Goodwill gone wild

This is the second of a two part series about my alternative spring break experience.
By Bryce Haugen

I don't make a habit of revealing my most intimate secrets to someone I've only known for five days. But that's what happened last week under a black night sky in West Texas.

Our version of the Pay It Forward tour, organized since 2004 by the University group Students Today, Leaders Forever, had already clocked a couple dozen hours of service in rural Nebraska, Denver, Santa Fe, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, before arriving at the Odessa, Texas, Salvation Army. At the Honky Tonk Badonkadonk crew's final stop prior to meeting up with five other tours in San Antonio, our 38 participants took on some characteristics of the town's Permian High School football team made famous in "Friday Night Lights."

Only for our crew, it was "Tuesday Night Candles." Sitting in a circle amid a wick-fueled glow, we shared what had impacted us the most so far and made personal commitments to incorporate paying it forward into everyday life. I promised to start a student group, a well-received pledge.

Much later in the evening, finding the confines of the Salvation Army gym too claustrophobic, Gretchen and I propped a door and stepped into the crisp night. A few minutes later, or so it seemed, I looked down at my cell phone. It was 6 a.m., and I had spent several hours spilling my guts. And the 20-year-old in a committed relationship genuinely cared about what I had to say. It felt better than sleep ever has. Hell, it felt better than sex.

"Do you ever use your story to pick up women?" Gretchen asked before we went inside for some biscuits and gravy.

"No," I said. "That would be really wrong."

"Good," she said. "But you could."

Inside, Michelle, the thick-accented wife of our Odessa contact, helped prepare breakfast and, more important, brewed coffee. Gretchen caught an hour of sleep, but four of us carried on, energized by caffeine and this hilarious - and considering the rows of snoozers a few yards away - obscenely loud woman.

We loaded the buses around 8 a.m. for a local thrift store. Everything's funnier when you're exhausted, and the appropriately adjectified Magical Megan (we assigned ourselves descriptors on the first day) conjured me out of my coma with a giggle session en route.

For most of the morning, before fantastic, complimentary homemade burritos, we reorganized and restocked a local thrift store. We might have had too much fun, and we didn't always flip our censor switches for the elderly customers. Those transgressions produced negative energy, causing a minor rift between participants, many of them cranky. Regardless of perceptions, the thrift store manager graciously thanked us for our work just before we headed to the mall to pick up some Permian Panther gear.

We headed to San Antonio that afternoon to meet up with another bus from the University of Minnesota, two from Bemidji State, one from the University of North Dakota and one from North Dakota State (where my brother's enrolling next fall - he's getting a pounding if he doesn't join their STLF chapter).

Following a quick bite in downtown San Antonio, we went to our hotel a few miles away, where we immediately started sharing stories with the other buses. One crew had line-danced at a bar in rural Mississippi. One of the Bemidji groups picked up cow chips in Beaver, Okla. (An ode to their mascot, no doubt.)

My sizeable crew of Honky Tonkers explored the urban sprawl surrounding our hotel for a couple of hours that night. Meanwhile, at least four others, as more than 20 had in Mexico three days earlier, violated the trip contract and had a few drinks.

Before bed - a real bed! - I talked for a good half-hour with Blake, a cosmopolitan East Texan with a barely discernable accent (he's "fixing to move to Alaska") about what life's really like in his enigmatic state (they're not all intolerant conservatives, it turns out).

Bright and early the next morning, more than 200 volunteers worked at a huge park that boasted an awesome view of an apparent Spanish mission. Some picked up trash. Others painted. To mix things up a bit, I joined a crew of almost exclusively Bemidji students to shovel and spread tons of mulch throughout the huge park.

Several members of our bus noticed an unpleasant discussion between our four bus leaders and four leaders of STLF National at the post-project picnic. It was March 15, and we sensed impending doom. Beware the Ides of March.

As we learned very quickly, someone had told Greg and Nickers, two STLF godfathers and members of the National core, about the drinking. On the quiet ride back to our hotel, a visibly pained Greg read us the trip contract and offered the Honky Tonkers a choice: Leave the bus if you feel you didn't violate it or stay on the bus, and face the consequences, if you know you did.

It was a case study in ethics - and friendship. Before he spoke, Greg knew at least one person was staying on the bus. The person who confirmed the rumor. One of his close friends.

Several hours later, the four people who stayed on the bus had started a rental-car journey home, leaving the rest of the guilty or bitter violators behind.

But how could someone self-incriminate like that? "It came down to refusing to lie to a friend," the prominent STLF member and inspiring loyalist said at his house in Marcy-Holmes on Tuesday night. "Lying would have saved a lot of pain, a lot of confusion and a lot of tough decisions, but the truth always comes out in the end."

Instead of letting the drama ruin the trip, we chalked it up as another learning experience. Returning downtown, we continued bonding over chicken-fried steak and okra before strolling San Antonio's famous River Walk. Bliss saturated the humid air as we met up with my new Bemidji friend John, whom I had shoveled with earlier, and enjoyed cigars and a ridiculously cheesy band that played Latino-style covers of rock classics. ("Another Brick in the Wall Part II" on recorder, anyone?)

Back at the hotel, following a lengthy closing ceremony, John, Mighty Mike (my real-life housemate) and I stayed up until the wee a.m., talking philosophy and marveling that, from our vantage, the glimmer of a single - lone - star cut through the city sky.

In too little time, we found ourselves on the bus for the long ride home up Interstate 35. The 35 remaining occupants caught some sleep, except our beloved bus driver Cal, and we threw yet another dance party on the way to our next all-nighter.

I disrupted a tendon while tossing around a football at an Oklahoma rest area. But the mangled muscle-to-bone connection paled in importance with the continually deepening emotional connections I felt and observed.

Those connections climaxed in our last gathering as a bus in an epic three-hour discussion. On the floor of a YMCA in El Dorado, Kan., we candidly discussed the trip, from the service projects to participants' attitudes to bus crushes. We often disagreed, but physically demonstrated our cosmic union when we locked hands and started spiraling: a collection of stars in a human galaxy.

Those who slept that night counted it in minutes, not hours. Many played air hockey and basketball, but we mostly just talked, making the most of the waning moments of the trip.

The next day in Story City, Iowa, coming full circle at the location of the first and last chapters (and stops) of this volume of the story, Eric commented about the weird coincidences he'd discovered on this trip (he went to high school with my roommate, for example). But as we discussed it, we realized we could find some type of bond with each student at the University of Minnesota - and by considerable extension, with everyone on the planet. It just comes down to awareness.

The Minneapolis skyline started peeking above the horizon less than three hours after lunch, as we bumbled into the south metro.

"The weird thing is," Megan said as we took the University Avenue Southeast exit, "It didn't even feel like I left."

I considered that for a while and decided I agreed. If home is where you feel safe and comfortable, I hadn't left.

That night (it was St. Patrick's Day, after all) most of the Honky Tonkers consummated our relationship over Jameson and Irish beer at Captain Corey's apartment. I wore a lei attached to a keychain that contained a compressed, real four-leaf clover I found at an abandoned house in Nebraska the first day of the trip.

Every so often that night, I glanced down at it, smiling, realizing beyond doubt I am at the very least tied for luckiest person on earth.

Bryce Haugen, staff reporter, welcomes comments at bhaugen@mndaily.com.