Part of the magic of a group trip is how well you get to know your companions. Being with them constantly and seeing their private quirks and routines, sitting near them at all hours of the day, hearing how they eat, watching how they fiddle, smelling them before they have a chance to cover their scent. You know them quickly and intimately.
This is magnified with teenagers, who are more casual than adults and thus willing to let you in to their worlds. They are also not as practiced at hiding their foibles, so they either let it all hang out, or overcompensate self-consciously. It is easier to love a teen at these times because they are at their most genuine and their most vulnerable.
As an example, I was talking to a student named Jenny on my recent trip to Florida when she casually mentioned her 20 year old sister’s battle with alcoholism. It was a passing conversation. I asked if she was the oldest child and, bam, bam I learned of her concern for her older sister and her continuing struggles. She trusted me enough in that moment to share that far away from home, her mind was on her sister, Stacy.
A big part of what you discover about the secret lives of teenagers comes from what you overhear from neighboring tents. The zipping and unzipping of a frantic search for something lost, the soft arguing and the loud gossip. The squirming, the scratching, the farting, the snoring. Trip leaders quickly learn how to filter out the annoying while staying on alert for the disruptive. Soon, even the annoying becomes the cricket song of a tenting teacher’s half sleep.
One night in the middle of our trip my colleague and I heard a sharp cry, a ripping of a zipper flap and hard footsteps in the dark moving toward our tent. That, and a crying voice calling my name. These are sounds that get you out of your bag and on your feet quickly. Jenny ran up to me sobbing as I stumbled out of my tent and said, “my sister was hit by a car.” Then she pushed her cell phone to me like it was diseased.
Even as I write this I have to take a deep breath to continue.
On the other end of the line was a mother who had just lost her child. She spoke with the calm matter of factness that comes with the shock of grief. Stacy was hit by a car while she was crossing the street in a crosswalk. She was on her way home from an AA meeting and was celebrating her third month of sobriety. She was brain dead.
I don’t know how I was able to speak lucidly, but I did. In some shock myself, I was sympathetic and concise. We would take care of Jenny’s grief on our end and do our part to bring the family back together as quickly as possible. I did not know the mother at all, but we were connected in those minutes by the love of our own children and our care and concern for Jenny.
The logistics are boring, but you can imagine that they weren’t easy. Complicating matters was irregular cell phone reception and the necessity of working by flashlight. My trip team, my three colleagues in Florida, get high marks for handling the situation. We are four men, two of us parents, with 40 student camping trips between us. We were exhausted, but we each took a role and performed it efficiently and well. You always hope nothing will go wrong in the field, but it generally does. I was glad not to be a rookie that night. I was glad the others weren’t either.
Less than 24 hours later, Jenny was home and our trip was back on schedule with nary a glitch. I believe there were students who didn’t even know what happened. But I do. I was as close to the situation as a stranger can be.
