I was seven years old when I opened my sleepy eyes to the pitter pattering of the rain and the swinging and swaying of our families tent. It was the summer of 2012 on an island in the middle of Priest Lake in Idaho. We had decided to go camping even though there had been, well some rain forecasted. We never would have thought it would amount to the big storm cresting the horizon. I stepped outside to see that the sky had been crowded with gray clouds, rain, and lightning. It seemed as if God himself was pouring buckets of water down on us. Within seconds of standing outside of the tent, I was drenched from head to toe. I turned around in surprise when I heard yelling from the shore of our lakeside campsite. My grandma looked as if she was standing on something in the lake, but her knees were immersed in water. I was puzzled by the sight of my grandma looking as if she was standing on water, although I ran over just to check and make sure everything was ok. I assure you that the following thing I'm about to tell to you was indeed very exciting for a seven year-old who was always, and I mean always, looking for a new adventure and a way to excite herself.

I gazed upon our now sinking boat that had brought us to the island. The only ticket home resembled the Titanic with only its nose out of the water. The rain had filled our boat, sinking it like an elephant on an airplane. My seventy year-old grandma was in the vessel, pants and sleeves rolled up, hauling water out with a small kid’s  bucket. It was quite a sight! I jumped out of where I was cemented with shock and the thrill of odd excitement, and grabbed for the nearest “bucket”, which turned out to be a small pink plastic sand toy. Just as I did, my mom and dad ran out of the tent, grabbed buckets and hopped into the boat where they helped my grandma by hauling the water out. I joined them in getting the endless gallons of water out of the watercraft. The water was past my hips and gaining. My dad told me to jump out of the boat and change out of my now dripping  clothes. I ran over to our slouching tent where I found my older sister, who hated lightning, playing dead. Lets just say as a seven year-old whose nine year-old sister was playing dead in a tent, I felt pretty accomplished. I soon found out that all my other clothes had been soaked, which meant I would have to stay in the saturated clothes I was already in.

We managed to push the boat up onto land, and get most of the water out. Even though the our 1980s retro orange Bayliner looked ok, it was in no shape to take us anywhere. The storm raged worse and worse. My mom called the rangers asking if they could bring their boat and help us fix ours, but they refused telling us that the squall was too dangerous to come out of their station, which left us trapped on a island with trees falling right and left of our tent.

“This is an adventure!”as Steve Zissou says it in The Life Aquatic. And it surely was. My family decided that we should escape the storm and go inside the tent. Me and my sister sat snug in a blanket, while my parents and grandma both laid on their sleeping bags. We pulled out the UNO and Old Maid card decks and played for hours till the storm passed. After about three hours of waiting in the tent, a beautiful, hopeful, warm ray of sunshine shown on the tent. My sister and I crawled out of the tent with smiles on our faces as if we hadn't seen sunlight in years. We all packed down the campsite and loaded up the boat hoping and praying for a miracle that the engine would run and that the boat itself would not sink again. We turned the key in the ignition with our fingers crossed. I heard the familiar sound out the thirty year-old engine straining to start, then switch into a fully running engine. Seamingly coordinated, each of us let out a deep sigh of relief. We all climbed in, and slowly but surely made our way to the mainland, shuttering everytime the boat’s engine quit for a couple seconds. My dad parked the post sunken vessel on the dock, and we all stumbled onto the wooden walkway.

This unexpected adventure taught me that life is not predictable. We will never know what is going to happen in the future. So all we can do is put a smile on our face and embrace life.