Close your eyes. Imagine you're driving down an old, two lane highway road that is parallel to a mountain range. The highway cuts through a high valley prairie with a few towns sprinkled through out. A river winds close by. It's a scene that is familiar to you; it's a road you've been traveling during the summers since you were three. This time it will be different.
Keep your eyes closed. You're in an old GMC pick-up that is hauling a stack of rafts. Wet suits, life jackets, and helmets are jammed in to the covered truck bed. The windows are rolled down so you and the driver can feel the cool morning breeze against your face. Your right arm hangs out the window, and the radio is playing a local rock station.
Keep your eyes closed. You look out at the grey-blue mountain peaks that still have some snow pack on them. You take a deep breath. A song you've never heard before starts to play over the radio. An electricity jumps out of the speaker onto your skin, soaks through, and races to your heart. The world slows down and your heart lifts out of you taking your hand and pulling you into the crystalline sky.
There you stay while the music pulses through you. For this moment, you feel a sense never experienced before. You're a teenager, and for the first time in your life you feel alive. You feel you belong. Right there in that truck hauling rafts to a river that helped raise you.
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