Written for US educational group. Washington DC. Used with permission.
For grade 3 (8 year old readers).
It’s a real scary thing living next to the tallest
mountain in the world. All I have to do is look out of my bedroom window and
there it is, Mount Everest, standing there in all its splendid magnificence,
just behind the gas station.
Both my daddy and my granddaddy are heroes, you know. My
daddy is in the army and he is always away from home. He is working in the
mountains in some far off country and I sure miss him. He calls on the computer
once a week and Mom and I talk to him. My granddaddy was a soldier, too, a long
time ago.
“Longer than I care to remember, sweet pea.” He’s
forever telling me.
My granddaddy still has a taste for climbing in the
mountains. “It never leaves you. It gets a man right here.”
That’s when my granddaddy makes a fist and hits on his
chest where his heart is and then he says, “I’m going to make you a mountain
person, too.”
I’ve always wanted to be a mountain person since I was
knee high to a snowman. So I’m going to make sure I am ready for the mountain
when my granddaddy says it is time to climb.
I know I can do this and I know people will think I’m
crazy to want to climb the highest mountain in the world but it’s what I’ve
always wanted to do. Honest.
When you know your own heart, you know things are going
to be all right. At least that’s what my daddy tells me all the time.
Marion is always trying to get the other kids in my
class to say stupid things about me. There goes the crazy mountain girl, she
shouts at me, but as my granddaddy is always telling me, what people say about
me isn’t my business.
I remember one day Marion brought a book into school
about mountains. I remember she said that the mountain behind the gas station
wasn’t anything more than a hill. She told me there was a book that said that
Everest was a long way away in China or Nepal or somewhere like that. Then she
said that we didn’t live in China or Nepal or anywhere close by.
I told her she was lying but she was having none of it.
Said I was a stupid kid who believed her stupid grandfather.
Then last Saturday guess what I saw? Go on guess. Give
up? It was Marion pulling herself up a tree using ropes and stuff like that.
She didn’t see me, so I just stood at the bottom of the tree until she got to
the top and I said to her that she must like climbing.
Well she nearly fell off the tree she was so shocked.
When she stood up, she told me that maybe she did like climbing and maybe she
didn’t. I didn’t think that kind of talk cleared anything up as I was still
confused.
When I told my granddaddy about Marion, you know what he
said? He said, why didn’t I take Marion along with us to climb Mount Everest?
Have you ever heard anything so crazy?
Just in case he was right, I asked Marion and she said yes. So that is
why the three of us are setting off to climb the highest mountain in the world.
I’ve packed soda and water. Marion baked some cakes with
her mom helping. She says that there are animals called Yeti and they live in
Mount Everest and they tend to like cakes. If you throw one to them, then
they’ll leave you alone. We didn’t see the Yeti, so we just ate the cakes
instead.
The climbing wasn’t as difficult as I thought, but I
guess all those months of training helped.
When we got to the top, granddaddy planted a flag, the
flag of the United States, and he said that we were the very first to get to
the top. Marion started crying because she said she’d never been the first in
anything. I gave her a hug and she said she felt better.
The other thing was that at the very top my granddaddy lifted
me up on his shoulders and he said that if I looked hard enough, I could see my
own daddy in the mountains where he was working.
I’m sure I saw him waving, so I waved back and when he
talked to me on the computer last week, he said that he’d seen me waving.
I reckon everyone should climb Mount Everest.
bobby stevenson 2012
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