One of my greatest achievements in high school was having a rule created and named after myself. I was out during free block with a couple friends right after a thunderstorm with flash flood warnings, when we had the brilliant idea to take a kayak across the flooded soccer field.

We came across the creek that divides the soccer field from the softball field, and it looked more like whitewater rapids than a creek.

I took the kayak we had brought out with us onto the water on a dare. I glanced downstream and pushed off without giving anything much thought. If I had looked a little more carefully, I would’ve seen trees and branches littering the surface of the water. Once I was out on the water, I had a good 15- to- 30-second run before I ran into a tree extending over the water’s surface and flipped. I remember all the things going through my head when the kayak turned over, but the biggest things that stuck out to me were how cold the water was - and then the sudden realization that I had to get the kayak and paddle out of the water with me somehow. The kayak and paddle belonged to a teacher at school, and I was enrolled in his class. I couldn’t let down one of my teachers, especially one that had input on my grades, so even though there were multiple opportunities for me to get out of the water without the kayak, I was fighting for my life trying to swim while dragging the kayak with one hand and holding a paddle in the other. I floated for a little under an hour, and ended up across campus. Indian Springs’ campus is huge, so circumnavigating it while trying to get a kayak out of running water with one hand was not an easy task. Eventually, I got to a point in the water where my feet hit the ground, and I was able to use a tree trunk skimming the top of the water to pull myself, the kayak, and the paddle out of the water where my friends eventually caught up to me.

I ended up getting a few lectures from the administration, but nothing I did was explicitly against the rules. The school, realizing that this was an oversight on their part, promptly created a new rule which my friends, and consequently the whole school, have lovingly coined as the Sid rule. While it’s cool to have a rule named after myself, in hindsight I could have been seriously hurt. This experience brought on a jolting realization that maybe I should think twice before acting as recklessly as I did, and although it was fun, I aim to not have any more rules named after me.