I heard rustling in the bushes behind me.

A bear.

I immediately jumped to my feet, armed with merely the journal and pen I held in my hands. I approached the bushes slowly, thinking for some reason a quick glance would alleviate my fears. More rustling, this time louder.

Run!

I flew backwards, smacking to the ground, subsequently engulfing my entire body in a cloud of dust and dirt. All those hours scrubbing my body with a bandana for nothing, I thought.

Just as I rose back to my feet, it appeared.

A marmot.

The furry, gopher-like creature sat there admiring me. We exchanged looks for what seemed to be twenty minutes, the longest staring contest I’ve ever had. Suddenly, it flinched — I won. Within seconds, it disappeared.

---

As a final rite of passage out of high school, my school offers a three-week-long backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Each senior class views this trip as an obligatory tradition. Placed at the end of May, it’s the last activity we have as a class before graduation.

Divided into groups of eight to 10 students with two instructors, we hiked nearly 80 miles throughout the mountains with backpacks filled to the brim.

Months before the trip, I daydreamed about what might happen. Bear attacks, mosquito bites, fatigue, coldness and insomnia filled my mind. (OK, well the probability of a bear actually attacking me was little to none, but the other options were actually quite possible.)

I shook off the fears almost immediately when I remembered that my older sister went on the trip. If my girly-girl, sister — known for her singing and dancing — could survive, so could I.

That's when I realized I forgot the most nerve-wracking, possibly traumatizing part of the trip: the mandatory four-day-long solo.

---

We sat in a circle around our licked-dry pots and pans the night before we would depart on our solos. Day 14. Thus far, the trip had been incredible; I grew extremely close with the others and adapted pretty easily to a life without cellphones, wireless Internet, showers and the other luxuries of civilization.

“We will be separating each of you into your quadrants tomorrow morning,” Kenzie, one of my instructors, told us. “By the looks of it, none of you will be able to see or hear each other.”

That’s when the overwhelming, indubitable grasp of loneliness hit me. Four days. Three nights. No communication. I felt like I was headed for an insane asylum.

---

Solitude. Interminable, copious amounts of solitude.

A solitude that can’t be fixed with the buzz of a cellphone or the clacking taps of a keyboard. A journal, a pen and my mind were the only activities I had to keep me company for four days.

It was easy the first few hours. I drew flowers, wrote about our trip so far and explored my quadrant. Rocks, a tree and a gently sloping hill constituted my home for the next few days — I might as well make myself comfortable. Then night hit.

Without a watch, I used the sun’s cues to determine my bedtime. The sky slowly turned from blue to pink to orange as darkness approached. Without any thought, I slipped into my sleeping bag with hopes that I’d fall asleep before it turned dark.

---

The sun leaked through the tarp, first hitting my blue Nalgene bottle above my head. The reflected light warmed my face, waking me up.

I immediately grabbed my journal and read what I wrote the previous afternoon. I read over each word, even taking time to correct my own spelling and grammar. This tedious focus on correction served as a temporary form of entertainment.

I closed the journal. What is there to do now?

I stepped out of my sleeping bag and headed towards a big, light gray rock. With my journal and pen in hand, I scaled up the rock and sat comfortably in the crevice at the top. I surveyed my surroundings from the highest point in my quadrant, gazing down through the trees at an open meadow. With a closer look, I saw a family of deer grazing the fields. After staring at them for a few minutes, I began to write.

Writing in a journal seemed to come naturally. I don’t usually keep a journal at home but the freedom of expression associated with it enticed me. I wrote endlessly, detailing the important moments of my senior year (even shamelessly detailing the latest gossip and my love life). I then drew a large Block ‘M’ horizontally across one page with my blue pen. The ‘M’ was so large it took nearly 20 minutes to shade in. With each stroke of my pen, my excitement for my future at the University grew.

I closed my journal. The sun sat directly above my head as I remembered a conversation my friends had before we departed on our solos:

“Are you going to write her a letter?”
“Probably. Are you going to write any?”

“Probably.”

Letters hadn’t even crossed my mind.