Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Reunions and Adventures

Katie D.

August 16, 2009 - 7:00 PM

A quick note on college friendships: people are in and out of town all the time in college. You get to be great friends with someone, and then they leave for the summer. You make some great senior friends and then they graduate. You live in a perfect house and then they all move out at the end of the year. You study abroad, they study abroad.

All that being said, I have friends now that are some of the best in my life. I have friends from abroad, friends from classes, friends of friends, etc. And as they come and go the people I spend my time with fluctuates, and when most of my friends are out of town, as has happened this summer, I have made new friends who will continue to be of great importance for this final year of college.

But there has been a core group of amazing friends that began forming the first week of freshman year, and solidified during winter term of freshman year. We are a group of eight, who have gone through college together as a pretty cohesive group, basically self-sustaining over the years. We have lived together, some of us took our first alcoholic drinks together, we have vacationed together, and generally made college an understandable thing because we have been through it together. These seven friends are absolutely central to my college experience.

Like I said, though, people in college tend to be relatively mobile. Seven of the eight of us studied abroad. Two are still abroad now. None of us went to the same countries, and all of us have come back, or will come back, greatly changed by this experience. The group has changed some, as well. During our freshman and sophomore years we were generally inseparable. Now we've had to learn to function without everyone present.

I was the first to study abroad. I left for Chile in March of my sophomore year, 2008. I loved my time there, and do not regret my choice of timing at all. However, the group has not been all together since then. That's a year and a half with the most essential unit of my college experience always missing a piece! Most notably, my friend Nathan studied in Japan all of last year, which meant that I hadn't seen him in a full eighteen months.

In September we will all be getting together for a reunion of our group. We'll be meeting up in Portland a week before school starts back up, and we plan to spend a couple of days in a cabin near Mt. Hood, catching up on a year and a half of stories. I can hardly wait.

In the meantime I'm catching up with these people as much as I can. We Skype, we talk on the phone, we have a facebook message exchange that's reached well over 1,000 individual posts. But when we get the chance to be together in person, it feels like no time has passed at all.

Nathan came to visit on Thursday. Seeing him after all this time was just like being back in the dorms, except for the year and a half of stories we had to catch up on. He is one of the funniest people I know, and had such amazing stories of his year in Japan. But we didn't just hang out and talk: on Friday we headed out to a nearby lake to go boating with our friend Grant and his family.

It has been years since I've been tubing behind a motorboat. I've graduated to kneeboarding and waterskiing mostly. I'd forgotten that hanging on to a tube behind a speeding boat was such a brutal workout. I'd also forgotten that you take a serious beating out there. Two days later and I still ache all over! But it was so fun to be out there, two people being pulled behind the boat. There were epic wipe outs, including collisions, swimsuit loss, and a notable episode where I skipped across the water for what they say was an impressive amount of time but what I remember as being hours and hours.

It was an amazing time, catching up and creating new memories.

Yesterday Nathan came with me on an AEI trip to Crater Lake with a group of Japanese students. One was a friend of his from Waseda, the Japanese university where he studied! It was so fun watching him interact with the group, chatting away in Japanese and being surrounded by people who didn't even come up to his shoulder. He asked me to vouch for his language skills, and I will say that I couldn't hear any difference between his unintelligible Japanese and what the students were speaking. I'd call that a good sign.

I've had an amazing summer. It's been full of all kinds of adventure and I've made some wonderful new friends. But this weekend with Nathan and Grant made me remember what a special thing it is to have a group like that, friends who know all my stories and secrets and who have been experiencing the same things together for three years. I can't wait until we're all together again! I can't wait for the inside jokes and the time spent just hanging out, or adventuring to the mountains or coast, or seeing events on campus. We'll all be busy this year, writing theses and getting ready to graduate and go off on all our different directions in life. But we've got this year to be back together.

And I can hardly wait.