That Was Epic

Andrew Marshall

The creek was raging–frothing over its banks in brown, angry gouts of water. Above us, rain continued to filter through the dense Pennsylvania hardwood forest, swelling the unnamed creek even further. Thunder rumbled across the lake below us. Both showers and thunder were at the fringe of a hellacious storm that had battered our group all through the night, soaking 25 middle-schoolers in their Walmart tents and sleeping bags.

I watched the gaggle of middle-schoolers eye the creek skeptically. They were wet, and they were cold, and they were tired. Some of them had eaten only a soggy granola bar for breakfast, and most of them had skipped their morning meal entirely in the sullen, stubborn way that only uncomfortable teenagers can muster. They had a three-mile walk ahead of them before reaching the vans that would ferry them towards phones, showers, and pasta–in that order. 

But first, they had to cross a creek, a creek that roared and gargled and shared nothing in common with the mild trickle they’d stepped over without noticing the day before. 

I stood downstream in the knee-deep water to add an air of reassurance (there was some worry among a few of the smaller students that they might be washed downstream, never to be seen again). Some of the more enterprising kids found suitably sturdy walking sticks, and they helped each other cross one at a time. When everyone was across, the group let out a spontaneous cheer. I saw scowls break into grins, like a flash of sunshine above a raincloud. Suddenly the air seemed warmer. In the coming miles, there’d be complaints and sore shoulders and blisters, but for now, the vibe was of insurmountable odds overcome–giddy, buoyant, and unbreakable. 

Summit feelings.

You’re reading this story on a blog for a product aimed at outdoor types–so chances are you just snorted a little at the relatively tame nature of this little adventure, at the contrast between perception and reality. A rainy-day ford and a three-mile walk in the foothills of western Pennsylvania barely rates as a day hike for most of us. 

But that’s the magic of being in the outdoors with children–even older children just beginning their trek into adolescence. I got to witness it firsthand several times in my brief but eventful career as a dorm parent for a boarding school in rural Ohio. Because of my long-distance backpacking experience, I was more or less automatically slotted into leading the yearly seventh-grade camping trip, and it was on one of these trips that this story occurred.

It’s nothing new to point out that the world seems bigger, wilder, and more mysterious to the young. I think most of us realize this. But there’s a difference between acknowledging this concept abstractedly (or witnessing it as a parent within the confines of your home) and seeing it played out in the outdoors, where the trees stretch up into eternity and the darkness at the edge of camp is infinite and every mouse rustling cautiously in the fragrant understory is an unknowable beast in the night. In the woods, the wonderous scale of childhood expands and refines. The resolution of the imagination sharpens with exquisite clarity, and experiences paint themselves with vivid colors notable for their vibrancy if not their accuracy.  

The creek we forded that day was angry and swollen but was far from powerful enough to sweep a hapless teenager down the mountain and into the icy depths of the lake below. The three miles from the lake to the van included a total elevation gain of about two hundred feet. The storm was bad, but no worse than the hundreds of other thunderstorms that sweep across the mid-Atlantic every summer.

But you’d never know it from the tales the group told in the weeks and months to come, which somehow grew to include mountaineering, altitude sickness, search-and-rescue operations, hurricane-strength winds, and lightening-struck trees exploding into flames. The next year I was pulled aside on more than one occasion by worried seventh graders who’d heard tales of ice-choked river crossings, hypothermia, and frostbitten toes from the adventurers of the year before.

I’m not sure how many of those creek-fording 12-year-olds actually enjoyed their soaked, chilly, moderately frightening camping experience, but they sure did enjoy telling stories about it–something anyone with sufficient outdoors experience understands. Now, seven years and two careers later, I still get the occasional message from a former student.

“Remember that river crossing?” the message will inevitably say, referring to a knee-deep creek about three feet wide that the author once crossed on wobbly, coltish legs, clutching a muddy stick for balance as a mountain storm cleared above her head. In the past–her childhood. In her future–the unmappable country of adolescence, with all its attendant tragedies and joys. In the moment–a creek, swollen by rain, pure in its simplicity, uncomplicated in its reality, but with the potential to swell and grow and jump its banks in the country of the imagination. Untamable and forever large in the shifting landscape of memory.

“That was epic.”