Our church Pilgrim Fellowship club went on a weekend trip to Mauna Kea during my senior year. We were all so excited as we planned what to eat, what to bring, how we would prevent the car radiators from freezing up and bursting, what we would wear and how we'd get there. I don't think I had ever looked forward to anything as much in my entire life. I was looking forward to this trip for weeks.

We congregated at the Church of the Holy Cross, piled into some cars, and headed for the mountain. Up the Saddle Road until we came to a small side road that turned right, toward Mauna Kea. Right turn, and here we go. It was a rather sickening trip up, to tell the truth. If I were prone to motion sickness, I would have lost my breakfast long before we reached the cabins, which served as our over-night accommodations and jumping-off point the next morning.

We ran around the campgrounds for an hour or so, shivering in the cold mountain air, charging through the patches of snow that lay on the ground. Although the air was pretty thin, and oxygen was pretty scarce, none of us seemed to have any problems breathing.

The rarefied air did make us all tired, however, and we turned in early after dinner and a few rounds of cards.

I awoke the next morning as nauseated as a pregnant woman. I had altitude sickness in the worst way, and knew that my dreams of mountain-climbing glory had come to an end. There was no way I was going to be able to make the final walk to the summit.

Ron Takata and Geraldine Shiraishi also crapped out, and the three of us spent the morning adjusting in the cabin, and walking around outside in the crisp air. It was invigorating, but depressing. We knew that the others were having the experience of their lives.

After a few hours, the others began returning, their cheeks rosy from the nippy air and mountain wind. They were chattering away about the frozen lake, and the 100-yard gravely climb to the top (one step up, a half-step slide backwards).

What a major disappointment. We never did get past the cabins.

Our zoology/physiology teacher, James Noda, once turned me in for cutting class. I didn't actually cut class of course, but he wanted to teach me a lesson. It was during the preparation for the annual senior dance. I was to be in charge of lights, a rather innocuous job, but an important one none-the-less. No lights, no dance. I never took it seriously until the day of the dance when I discovered we were short about two dozen light bulbs. So, I had to scramble, appropriate some from my home and my friends' homes, and buy some with no approved budget.

We had a meeting that started during the lunch hour, and ran late. Instead of asking permission from Mr. Noda, I stayed at the meeting that cut into the time I was supposed to be in Mr. Noda's class. So I just never went.

I got a note in my next class to see Ung Soy Afook (initials "USA") immediately. He called me into his office and showed me a note he had gotten from Mr. Noda. It read: "Call Craig Miyamoto in and scold him for cutting my class!"

Now, this was the only time I ever talked to Mr. Afook, and when I was called to see him, I could only imagine the worst things happening. My ass was grass, right? Wrong.

Mr. Afook said Mr. Noda probably was just hurt that I hadn't consulted him before staying at the late meeting, and that I should just go up to him and apologize for not thinking clearly.

So, I went up to Mr. Noda's class immediately, hat in hand (well, not really, I didn't wear a hat), and apologized for being so stupid. What could he say? He forgave me, for after all, he knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I was one of his favorite students.

It goes without saying that I got an A in his class.

Newswriting class was one of my favorites. Mrs. Fukabori had a reputation of being a tough teacher, but she liked me a lot and encouraged me to take up a career in writing. Later, when I took up journalism in college, then went to work for newspapers, she kept up with my career via Mom.

Mom said she was proudest of me when I sent home a clipping announcing that I had been made managing editor of the publishing company I worked for in Los Angeles.

Anyway, I used to write under the nom de plume (that's "pen name" in case you don't understand French) of "Kraig." My specialty was off-beat creative feature stuff. I'd do anything to get out of doing serious stuff and turned out weird items by the bushel. Every edition of The Viking carried at least two strange articles by Kraig.

If you look in my senior yearbook, you'll see that a number of friends signed their pictures "To Kraig." I don't know if they really thought I spelled my name that way, but I like to think that they were smarter than that. Although, several teachers believed that how I really spelled my name.

It was a fun class and it made me wish I had taken it during my Junior year. One day, my very close friend, Jean Hirata, came running in waving a sheet of paper. She had just picked up the list of students who had been named to the National Honor Society, so she could do a story for the school paper. She was so happy, telling us "I made the list! I made the list!" Well, good for her.

Of course, we all crowded around to see if our names were on it. Some were, some weren't. I was not on the list. And that really made me angry. But I tried not to let the disappointment show, and tried to be happy for those who did make it. Another person who didn't make it was Cherylyn Zane. She wept, unable to hide her disappointment.

"Don't you think you deserve to be in the honor society too?" she asked me. I told her that what I thought really didn't make a difference, but that if anyone deserved it, she did.

Honor Society membership goes to the top ten percent of the graduating class, so some of us mentally figured out how many that meant. The actual list was about two or three students short of ten percent, so I think we all harbored secret thoughts about how the committee made a mistake, and would name more of us when they discovered their oversight. Fat chance.

Jean was scolded for releasing the list, and for a while there, it looked like they might take away her membership in the honor society. That would have devastated her and would have ticked me off something royal.

But they didn't take it away, and I felt good for her during graduation ceremonies when she sat with the rest of the Honor Society members in the front rows, while Cherylyn and I -- and the rest of the 600 or so ordinary seniors -- sat behind them.

So, we all graduated. I won't dwell on graduation -- we all went through it and know what it's like. We sat through the ceremonies, sang the class song, honored the new members of the National Honor Society, hugged each other, wiped away some tears, gave each other leis, went out to dinner and a couple of parties, and got home just as the sun was coming up.

