Quake Camping

• Sebastian Primmer, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2015

It was supposed to be a good week, so I wanted to go camping. I asked Douglas and Mitchell if they wanted to come camping so we brought two motorbikes and a four wheel drive. We then came to a rickety old bridge that went over a large chasm so we left the four wheel drive on the other side of the bridge so Douglas and I took a motorbike each and Mitchell walked across.
We had been for at least an hour. Then suddenly we heard an earthquake! The bridge had collapsed and the car fell down along with all our food supplies and phones. So there we were, stuck on the other side of a chasm. We were going to use the rope in the compartments on our motorbikes to go down the cliff face but it was slowly getting dark and pouring rain so not the best conditions for climbing down a cliff.
Mitchell still tried to start a fire to keep us warm so he drained out some fuel from the motorbikes. He then struck my pocket knife against a rough rock and then as the fuel ignited Mitchell was knocked unconscious and I was blown back to the edge of the cliff and was hanging on for dear life. Douglas came over to help me but once he had grabbed my arm and tried to lift me up off the edge the crumbled below him rapidly without warning he then fell onto a jagged edge. Mitchell was still unconscious so I had to go down to help him. I couldn’t tie a rope to anywhere above him but there was an area to tie the rope where the car had fallen.
I tried to get the phones out of the car so I could call for help, I used the rope that we’d used to tie down the motorbikes and threw it to hook above where the car had fallen. I used one motorbike seat for padding then swung across and smashed in to the side of the other cliff face and as soon as I stopped I had to start climbing back up to the car.
I reached the car and found a phone. The signal was weak but enough to make use of. I called one of my friends that was a helicopter pilot and owned his own helicopter. The best part was that he lived pretty close to us. Once I finished the call the car jolted down and I thought the car was going to fall, but at the last minute he hooked the back of the car so he raised the car up on top of the chasm so we could help the others and then he took us all home.
The next week we went to see if anything was still there to get back, but the only things left were one of the two motorbikes and the exploded motorbike so I took them home to remind me to be careful were I go camping.