Sacramento 2003

The true story of the best summer of my life, the summer I ran away from home. I wish I had more characters left, Santa Cruz was magic.

It was 2003, I had just turned 17, and I was standing naked on the top of a bridge shaking in fear. In the distance, I could hear them chanting "Jump! Jump! Jump!" and not wanting to look like a total loser I inched closer to the edge, held my breath and stepped off. It seemed like forever until I hit the water with a stinging splash before breaking the surface to hear the cheers. I swam to the shore and flopped myself onto the sand, catching my breath and smiling so hard it hurt.

Earlier that year I had packed a backpack with an extra outfit and bag of trail mix before hitting the road with a truck full of 16-18-year-olds, all running from something. Our first stop was Sacrament for the WTO protests where we had climbed through an open window of an abandoned building, making it our home and naming it 'The Icecream Parlor'. On this day, we were escaping the roar of protests to take a dip in the river and wash off the filth of the riots and dusty floors.

I sat up, brushing the sand off of my knees as I stared at the other teenagers swimming and splashing around. How did I get so lucky to have found these people, people who needed a family, who needed me? Just then my stomach growled and I realized I had not eaten since the day morning before. My new friend, a scruffy but scrawny boy from the midwest, sensing my hungry leaned in and told me he knew of an abandoned orchard across town. I threw on my clothes and hopped onto the handlebars of his dumpster bike and we led a parade to the orchard. We crawled through a hole in the fence one by one, each holding the sharp edges the bolt cutters left for the next one. We stuffed our backpacks full of over-ripe fruit before hearing police sirens and scattering back to our squat to devour our bounty. We were invincible, young and free and finally smiling.

When the WTO protests ended and it was time for us to move on we hugged each other tighter than any of us had ever been hugged, full of love and admiration. A few of us banded together and headed to the train yard to hop a train down the Santa Cruz, we heard there were more kids there, living in the woods by the sea, that they dumpsters were plentiful and the music played all night long. Just then, the train whistle blew and put on our packs and got ready to jump on board. Here we go, I thought, the world is ours.