Yearbook

by Seth Rogen

  Then weave the broom handle (or other implement) through the exposed leg holes.

  And now TWIST.

  Once the traumatized Jewish child’s screams reach a deafening point, release. If all has gone right, the elasticity of the child’s underpants should unwind, causing the broom handle to spin like a windmill.

  I learned every swear word there is at camp (I thought “cock” was a vagina up until then, so that was valuable information), made friends I still have to this day, and can still operate most industrial dishwashing equipment fairly competently. Remarkably, this place that basically amounted to a Jewish Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Ryes? Lord of the Matzoh Breis? I’ll workshop this.) went largely without incident.

  That is, if you overlook the terrible, terrible incident that happened in 1997.

  Halfway through every summer, we would go on what was known as Tiyul, which was essentially a three-night camping trip. Now, as much as Jews love camp, I’d say they generally have an inverse relationship with camping, which is a VERY different activity. Camp had a swimming pool, bathrooms, a tetherball court. Camping doesn’t have jack-fucking-shit, and every year things would go wrong.

  In ’95 we were supposed to hike for five hours to a lake where we would camp, drinking water from the lake itself. We hiked all day to get to the lake and, when we arrived, were alerted the lake had beaver fever, which not only rhymes but also involves the word “beaver” and makes you shit yourself for days on end, so it’s hands down the most hilarious of diseases; but at the time, it wasn’t cool. We couldn’t camp there, so we hiked BACK to our starting point, which was the parking lot of a ski resort, where we slept until a bus could be organized to come pick us up. “Can’t get much worse than this!”

  In ’97, we were fifteen and our counselors were seventeen, which, again, is like entrusting a kitten to a ferret. The plan for Tiyul was needlessly ambitious. We were to take a ferry to Vancouver Island and hike the Juan de Fuca Trail, which is a TWENTY-NINE-MILE trail that winds along the forested mountainous coast. There are no services anywhere along the trail, and its current website describes it as “difficult and strenuous for a four-day hike.” We were gonna do it in three, which meant we needed to do about ten hours of hiking a day.

  The first day was hard but not yet disastrous. It drizzled as we camped out under tarps on Mystic Beach, and in the middle of the night, we snuck out into the woods to eat a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids, which were contraband.

  The next morning, we started early. British Columbia is technically a rainforest, which might sound odd—until you’re trudging through one of its many forests as it pisses rain. The already “difficult and strenuous” hike was becoming “super fucking hard and pretty fucking dangerous.” The trail turned into slippery mud.

  Because it’s the worst possible thing that could have happened, we were halfway through the second day of our three-day hike, putting us fourteen miles into the twenty-nine-mile trail, making our way across a narrow cliffside in a single-file line, when I heard one of the counselors, Jono, yell, “EVERYBODY STOP AT THE CLEARING UP AHEAD!”

  We gathered in a little seaside ravine and another counselor, Zoey, came running up to the group of us, roughly twenty-five kids. She looked spooked.

  “Aviva Strubisky fell. She sprained her ankle really fucking bad and passed out from the pain.”

  I went to elementary school with Aviva, and this added up. Once, paramedics had to come to give her smelling salts in Hebrew class in fourth grade because she fainted. Also, I had a crush on Aviva, so I was particularly invested in her and her consciousness and her ankle and her overall well-being. We bombarded Zoey with questions.

  Mayan Bomshtick: Is it bad?

  Zoey: We don’t know. She’s unconscious.

  Saul Moscovitch: That seems pretty fucking bad!

  Lauren Hershfield: What do we do?

  Zoey: I don’t fucking know!

  Mayan Bomshtick: Well, if you don’t fucking know, then who DOES fucking know?

  Zoey: I don’t fucking know!

  Saul Moscovitch: Well, what the fuck?

  Zoey: Yeah! What the fuck is right!

  Jono yelled from up the trail, “She’s awake!!”

