Marion Young

The distance traveled matters in any journey. Sometimes we can measure the distance of a challenge not by how far, but how high instead.

Samantha Yeung ’29 traveled 6,000 miles from Hong Kong to attend The King’s School in Canterbury, England. Then she traveled another 3,000 miles from Canterbury to arrive at Bowdoin College. On the morning of October 3, Yeung traveled eight more miles—except four of these miles were straight up, and then the next four were straight back down.

On October 2, I traveled with the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC) to New Hampshire to climb Mount Adams. We camped close to the base of the mountain, waking up the next morning at 4:30 a.m., and rallying our spirits with soggy oatmeal and a handful of cornnuts. We started our journey for the day before the sun had started its own, letting our headlamps lead us up the trail.

“I grew up as a Hong Kong Canadian Scout, and we were outdoors a lot. But I’ve never done anything like this,” Yeung said. “It was straight rock. We were just going up rocks and rocks and rocks.”

It’s true; the last mile to the summit consisted of rocky terrain. On the final mile of our climb to the summit, and our first mile back down, you would likely find us crouched, using our hands and arms to get across the boulders.

“My favorite part of the outdoors is the smell. For example, when I was climbing, I used my hands to help me with the rocks, and that made my hands smell like nature. I like the mossy smell, and the smell of dew from the rock, too,” she said.

Pulling herself up over a boulder is not the only way Yeung puts her hands to work. She uses them at Sidney J. Watson Arena on brooms and stones as a member of the Bowdoin club curling team.

“There’s a lot of mental or mind games that go into it. When you’re down, when you’re losing, do you give up or do you say, ‘We can come back from this?’ And where do you want to go? What kind of play do you want to have on the ice? So you have to think. How do we score the most points? How do we knock out there in a rock so we get three and they get one instead of four?” she said.

Yeung’s hands often find the strings and bow of a violin in the orchestra, as well.

“I love being able to make music with other people and seeing how everyone’s part comes together. Sometimes during rehearsal, I wish I didn’t have to play so I could listen to everyone around me. But it’s so wonderful having a skill that you can share. It’s lovely,” Yeung said.

And on Thursdays from 2 to 3 p.m., you’ll hear her voice on her own WBOR show.

“I just started my first radio show, and it’s called ‘Silver Lining.’ My parents stayed up till 3 a.m. to listen to it. On the show, I play a lot of jazz music, which is what I mostly listen to,” Yeung said. “It felt really nice for my parents to be able to hear what I listen to in my own time, especially because we’ve never been a family that played a lot of music in our home.”

Yeung said the name of her show comes from jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and his rendition of the song, “Look For The Silver Lining,” and also from her own life philosophy.

“The other reason I chose that name is because I can be a pessimist sometimes. But I’m a pessimist who’s now trying to always look at a situation with a positive light. There’s always an upside,” Yeung said.

On an eight-mile hike, you might say a silver lining found from the strenuous climb is the view at the summit. Although, you could also say it’s the distance traveled that reminds us why the labor of a journey is so important anyway.

“I wanted to quit 0.2 miles in. I wanted to turn around, but that wasn’t an option, so we kept on pushing. When I reached the summit, I still wanted to tap out, but you really can’t on a 5,700-foot mountain,” Yeung said. “And then on the way down, everything hurt. But I know now I can do hard things. To me, it means that you can commit to things you don’t want to do and see it through. My favorite part of today is looking back and seeing how far we have come.”

Whether it’s traveling across the world from Hong Kong to Canterbury, climbing to the top of Mount Adams, or making the walk to Watson, orchestra or the radio station, the silver lining of going any distance might not just be reaching the summit, but the reminder of the ground you’ve covered, and the ground that’s yet to come.