I offered an overnight backpacking trip to our middle school students. Ten
students (and four parents) came. A majority of the students had never
backpacked. I was especially delighted that six girls came because I believe
our culture needs more strong women and I believe that backpacking
strengthens people in so many ways.
We made a small campfire about an hour after sunset. Two of the seventh
grade girls came up from the river to the campfire and shared how, in the
dark, with their headlamps shining onto the water, they could see many
small fish swimming in the shallows and sometimes they could touch them.
The campfire lasted about an hour, in the course of which the thin crescent
moon set and the sky darkened deeper. After the fire burned down to
embers, some of the kids went on down to the river again.
We were camped on a point bar so the river at that point was a long, slow,
shallow, upstream eddy. Therefore, I felt comfortable with them down there
as a group. From where I stood back in camp, I could not see the kids but I
could see an occasional dim pool of light when one of them shone a
flashlight out over the river. After about half an hour, the two boys came
back to their camp near me and settled in. About fifteen minutes later, I saw
a flashlight come up and go over to the girls’ site. It was now about 10:30 or
11. Dark. Quiet. About five minutes later, a girl came over and asked for
permission to go back down to the river because two of the girls were still
down there. I said that I would go check on them and that she should go
back to camp. I walked slowly down to check on them.
I prefer walking in the night without a flashlight. My feet can find their own
way; I want my eyes to stay wide open to be able to take in the night world
around me. So down I moved towards the dark river. As I drew closer, I saw
for a few seconds a dimness on the water surface about twenty yards upriver.
I angled towards it. There came a point where I could see over the edge of
the bank and I saw the two girls about 15 yards away. What I saw stopped
me in my tracks. I stood there silently in the dark for about twenty seconds
and then, because the scene felt so sacred that I wanted nothing to disturb it,
I backed away so I could not see them. It was a time for the two of them, not
for me. I stood there in the darkness, grateful for what I had seen, for
probably another twenty minutes until they, on their own, returned to
camp—never knowing I had been there.
All I had seen was the lights from their headlamps. I could not see the girls.
The headlamps were not turned in my direction so the only light was a few
square yards of dimly-lit river surface. But the lights emanated from their
foreheads and shone precisely on whatever they were looking at so the
subtle movements of the two lights revealed as perfectly as words whatever
conversation of spirit the two were having with the night world. The lights
originated a couple of feet above the shore so the girls were down on their
hands and knees at the river’s edge. The lights were playing over the water
in a way that I knew they were watching the small fish again, and had
probably been, just the two of them, for half an hour or more. The way the
two lights moved together revealed, within seconds, how deeply they were
sharing this experience—but without words. Two girls, silently down at
water’s edge like raccoons with glinting eyes and paws in water, deep within
the Earth’s dark shadow of night, their spirits dissolving in the water,
merging with the world of the illuminated fish.
Next morning: Said by a student learning how to skip rocks: “I thought you
just had to throw the rocks.”
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