They brought in two engineers — a man and a woman with the same last name — to talk to the class. The man engineer was skinny and had grey hair and a moustache. The woman engineer was skinny too, and she even looked like the man engineer, except her hair was brown and she didn’t have a moustache. The woman engineer was also kind of pretty, which the man engineer wasn’t.
The man engineer told us that next year we’d be walking uphill to and from school and then the woman engineer talked to us for half an hour about a new and revolutionary technology she’d discovered along with the man engineer, who was her dad.
None of us understood much, except that starting in September we’d have to walk uphill both ways to school.
“See, when she was young I used to tell her how school was uphill both ways,” the man engineer said. “She didn’t believe me, you know.”
“The likelihood of the exact conditions occurring naturally is almost non-existent,” the woman engineer said.
“Then how come me and all my classmates remember it?” the man engineer said.
“Well, we have yet to find a naturally occurring slope which is uphill both ways,” the woman engineer said.
“Anyway, you guys can all go home tonight and tell your parents how next year you really will be walking uphill both ways,” the man engineer said.
They also brought in a nutritionist who worked for the school board, and she explained how all the kids who took the bus to school would get on and off at the other end of the hill. “Part of the reason we are doing this is to encourage you all to get exercise,” the nutritionist said. “This measure will improve the overall fitness of children and help reduce childhood obesity.”
Leisha asked our teacher Ms. Ferrer if it was a joke. Ms. Ferrer said no, but we didn’t really believe her because they didn’t talk to any other classes about it. Mehmet said so to Ms. Ferrer and she said that was because the school had thought we were old enough to understand what was going on and that we’d find it interesting. Then she said she guessed maybe the school was wrong.
I went home and looked it up online and it turned out to be a real thing. There was a government website that said our school was one of the pilot projects, but there were going to be pilot projects all over the world.
Nobody talked much about it until the fall when school started again. On the first day of school everything looked the same. There was a bit of a hill up to the school, but mostly it was pretty flat. It didn’t feel the same, though. It was like climbing a mountain. By the time I got to the schoolyard my legs killed. After school I walked with Mehmet and Billy to Billy’s place. It looked like we were walking downhill, but it felt like we were going uphill. It felt even steeper than in the morning.
On the second day of school our class complained to Ms. Ferrer, but she said that was how it was. “You should be excited,” she said. “One day you can tell your children that you were some of the first people in Canada, in the entire world even, to really walk uphill both ways to school.”
Most of the school went along with it. The other grade sixes pointed out it was only for one year and the younger kids didn’t know any better. Like my little sister Jessica, who’s only in grade one.
That didn’t make it fair, though. I looked online some more and there was talk that all the elementary schools in Canada would be walking uphill both ways in five years and after that they’d do the high schools.
I did find one bit of good news, though. Apparently Germany has banned the technology. Their chancellor said something about how German kids walked enough hills and they didn’t need some stupid gimmick to get them in shape.
I told my parents that. My mom said that’s nice and my dad said good for Germany. I said we should move there, at least for Jessica’s sake, but my parents said we weren’t going anywhere.
I talked to Mehmet and Billy and they said Germany was far away and what could we do, but Leisha said her neighbour was from Germany. Leisha’s going to talk to her neighbour about teaching us German. That way when we’re grown up we can move there and when we have kids, they’ll at least be able to walk downhill one way.
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