It’s three in the morning on Sunday, April 29^th 2007.  I’m sitting in the middle of the woods in the freezing rain, and I’m about to tackle a man into the mud.

I’ve been awake for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.  In that hour and a half I’ve had to trudge through half a mile of mud without a flashlight, pick a snake off of me, and help build a campfire.  I’m about ready to collapse.  My shoes and socks are soaked, as is my jacket, which I abandoned about half an hour ago.  But all of this pales when I see a man, roughly six feet, five inches tall storm into the campsite.  He’s wearing a white button down shirt tucked into black pants all covered in mud.

“Where is she?” he yells, glaring wild-eyed around the camp.

I stand up from the campfire where I have been desperately trying to stay warm.  “Who?” I ask.

He does not answer; instead he stomps over to a tent and pulls a girl out of the tent by her hair, throwing her down onto the cold ground.

“Hey!” I shout, leaping over the campfire.  A split-second later I’m airborne and crashing into his right shoulder, and moments after that, we’re rolling on the ground.  I angrily growl, “Get off me!” as I kick him squarely in the chest.  He starts to stand when my partner hits him in the jaw.  I stand up to grab him again, but before I can reach him, he’s already got my partner pressed up against a tree and I see the girl running out into the woods.  Then she trips.

Damn.

Someone yells, “Cut!” and I’m not sure if it’s the director or the assistant director or one of the cameramen.  All I know is that I’m brushing dirt off my shirt and pants and heading lazily back to the campfire.

“Jack, that was great,” says the 6’ 5” sophomore.  “See if you can get a little more air on the next one.”

“No problem big guy.” I say, both shivering and yawning at the same time.

Here I am in the middle of nowhere in western Massachusetts standing in the pouring rain.  I’m on a film shoot for “The German Wheel,” an Emerson College Film project that centers on a circus in Nazi Germany.  Naturally, with my history in the circus, I was eager to try out for it.  That is, until we got the weekend forecast, which consisted of rain, clouds, more rain, and a nighttime low of 40 degrees.

Soon enough, though, I’m back on my feet and ready to attack him again.

The way I figure it, I’ll be wet, I’ll be miserable, but at least I’ll actually be doing something to take my mind off of how miserable I am.  And after all, tomorrow will be warmer, it won’t be raining, and I get to ride a horse, which in my action movie-laced mind, sounds like the coolest thing ever.

Of course, that was until I met the horse.