Turning Points: Interviews with the Poudre Community

TRANSCRIPT:

Mo: Okay, tell me about a major turning point in your life.

Mr. Rodriguez: A major turning point in my life, um, I would, maybe about 4 years ago when- I’m a huge mountain biker, especially downhill mountain biker, and I was riding my bike and I hit a rock a weird way. My bike went flying that way (pointing left, my body went this way (pointing right), and I went straight first into a rock. So my shoulder hit the ground, my head hit a rock and my helmet actually split open, and I was unconscious for probably solid minutes. And that turning point for me was that, life can end in a split second, and just enjoy every moment of your life because you never know when something is gonna happen.

Mr. Nichols: So, a turning point moment for me was in high school, being an upward bound student when we went to live at the university for 6 weeks, and that was cool because I was the first person in my family to go to college. So I enjoyed doing that, and when we did that, the first week we spent going backpacking and mountaineering and rock climbing and I got involved with a group in Laramie, Wyoming called Solid Rock. And later in college I worked for them as well and just the people I met there kind of opened my eyes to different things that I could do in life and gave me different experiences and taught me I could do things I didn’t think I could do; including scaling cliffs and climbing mountains and things like that. And that led me to meet my wife and lots of other turning moments we had there. We got over seas for 10 years, so that was an adventure and experience to move from the United States to an unfamiliar place. To see other parts of the world definitely changed my mind about a lot of things, which was pretty interesting, pretty fun, pretty scary sometimes. And I got to travel around the world a lot, which was really impactful, but yeah, I didn’t want to go to that camp when I was in high school. I thought “this is not what I want to do here”, but then the longer I spent there, the more I saw the value in it, it just kinda kept me from just hanging out all summer long. Ya know, I got to spend six weeks doing something and getting real life experience and got some college credits out of it. So yeah, I’d encourage anybody to do that.

Person 3: Um, probably - um I had a friend that died when I was like, 13 and that like, I don’t know, kinda made me change my views on like death and like, what like, living means. And like, I don’t know, I guess I was like really naive before and I thought that like, ya know, old people died, like that’s what happened. But like, I don’t know, that kinda really just changed my entire perspective like, I don’t know.

Mo is a Senior at Poudre High School and is in her first year working with the Poudre Press. She runs a blog called Watashiato Press, about the affect that people's words have on each other. Check it out here!