Melting my own frozen breath

Today was interesting at Penncrest..  Some of us listened to a professional adventurer talk about his amazing trips to the north and south poles.  The pictures were beautiful, the stories compelling, and let's face it--we each were a bit dumb-struck that you could do this for a living.  And the entire time I listened and watched, I thought about Latin.  Now I admit that I am prone to daydreaming, and Latin forms the stuff of most of my dreams.  But I found the connections between our guide's melting his own frozen breath to get drinking water and learning Latin too obvious to miss.  

What is that, you say?  You don't see the connections?  Let me elaborate:

Just like the south pole, Latin is not some immediate place.  It is not easily accessible, filled with jocular citizens and attractive singers.  You don't get on a plane and fly to Latinium, you don't go to a Latin restaurant, you don't find a Latin station on your radio.  It is far away in about every possible connection.  Time separates us.  Geography and climate separate us.  Culture separates us.  And our own social niceties make seeking it out hard.  I mean, come on:  how many "in" people do you know reading Latin and name-dropping Cicero at lunch or in the movies?  No one simply stumbles into Latin like you might into a good sale at the Gap.  You get there because you set off to go there. 

And the getting there is not easy, either.  Our adventurer-guide spends crazy amounts of time preparing for his various expeditions.  We saw the pictures (or know someone who did):  the physical stamina, the mental focus he required.  Latin requires no less.  Rarely do we get a fellow to speak with, someone to write to.  Our conversations are with long dead writers.  We must overcome the barriers of vocabulary and grammar with hard work.  And though we don't have to run up mountains pulling tires behind us, we do need to return time and again to stories, vocabulary, and sentences.  We need to write notes, paragraphs, little snippets of thoughts as they come.  And we often do this alone.  

More importantly, our guide considered the destination worth the effort.  He arrived in a remote place with a desolate landscape, yet it was beautiful and life-changing.  He considers it so worthwhile he takes others there, repeatedly.  Anything he has to do to get there is worth it--even walking for two days straight, even scraping his frozen breath off the inside of the tent so he could melt it for water.  In Latin we have the last two millennia calling over their shoulders to us, urging us to come see what they have gone on ahead to discover.  They considered the destination worth the effort.  They returned repeatedly, brought others, overcame obstacles for the pleasure of reaching this goal of Latin.  The goal IS worth it.

So as I listened, I connected with his struggles, his disciplines, his goals, his victories.  I saw Latin in every picture.  And I knew how good the water tasted, even though flavored with tent.