LOCALadk Magazine

I'm lucky to call Keene, New York, my home. I love walking down the street and passing snowcapped peaks, clear rivers, and hip mountain cafés. I also love the two-hour southbound drive on the Northway to Albany International Airport, pulling a large duffle from the back seat, and jetting away. Through my travels, I've learned that the world has a beauti- ful, harsh and sometimes ironic way of teaching us the most valuable lessons. As an explorer, you're truly a student for life. Lesson #1: If you're sick, dehydrated and on the verge of passing out, tell someone. And tell someone before you get to that point. I'd like to say it only took me once to learn this. But, that's not the case. I tend to have this pattern of don't worr y, I can handle it, and that has certainly gotten me in a few predica- ments over the years. My most memorable one being in India in 2013. A young graduate student, I was in Mumbai with a cohort of international colleagues that I'd just met a few days prior. We were at the airport getting our boarding passes for a flight to Nagpur when I started to see dots. I'd been violently sick the night before, on the toilet with a trash can between my feet, pure joy coming out both ends. At one point, I lay curled on the bathroom floor, unable to make it to my bed. In the morning, I took Imodium and tried to eat a little breakfast, but nothing stayed down. I knew we had a flight to catch, so I took a few more pills and packed. It was nearly a hundred de- grees when we arrived at the airport. I lugged my pack across the pavement and hoped it would be cooler inside. It wasn't. I stood in line and sweated. That's when I began to see dots and my vision went out. I collapsed. When I woke, a handful of my colleagues with medical backgrounds knelt beside me. My skin was pale and clammy, and I could barely keep my eyes open. An airport medic was flagged over, and I was hoisted into a wheelchair and taken to the airport hospital where I was hooked up to an IV and rehydrated. Lesson learned: Don't avoid asking for help because you think it would be an inconvenience for your trip leaders on a hectic itinerar y. Way bigger problems happen further down the road if you don't communicate that you need it. Bottom line: Ask for help. Lesson #2: Get the unconscious rat out of your room before it wakes up. This is possibly the most terrif ying and comical experi- ence I've ever had. This too takes place in India, during my first year of graduate school. We were spending the week at Gandhi's Sevagram Ashram and learning about his life's work. Gandhi had lived at the ashram from 1936 until his death in 1948. He preached simplicity and the values of self-sufficien- cy, like making a shirt from cotton you'd grown. The quarters we roomed in were built of concreate and wood with thatch roofs. Inside, we each had a wooden bed with a ver y thin mat- tress, holding to Gandhi's beliefs that our lives should only contain the essentials. I loved our lodging quarters. The rooms were open and breezy, lizards scampered along the walls, bean vines grew outside my bedroom window, and I could see the stars at night. I shared the room with my classmate, Meaghan Gru- ber, and our ceiling had a fan with a large hole above it. One night, we sat up late, sharing photos of family on our laptops. From the ceiling came a scampering noise and we looked up. We'd both grown up in old farmhouses and shrugged. A ro- dent was living with us, no big deal. We clicked off our head- lamps and computers, went to bed, and it wasn't long before Meaghan was snoring. My hip bones cut into to the hard bed and I tossed and turned, all the while listening to my buddy do ceiling laps. Abruptly, the pitter-patter stopped, the fan jolted, and there was a solid thwack against the wall. In the darkness of night I knew what had happened. The creature had fallen out of the hole in the ceiling, hit the fan, and launched across the room. Also, it had landed ver y near me and I didn't know if it was in my bed or at the foot of it. My body rigid, I reached for my headlamp and clicked it on. I examined the frame of my bed. No rodent. Deep breath. I crawled to the end of my bed and peered over. There on the ground was an enormous rat, belly side up with its pink tongue drooped out of its mouth. For a moment, I wondered if it was dead, but then its fat stomach rose and fell. That dude was knocked out cold. Not wanting to wake the rat, I called softly to Meaghan for help, but she continued to snore. In bare feet I tiptoed to the straw broom in the corner and approached the rat. Luckily, the door wasn't too far from where he'd landed. At this point, I could tell he was a he. I pushed him with the brush, and just as he crossed the door's threshold, he woke up, rolled over and shot back under my bed. I screamed, jumped, uttered a few choice words, and chased after him. I beat the sides of my pack with the broom, flushed him out and he hauled ass toward the door. Once he was long gone, I locked the door and stuffed a towel in the crack beneath it. Then I shook the adrenaline out of my body with a loud "Ahhh!" During the whole ordeal, Meaghan never woke up and I told her about it in the morning. Lesson learned: When a rat hits a ceiling fan, it makes a Five Lesss Arnd the Wld By Bethany Gets

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