Fire

Before the Wyoming winter hit, the swimming team spent a lot of weekends in the mountains. We would usually drive east on I-80 to Happy Jack Road. From there we would drive a little further east. The high plateau between Cheyenne and Laramie is a cold, dark desolate place. We would get out there and have miles of empty dirt roads crisscrossing each other as far as the eye can see without another vehicle in sight. It is quintessential Wyoming living out there. Wherever you live in the state you can drive for fifteen minutes and find something like this. There is no one in sight. You have seemed to escape civilization. You forget there are laws out there, in that massive untouched plot of land. Go ahead, go sixty down that dirt road. Don’t even drive on the road. Set some bottles up in trees for target practice. Build bonfires the size of a pine tree. For some, this makes Wyoming mysteriously alluring. For the rest, this makes Wyoming an ungodly dangerous place. These people refuse to believe that such a place, like the high plateau of the Happy Jack wilderness, can exist in a civilized world. These are the same people that seriously ask, “Are there paved roads in Wyoming?” “Do you guys have the internet?” Honestly now. Shut up.

The team circles up around that big bonfire, exchanging jokes, drinking, and playing games. We start playing I Never. If you aren’t familiar with this game, the rules are quite simple. Someone makes an “I never” statement. Take this example from the peer-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia, “‘I have never edited Wikipedia.’ In this case anyone who has edited Wikipedia must drink a pre-agreed upon amount (usually a finger of their drink).” In an effort to make everybody feel welcome the captains were kind enough to include non-drinkers in the I Never circle. I usually held a soda, or something of the sort—anything that wouldn’t get me as inebriated as a young fellow one night when he decided to roll down the passenger side window for a piss as I drove his Jeep at 80 mph down the freeway.

You can do a quick self-evaluation of your innocence in a game of I Never, of course not on the rubrick that matters. Although I was rarely drinking, I really did enjoy the game. The things some people have done shocked me then as a freshman, and can still shock me today. The first night I played I Never with the team I went from not knowing any people who had had awfully raunchy and kinky sexcapades to knowing a good handful of them. I Never can be a very enlightening experience in that way. Listening to someone else’s outrageous experiences is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Although I would never find myself in that position, it is interesting to know of someone, maybe even someone very close to me, which has.

No one really ever wins I Never. If there were some elaborate point system set up it would be irrelevant by the end of the game because the competitors are too intoxicated to care, or to add for that matter, when the game is done. Nevertheless, if you got a point for everything that you never did, I would win…every time, unless it was like the game I played in London with some co-workers. For everything you had done in that game you gave yourself a point and then revealed your score to your co-workers upon completing an agonizingly long list of “have you ever?”s. My score was less than half of the next highest score.

The whole I Never tangent went a little longer than I anticipated, but I told myself that I wouldn’t limit any of the details that came to my mind when reflecting on, still, my freshman year.