On land or at sea, two Penn students' summer adventures

Two Penn students oeft the confines of the city for open space as part of their summer explorations. The sea stretches out in swaths of blue and slips into the horizon. Renee Farster looks out from the deck, following the lines until her eyes grow tired and she turns back to her home for the summer -- the USS Yorktown. Thousands of miles away, fellow Penn student Liz Caffrey, a College junior, also lets her gaze slide out for miles. Yet instead of the rolling of the waves, she follows the flatness of the Western Plains. For both students, summer meant somewhere far from the crowded streets of Philadelphia. In fact, the only thing crowding the terrain in Montana, where Caffrey spent her summer, was rocks. Strewn across the plains, the sedimentary rocks that many consider to be the geographic treasures of the Northwest were the basis of her summer research. Along with the 23 other students from around the country who took part in this field course run by the Penn Geology Department, Caffrey spent her days analyzing rocks, mapping them, and then learning about their geographic and historical significance with geology professors. "Its amazing to hold rocks in your hand and know that they're a billion years old," she said. This sort of wonder was heightened by the fossils she'd often find hidden in their dusty crevices. "We'd often find leaf fossils imprinted in the rocks, and then once, one of our professors took us out to look for dinosaur bones." On that trip, her friends found a dinosaur tooth lying in the dust. The program was also punctuated by trips out into the surrounding terrain, which wasn't always so kind to the inexperienced students. One weekend the group eagerly hiked up the Grand Teton mountains in Wyoming only to find their fun turned to fear as one of the students fell while trying to cross a waterfall. The group helped the injured girl down the mountain and drove her back to Montana. "Luckily, a policeman stopped us for speeding on the way back and found the girl -- who was bleeding -- free emergency care," Caffrey recalls, grimacing. Another memory, however, brings out a laugh. They had gone to visit some Wyoming hot springs, which were full of sulfur and "smelled like farts." Then, while the group was sitting there, a man walked up to a spring, bent down, filled up a big jug with it, and drank it down." Seeing the students' shocked expressions, he exclaimed, "'It's the fountain of youth, y'all, didn't you know?'" While Caffrey spent her summer examining the earth, Farster barely kept her feet on the ground, spending time on a Navy cruiser. Farster's journey began, however, on land. She has been member of the Navy ROTC program since her freshman year at Penn. "It means a drill every week, classes at 7:30 in the morning and workouts at 6:30. Then there's the four years of Navy after I graduate," she said. Nevertheless, the Wharton senior remains "grateful for the opportunity ROTC gives me." Not only does it pick up the tab for four years of college, but the Navy also sends Farster, as a full-fledged midshipman, on an assignment each summer. Last July, Farster's assignment had her voyaging from Curacao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, to Yorktown, Va., as the 567-foot-long, 55-foot-wide Yorktown searched for drug runners trying to enter U.S. territory. With state-of-the-art radar capabilities and potential weapon power ready, the ship searched out suspicious activity in the waters of the Caribbean. Farster, however, true to military-form, was closed-mouthed about the mission's accomplishments. "I can tell you it was successful, but that's about it," she said. While fighting drug smuggling may sound dangerous, Farster explained that her summer could have taken a more life-threatening turn. "Being out on the ocean means we're considered 'deployed' and ready for active combat. If there was a conflict anywhere in the world, we could be sent there." This time around though, the most action Farster saw was in the ship's public affairs office, where she put her Wharton marketing skills to use. Farster also helped her 399 other crew mates -- three of whom were women -- keep the cruiser going. Which didn't always translate into smooth sailing. "We hit a tropical storm," she recalls, describing how 13-foot waves rocked the ship. The ship was keeling so heavily that "we could walk on the bulkheads." However, it was when the weather calmed that the trip got exciting. On one memorable evening, a makeshift band that the crew had strung together held a concert on the helicopter deck. Farster joined in. "I got up and sang [the Stone Temple Pilots hit] 'Plush' with them, while the sun was setting behind us. It was an amazing feeling," she said. Another high point was the time they stopped in the middle of flat seas and everyone jumped in. "It was incredible, swimming out there in the middle of the ocean with no one else around," Farster added.