My childhood was spent closely surrounded by nature. I grew up in Northern Michigan. Where if you walked down the street from my school there was a beach where everyone hung out with their friends. There was a thick, lush forest less than a block away from my house that I spent a good part of my time climbing trees and building forts with my friends. A lot of the kids were gone from school on the first day of the open season. What wasn’t a usual occurrence for some people was like a background to my life where the two never mingled. Most of my friends all hunted or fished. In the small country town, I went to school it was highly imperative to most the people in my school they had gotten their first deer. 

My family was never like that. Both my parents grew up in cities and when we moved there it was like a whole other world. I remember being very comfortable with how my life was. I might have grown up and gone to school in all good with nature, little country town but I never really understood it or even tried to. Expanding my horizons was never my forte and I was keen on it staying that way but my sister Jazzmin, when she started college, began to and she took me a long while doing it. 

“It’s so hot!” I yelled. 

I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be anywhere else then this bug-infested, hot, forest. It was a clear summer day and it felt like the sun was burning me alive. I lathered more sunscreen into my skin hoping I wasn’t going to turn into a crisp. 

“We’ll be there soon,” said Jazzy said as she advanced ahead of me. 

I put my sunscreen in my bag as I kept walking the narrow, little, trail through the woods. I heard the gravel crunch beneath my boots, felt the sun boil my skin, and could see enormous swarms of mosquitoes surrounding me that seemed dead set on eating me alive. I wondered if there why did I agree to do this in the first place. 

Then I remember me sitting in my air-conditioned, bug-free room when my sister came in. Her dark hair was pulled up in a high ponytail. She wore big clunky tan boots and dressed in a tank top and shorts. I should’ve known she was about to ask me to do something I wouldn’t like. Ever since she got into college she has been trying to go on “adventures ” This included roping me and our younger sister Hayley into it and the last time she asked us to be apart of one it involved eating dead bugs and Hayley who has a mortifying fear of bugs started screaming when it was only at least 5 inches near her. Needless to say that way the last one for a while until that moment. 

I understood she was trying to find herself like most people in college and this was apparently the way she was doing it but I didn’t understand why we needed to do it too. She told me she wanted to show me something and me being a combination of bored and curious agreed with her. I would later in the day live to regret it because she is the reason why I am walking on this trail, failing to fight off mosquitoes feasting on my flesh and trying to protect myself from the sun's UV rays. 

 “What is even up here?” I asked.

“Just wait and you’ll see,” She said. 

I assessed in my head we’ve walked close to a mile and a half. I couldn’t stand the heat or bugs anymore and I was tired. I was so done with this “adventure” and mentally noting to myself never to agree to one ever again. Soon we approached an enormous rock wall with a wooden panel of stairs going jig jags upward leading to a flat top. Together we descended the stairs, hearing the old wooden boards creak. When I stepped off the stairs. It revealed that I was on a cliff looking out to a lake. 

The cliff appeared to be made in sand or rock but what left me shocked and amazed was the view. I grew up around water, I would see it every day on my way to school, spent most of my summers at the beach, it was a familiar sight that I grew up with but I had never seen it like this. The lake looked like it stretched so far it reaches the ends of the earth. It was evening so it clear, blue, and tranquil. It was like glass how still it was except the ripples of the tide crashing gently on the shore and the few boats left on the water almost made the illusion real. We were on a cliff that sloped down about 15 feet to a golden shore. 

“So do you like it?” asked Jazzy as she sat down in the sand. 

“I love it,” I said as I joined her sat right next to her. 

My sister later told me later how she found this place. One summer when she was working as a camp counselor come of the coworkers she was friends with showed her it. She said she just loved it so much she just kept coming back. We lay on the sand until the sun dipped into the horizon and the lake reflected red, orange, and yellows of the sunset.  My sister and I still go there sometimes. I think that if I never stepped out of what was comfortable I would never see this view or learn how much I loved it.