  Zoey ran off, leaving us with another counselor, Dan, a very sensitive lefty Jew. He was starting to hyperventilate a little. All the campers looked at each other, and I’m pretty sure all of us were thinking: Remember when Dan broke down crying as he sang Indigo Girls at the campfire last Friday? Yeah, he’s not gonna deal with this well.

  Zoey ran back. “She’s awake, but she can’t walk.”

  Saul Moscovitch started to freak out a bit. “Great! We’re gonna fucking DIE out here!!”

  Yiron, an Israeli kid who barely spoke English, went up to Zoey. “I am good in woods and forest. I will go to find service road. I will get help.”

  Dan, the sensitive lefty, seemed to be nearing a panic attack and jumped at the chance to be active. “YES. Perfect. You all wait here. And me and Yiron will come back with help.”

  Before anyone could settle on whether it was actually a good idea or not, they marched out into the woods, and I was 99 percent sure I’d never see them again.

  Zoey unzipped her backpack and produced a signal flare, the kind where you pull a string and it shoots an orange ball of fire in the air. “If we see a boat on the coast, we can shoot this off. We only have one, though.”

  I thought, Wow, this is a real emergency if we’re resorting to signal flares. And I also thought, Please, god, let me shoot off the signal flare. I’d only seen them in movies, and although it was a clear sign of how dire things were, I thought it was cool as fuck.

  “Don’t worry,” Zoey said. “Yiron and Dan will be back with help soon!”

  Five hours later and Yiron and Dan still hadn’t come back. I pictured Yiron eating Dan’s corpse in the woods but then realized Dan’s corpse wouldn’t technically be kosher, so he probably wouldn’t do that. The mood was shifting from “this is a crazy story” to “wow, this is a potentially fucked-up story.” The rain was pouring down harder than ever, and a few of the kids were beginning to show signs of hypothermia. Zoey pulled me and Ben, my best friend, away from the group.

  “Jono wants to talk to you two.”

  We followed her about five minutes back up the trail, and the whole time I’m thinking, What do they want with me? Did they single me out as the leader of the kids? The smartest of the group, being invited into some sort of think tank to figure out how to handle things?

  We rounded a narrow rock corner and saw Jono with Aviva, who was lying in the mud, going in and out of consciousness. Jono produced a small ax and thrust it into my hand. He looked at me and Ben. “You’re the two largest kids in the group. Chop down two trees. We’re gonna lay a tarp over them and make a stretcher and carry her out the way we came.”

  Me: What do you mean?

  Jono: You heard me.

  Ben: I’ve never chopped down a fucking tree.

  Jono: Nobody here has, obviously!

  (Jews.)

  Me: We can’t carry her out of here!

  Ben: We couldn’t even walk to here without someone getting hurt, and we weren’t yet carrying an injured person, which I assume will make this whole shit a lot fucking harder.

  Jono: There’s no other plan. We gotta get out of here.

  It took us about thirty minutes to chop down the first tree, which was around the thickness of my arm. We hacked it into an eight-foot piece, which we could barely lift on our own.

  I looked at Ben. “Yo, dude, this is only one half of the stretcher and there’s no teenage girl lying in it yet. How the fuck are we gonna carry the whole thing out? We can barely carry this.”

  “Maybe once she’s in there, the weight will distribute it all out properly.”
/>   I didn’t really know what the fuck that meant, but at the time, it seemed to make sense.

  A half hour later, tree number two came down, and it was getting dark. The girls in the group had started to burn their tampons for warmth, as they were the only dry and flammable things we had. We tied the tarp to our tree trunks and laid our stretcher next to Aviva, who was shivering as her eyes rolled back in her head. Me, Jono, Ben, and Zoey heaved Aviva into the stretcher. We gripped the trunks and hoisted, lifting her off the wet ground. We all looked at each other. “Alright, we’ve got a rough twelve hours ahead of us, but we can DO this if we work together and don’t give up.”

  We started the march, and after three steps, Jono slipped in the mud, sending Aviva to the ground with a THUD.