Another day, another milestone. Ho-hum.

I spent my last summer at home working at Hilo Nursery with about 50 other guys. It was a position with the State Dept. of Agriculture's Forestry Division and it paid $1.25 an hour, 15¢ above the minimum wage of $1.10. We were proud to be working for higher than minimum wage, and when the minimum was raised during our tenure, we all felt that we would be getting a proportionate raise in pay, say to $1.30 an hour. What a bunch of dreamers.

Mr. Kawasaka, who was the father of my classmate Carol, lived on our street, and was conducting the job interviews. That one was a slam-dunk; I got the job. He told me I'd have to buy some gear before the first day of work -- a yellow oilskin raincoat, a waterproof hat, a water canteen and appropriate belt, and some rubber boots. Oh yes, and bring lunch every day. They'd supply the water, tools and transportation.

I borrowed the money from Mom to buy what I needed, and arrived at work the first day with a stiff yellow raincoat, just like everybody else.

Our primary job for the next three months was to plant trees in the Panaewa Forest, and to clear brush around the trees that had been planted the year before. It would have been great fun, except for this ass-hole of a straw boss that we had. What a dick-head. Yelling all the time, acting as if we were stupid cretans. Hell, I was going to be a doctor, not a soil-turner like him.

The work was tiring. We had to carry a bunch of seedlings in a wet gunny sack, keep ten feet between us, pace off ten feet, whack our pick into the ground with one powerful stroke, stick a seedling into the hole, tamp it closed with the pick or our foot, pace off another ten feet and do it all over again.

Monotonous and tiring. Bearable, except that right from the start, Straw Boss Man started yelling at us and telling us we were doing it all wrong. It was his first job out of college, and I think he was trying to establish his authority over us. Hell, he could have whispered and we would have done what he wanted.

When that first day was done, I was filthy. As soon as I got home, I jumped into the shower, washed away the dirt, ate a little supper and crashed until the alarm clock rang in the morning. Then, it was back to the jungles again.

After one week, most of us had added gloves to our kit, to protect our hands from blisters, and to protect the blisters we already had. We were paid weekly, and practically all of my first paycheck went to Mom to pay her back for the stuff I bought.

Each day was a carbon copy of the day before. Jump in the truck, suffer a bouncy, jostling ride for about 30-45 minutes into the forest, unload, and plant seedlings. We trudged through miles of forests. Yes, I said forests. I never quite comprehended why we were planting trees in forests when the forests were already full of trees. We discussed this at length during water and lunch breaks (among ourselves of course, because nobody would ever dream of talking to boss Yamada unless we had to).

Many days, it rained. In buckets. In bathtub loads. We'd slog along, planting trees in the mud, getting soaking wet despite the waterproof hats and raincoats, and rubber boots. We'd eat our lunch huddled under ferns, trying to keep our food from getting soaked. It was miserable when it rained. We were cold and wet, our feet were sloshing around in our boots, and when we finally got back to the nursery and took them off, our toes were shriveled and blanched. It's amazing that I didn't catch any colds that summer.

Years later, when I saw pictures of American soldiers slogging through the tropical jungles of Vietnam, I was reminded of my days as a junior forester in the great and expansive Panaewa Forest.

Each of us had a chance to stay back at the nursery for one week during the summer. It was done in alphabetical order, so my bunch included Melvin Miyao, Raymond Miyashiro and Solomon Malani. This special duty was a break from reality. Indeed, it was like heaven, compared to the hell of the forest.

The only distasteful job was when we had to shovel planting mix out of the gigantic sterilizer. That stuff smelled terrible, sort of like cooked manure. In fact, that's exactly what it was.

Part of our job was to screen dried horse manure. Picture me and Sol Malani throwing manure on a screen, and rubbing it with pitchforks while this red-brown dust rose up into the air and straight for our nostrils. Think about that. We were breathing in horse shit together.

You get kind of close with your partner when you do that. Sol had been a star basketball player for Laupahoehoe High School (he made the state all-star team). He transferred back to the University of Hawaii from Oregon, and I'd bump into him every now and then the next year. We'd stop and talk, recalling our days together in minor, manure detail.

About half-way through the summer, they took away our picks, and gave us sickles and machetes. Our job now, they said, was to clear away brush and weeds that might be crowding out last year's seedlings. The work was a little easier, since we didn't have to march in formation and schlepp heavy bags of seedlings. Oh, we did cut down a few year-old trees by mistake, but we bore Straw Boss Man's tongue-lashings and accusations of stupidity fairly well.

There was one time, though, when we entered a grassland area with bushes. "Watch out for bees," one of the supervisors said, and of course, no one watched out for bees. No one, that is, until one of the guys accidentally cut down a bush with a hive of brown bees in it.

You know how it is in the cartoons when a swarm of bees hovers overhead and heads straight for a victim? Well, it's like that in real life as well. Those bees were everywhere, attacking everyone in sight, and we all scattered to the four corners of the earth, the supervisors laughing like crazy. It goes without saying that we checked out every bush very carefully after that, before whacking it down.

But, I couldn't complain too much about the experience. After all, it was the best money I ever made.

We made, let's see . . . $1.25 an hour times eight hours a day equals ten bucks, multiply that by five days a week and you get fifty dollars. Then, subtract social security, state and federal taxes, plus a disguised fee to the labor union, and that left about thirty-five bucks a week to bank.