Boy Scout Beach

I've convinced myself that, although some people tell me that in order to get good at writing fiction I need to practice, I really should never write fiction again. I'm not very proud of my last two blog posts; any fiction I seem to produce seems devastatingly hokey to me.

However, I still want to practice story-writing. So I guess I'll try writing stories that actually happened. Wish me luck.


Last summer, I and 19 other women on Juneau Summer Project headed out to Boy Scout Beach to camp. Technically we were backpacking, because we had to hike a mile to the site with our food, tents, etc. loaded onto our backs. This short hike covered a wide range of gorgeous terrains (as many hikes in Juneau do): forest, open field, marsh, beach. The beach was beautiful; the water stretched out almost as far as the eye could see, but was cut off by snow-capped mountains lining the horizon. The beach was soft with sand and stopped abruptly with a field of tall grass.

I occupied myself with building the fire while the other girls set up the tents and galavanted in the rising tide. The fire was of minor importance, as we had already eaten dinner and the weather was relatively warm, but I had a trick I wanted to share with the ladies that Elizabeth had shown us the previous summer: fire breathing.

It was pretty simple: crumple up a piece of newspaper, shove it onto the end of a stick, light it on fire, fill your mouth with corn starch, and blow the corn starch into the blazing newspaper. The result can be pretty impressive when done well, as all the little corn starch pieces catch fire and spread out in the air like a blow torch. I was the first to demonstrate, and the problem I found was that if you don't blow out the corn starch almost immediately after putting it in your mouth, your saliva moistens it and it doesn't want to be blown. Nevertheless, we amused ourselves with this trick for a good ten minutes.

The tide was rising quickly and it was getting dark (not because the sun was really going to go very far below the horizon, but because it was cloudy). I went out into the water with one of the ladies and timed it as the water level traveled about ten meters in a minute. We couldn't really see a line in the sand where we anticipated the water level would stop. We were camping high on the sand close to the grass, which was too tall to camp in. Behind the grass a ways was the beginning of a pine forest with a clean floor where theoretically we could have camped, but we wouldn't have felt it fair to say we had camped on the beach in that case.

We went to bed kind of late, about 11:00 p.m., and fell asleep without a plan regarding what would happen if the tide got too high. We reasoned that we had camped on this beach the previous summer, when the tide had risen at about the same time of day, and hadn't had any issues with the water level getting too high, so why should it be a problem this year?

I awoke at about 1:00 a.m. to the sound of Lexi's voice hissing my name from outside my tent. I had been in deep sleep and was pretty groggy when she explained to me that she had set a frisbee on the sand about ten feet in front of the tents, and that she had stayed up watching the water level with the plan that if the water reached the frisbee, she would wake me up for collaboration. I started coming to; it was decision time. Do we wake the girls up and move our tents to the forest area? Do we wake the girls up and leave altogether? Do we do nothing and risk getting everything, including ourselves, pretty soggy?

We decided to leave. It wasn't worth the risk, and if we were going to have to pack up and go, we might as well go all the way home rather than try to set everything back up elsewhere in the middle of the night just to say we had camped through the night.

We woke the ladies up and everyone sprung into action. Impressively, we were all packed up and ready to go within ten minutes. The water had risen almost to where our tents had been, and we determined we had made the right choice. While everyone was folding tents, gathering bear bags, and packing their packs, I was handed the can of bear spray and told that I was in charge of warding off bears during our mile hike back to the cars. After I packed my bag and everyone was still bustling around me, I sat there studying the instructions on the can with the light from my headlamp trying to figure out how to operate it.

I led the group on the hike out. The trail had flooded as it had started drizzling during the night, and of course it was dark. I marched through the tall grass beside the trail, trying to avoid the flooding, with 19 women parading behind me. We sang songs and tried to be cheerful. I saw dozens of frogs as we hiked, who seemed to be delighting in the puddles. I warned people of them so that they wouldn't get stepped on. Meanwhile, I was armed and ready with bear spray, on the lookout for a furry midnight attacker.

What relief when we reached the cars! We arrived back on campus at 2:00 a.m., dropped our gear, and fell into bed.

Was our camping trip an utter failure? Yes. Was it worth it? Definitely. Sometimes failing brings out more of the adventurer in you than succeeding. All 20 of us have a story to tell now.


God bless.