  “Fuck, sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Aviva, you okay?”

  (Pained grumble.)

  “Great. Alright. Let’s try again.”

  We all gripped the stretcher. “This is gonna be harder than we thought, but we got this. Let’s DO it!!”

  Again, we hoisted. Again, we walked a few steps, and again, we slipped, ate shit, and dropped Aviva in the cold mud from, like, three feet off the ground.

  It had been twenty minutes and we’d moved about seven feet and arguably fucked Aviva up more than she’d already been fucked up, and she was already pretty fucked up. This shit just didn’t seem like it was gonna happen.

  And then I saw something. On the horizon, out on the ocean, lights! It was a ship! Miles and miles away, but there it was!

  It was my moment.

  “Give me the signal flare!!!”

  Zoey reached into her bag and slammed it into my hand. I leapt to the edge of the cliff, held the flare high above my head with one hand, gripped the rip cord with the other, and YANKED.

  Now, if I had to list the most disappointing moments of my life—which I don’t, but if I did—they would be:

  Seeing the Super Mario Bros. movie in the theater as a child

  Meeting George Lucas

  This shit with the signal flare

  What looked like a half-lit candle rose about twenty feet in the air and then crashed down into the ocean below. It was so unremarkable, there was no chance that the ship saw it. I barely saw it and it happened right in front of me.

  We were fucked. I remember thinking, If we die out here, maybe they’ll rename the trail after us? That would be nice. (Juan de Jew-Ca Trail? I’ll workshop this, too.)

  Then we heard footsteps from up the trail. They got louder and louder until FOUR GIANT, BEAUTIFUL, STRONG men in their fifties came around the corner. In my head today, they all looked like Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, the dude who heroically landed a plane in the Hudson River and is the subject of an insane Clint Eastwood film where the climax happens five minutes into the movie.

  The four men stopped in their tracks.

  Sully 1: What’s happened?

  Sully 2: Is there a problem?

  Jono approached the Sullies (Sullii?). “Yeah. This girl hurt her ankle and went into shock. Can you help?”

  Sully 3 stepped forward. “Of course we can. We’re goddamn fucking firemen!”

  I’m SURE that he didn’t actually say it like that, but it felt like he did. And they were, for real, goddamn fucking firemen.

  The Sullii instantly sprang into action, as a Fireman Sully is wont to do. “There’s a service road one kilometer from here. We can carry her using this stretcher you guys made.”

  BOOYAH. I’m a hero.

  Sully 4: Just give us five minutes to rebuild it and make it functional.

  Fuck you, Sullies. I thought we had a good thing going.

  Sully 1: It’s great you guys stayed together. Very smart. The worst thing you could have done is split up.

  Jono: Yeah…uh…well, technically, we did, I guess…split up…a bit.

  Sully 2: What in the name of god do you mean?

  Jono: Another counselor and camper went off into the woods to try to find help. You didn’t see them as you were coming, did you?

  Sullies 1 and 2: No!

  Jono: Fuck.

  Sully 3: There are two kids out there?

  Jono: Well, a kid and a counselor.

  Sully 3: How old is the counselor?

  Jono: …Seventeen?

  Sully 3: Oh no! That’s two kids!

  It dawned on us that Yiron and Dan being lost in the woods might actually be way, way worse of a situation than Aviva being passed out on the path. The Sullenbergers led us about forty minutes through the woods, carrying Aviva in a way that was so effortless, it made me legitimately mad. The whole time, they were questioning the possible whereabouts of the missing kids.

  Sully 4: Did they say which way they were going?

  Jono: Uh…no.

  Sully 1: Did they have a map or anything?

  Jono: Uh…no.

  The Sullenbergerses (sp?) led us up and over a small rocky face, where we found a dark, abandoned trucker’s road.

  Sully 2: Alright, now we trek up the road and maybe we can flag down a—

  The flashing of emergency lights became visible in the distance. Around the bend came an ambulance, and, even better, Yiron and Dan were in the front seat! Not only did they not die, they came with help!

