Note: My short-lived attendance at Ricks College in the small town of Rexburg, Idaho twenty years ago was a defining stage of my life. Mostly for unpleasant reasons. Taking an extremely impulsive anarchist skate punk from California and putting them in the Rexburg of 1986, what can you expect? My being an 18-year-old with the maturity of a 9-year-old didn’t help, either. But it was in Rexburg that I fell in love with photography and abandoned my academic career to follow my passion.

These entries are written from the journals I kept when I was 18. Of course, at 38 today, I do not advocate any of the illegal activity discussed here. -Trent

Sunday, October 26:

Today we had to go back to Idaho. A seventeen hour drive. Mom told me to call her when we’d made it so she’d know we were safe. We picked up Ted and started driving. At the Benecia toll bridge, we gave the attendant 40 pennies (the correct amount for the toll) and drove away quickly as if we were short-changing him. His response: “Hey! HEY!!!” We kept going.

We stopped at the Nut Tree (a mistake, wasting precious time).

We stopped at Circus Circus in Reno and played Gauntlet for two hours (a terrible mistake).

Drake got a ticket in the middle of Nevada and the highway patrol acted too suspiciously about it. They were screwing us over.

We stopped for dinner at the Red Lion in Elko.

We got to Ted’s at 1am, mainly on the adrenaline gained from listening to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.” It was horrible. We still had five hours of driving to go, and I had a class at 8am.

I called home and told Mom that we were back safely (we weren’t, but I didn’t want her to worry).

Drake drove the rest of the way while I slept but he took a wrong turn that cost us another hour. We were home at 7am, Monday, just in time for me to go to class. Instead, I went to sleep until 12:30 or so, missing four classes!

The whole drive I wondered why I was going back. I knew I had to, and couldn’t have stayed if I had wanted to, but my heart ached at the prospect of not seeing Naomi. I’m writing this Tuesday night, and the aching hasn’t stopped.

And worse, Mom was worried sick when I called early to tell her we were home. We would have had to drive 100mph to make it home when I called, so that was a big screw-up. By trying to have her not worry, I made her terrified.