Nature can be your best friend in one moment, and worst enemy in another. On tour in 2018, my bicycling group and I had decided that we would take a fifteen mile gravel road tracing The Great Dismal Swamp. We biked twelve miles before we hit a dead end. For the next three miles, our group, with bicycles slung over our shoulders, slogged through a full-blown swamp. This four hour trek was the toughest test of faith I’ve ever experienced, but it helped put American history into perspective.
We plowed through thorn bushes four feet tall, dodging mosquitoes the size of dimes. Snakes slithered by our feet and water ran out. During the last hour, everyone was yelling, screaming their frustrations as they slowly dissolved into ruins. During this whole ordeal, I watched and stayed quiet, mostly because I was frustrated right along with them. Kevin, our tour leader, was preoccupied cutting through thorns at the front. As team captain, the unspoken responsibility fell on me to motivate the team but regretfully, the team received only my silence.
What could I have done different when I felt the same way everyone else did? I have been reflecting a great deal on this incident and in hindsight, staying quiet was the wrong move, I realize that now. My responsibility to the group in that moment was to step up and keep the team stable, regardless of the battle raging inside me, because that is what a captain is meant to do. Now a purely motivational speech sometimes works, but I had gotten to know my teammates over that tour, and a speech without a purpose would fall on deaf ears, even if it was written by Patrick Henry himself. That year, my teammates responded best to challenges like steep hills or the hot sun. They did not see the swamp as a challenge. They saw it as an impenetrable wall. If I could have channeled my emotions to speak up and inspire my team, the journey through the swamp and rest of the day could have turned out very different.
Our whole team received somewhat of an eye-opening experience that day. The swamp was the exact route that slaves used to try and escape their masters during the era of slavery. As I walked through the jungle, my thoughts were only on escaping that wretched place, because it was miserable and I was tired. The slaves however, would have felt fear and anxiety on their entire trek. They would have had to worry about where to go, as well as where not to go. Not to mention, when they escaped the swamp, their journey was not even close to over. The slaves still had to flee hundreds of miles to escape their oppression, while I just had to go three miles to escape my discomfort. Overall, the experience was quite a shock and whenever I think of lessons taught in history classes, that unique perspective allows me a great insight into the subject and the people we talk about.