  Sort of.

  Dan and Yiron had somehow made it to the main road, hitchhiked to a nearby small-town hospital, and got their one ambulance and a single emergency pickup truck to come and help us. Aviva was loaded in, along with Abby Saltzberg and Lauren Hershfield, who were showing signs of hypothermia.

  “Alright, we’re gonna take them back to the hospital.”

  “What about us?!”

  The ambulance driver looked over at the remaining freezing, wet children. He clearly had no clue what to do. I guess the magnitude of the situation was kinda hard to comprehend. A lot had to go wrong to make thirty people need rescuing, and a lot did. We needed a bus or something, and I guess that wasn’t easy on short notice.

  The ambulance driver turned to the dude in the pickup truck: “Chris, you stay with them. Help them till we’re able to get enough resources together to get everyone to safety.”

  Chris was maybe twenty and looked like a young James Marsden, which was to say, he was not Jewish, which at this point, was very comforting. The last Gentiles we’d encountered had been immensely helpful.

  Chris looked at us, and again, somehow, me and Ben were chosen, because, again, I think at that age, height becomes associated with skill and intelligence. I’ve always been pretty tall, which I took for granted until I recently tried to set up my short friend.

  “How tall is he?” my female friends would ask, often before any other questions.

  “What does that matter?” I was offended on his behalf. “He’s short! Who cares?”

  “Easy for you to say. I gotta date a short dude and always wonder—was there a taller version of this same dude out there somewhere?”

  Brutal, but good point.

  On this particular day, my height made me seem capable and maybe slightly more mature than the other kids, which Chris would soon see was very far from the case.

  He addressed the group. “Alright, I’m gonna take these two guys in my truck to the lot up the road, which is a five-minute walk. We’re gonna start a fire, and by the time you all get there, we’ll have it set up to keep you warm until they can get a bus to take you all somewhere safe.”

  Me and Ben climbed into the front of the pickup truck. We rounded the bend and pulled into a big dirt lot.

  Chris: Make a pile of wood!

  Ben: It’s all wet, dude!

  Chris (with Christian swagger): Don’t worry!

  We threw all the branches and logs we could find in a big pile while Chris went to
the truck. He came back with a bright-red canister about the size of a bowling pin. It said Gasoline in black letters on the side.

  “Alright, get back.”

  Chris doused the pile with gas and tossed in a match. It roared to life, but because it was still raining like crazy, it instantly started to die out. So Chris dumped more gas on the fire, but this time, the fire crawled up the stream of pouring gas, reaching the can, engulfing it in flames.

  Chris (shocked): Fuck!

  He dropped the flaming can, which started rolling back toward the pickup truck, where it would very clearly settle to a stop directly underneath the gas tank, blowing up the truck and likely killing us all.

  Chris: Stop it!

  Me: How?!

  Chris: Grab it!

  Me: It’s on fire!

  It kept rolling toward the truck. I had to act.

  I ran up and KICKED the gas can as hard as I could away from the truck, sending it bouncing across the parking lot, leaving a thirty-foot-long, eight-foot-tall wall of flames behind it. The rest of the campers came around the bend and were shocked to see what I imagine looked like a solid episode of Game of Thrones, though they were over a decade away from understanding that awesome reference.

  Although unruly, the fire wall kept us warm until a series of fire trucks showed up and took us to a fire station, where they had cots and soup and those thick wool blankets you see in disaster movies. We weren’t at “shiny foil blanket” level disaster, which I’m still thankful for, because once those shiny foil blankets come out, you know the shit has really hit the fan.

  They eventually took us to a hotel, where we got to use a pay phone to call our parents and spend the night before we were all taken back to camp. We were on the local news and our rescue was officially deemed a “provincial emergency.”

  Dan, the lefty Jew, had a meltdown when we got back and left for three days to get his mind together. Aviva was back at camp after two days, and she seemed impressed that I helped build a stretcher. Thankfully, her memory of being dropped several times was foggy.