Exploration Five

1. "On the Rainy River" means the most to me. I like this story because Tim talks about how he was drafted, but he didn't want to go to the war. Instead he drove north heading towards Canada. On the way there he stops at the Tip Top Lodge where he meets an old man named Elroy Berdahl. The part that touched me the most came towards the end when Tim was on a boat with Elroy, thinking about his childhood and future. But then he imagines people calling him names like "Traitor" and Tim decides that he is going to go to Vietnam. My favorite quote to describe this moment is "I would go to the war-I would kill and maybe die-because I was embarrassed not to."

2. I connect the best with Tim, especially in chapter 4. At first he decides to run away because he is a coward and doesn't want to have to go through the war in Vietnam. But then he finally decides that he will go because he had no choice. The quote I described in the last question is exactly something that I would probably think to myself if I were drafted and had to go to war. I would feel just like Tim at this moment because I too would feel like a coward if I had to fight and die in war, while at the same time I don't want to be thought of as betraying my own country for not going to war like Tim.

3. I like how Tim describes everything that the men carried in the first chapter. To me the soldiers carried more than weapons. They also carried food, photographs, and other equipment. What I think weighs on more than any of that is that they are also carrying their emotions with them. Emotions of fear and anxiety about what could happen to them in war.

4. At the beginning of the second chapter titled "Love" a passage that I thought was good was in the first paragraph when Jimmy Cross visits Tim and they "talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried through our lives." This quote impacted me in way that even after many years of not fighting in battles, people who went to war still talk about everything they did during that time as well as remembering their own feelings about what they went through to stay alive. I think what Tim and Jimmy still carried in their lives are their emotions of what they had gone through.