When I was a young child, I always liked the outdoors. My backyard is practically a small forest so I was always out there chopping, digging, building, lifting, or destroying. Some notable projects I made were a 2 hole mini golf course complete with a pond, an RC car race track, and a log fort. The cool thing was, I could do anything I wanted and when I got bored with it, I could tear it down and start again. I always thought, “It would be cool if I could do this with my friends.” But no kids my age lived on my street. Then I learned about camping. I had seen and heard commercials on TV and the radio and read books and magazines about camping, and It sounded amazing;  going into the forest with your buddies, making fires, hiking, swimming, and best of all s’mores. I asked my parents if we could go camping and they quickly responded, “NO!”  I asked, “Why can’t we?” and they just mumbled something about it being uncomfortable to sleep in a tent. So that is when I joined the Boy Scouts.

When I first joined the troop as a scrawny sixth grader, I was scared out of my mind. It’s just like living in a cave your whole life then stepping out into the sun or ripping a band aid off. It stings for a while then you get used to it. The first meeting I expected it to be all fun and games. WRONG. I learned really fast that Boy Scouts is all about helping others and working hard. We do community service projects like laying wood mulch, removing trees and our biggest project was laying new trails in Tenhave Woods.

In January we do a tent campout called the Polar Bear which is one of my favorite camping trips. It is a challenging campout, but when you complete it you feel really proud of yourself. It’s  always freezing cold and snowing, so our course of events is revolves around fires and staying active to keep warm. We were all decked out in winter snow gear, which includes snow pants. The thing about snow pants is,once you get them cold and wet, they don't dry out, they freeze. We all had wet snow pants from sledding, and all of our pants had started to freeze solid. We refused to take them off because of the lack of replacements and we believed we could dry them out around the fire. We were all sitting really close to the fire because we couldn't feel the heat through our gear. When I smelled something acrid or sour and I looked around and saw smoke rising off of Ethan and realized it wasn't normal steam It was black smoke rising from his knee cap! I screamed, “Ethan you’re on fire!” He kind of clumsily looked down and said, “Wuuuuuut?” I said, “Dive into the snow!” as I shoved him into a snow bank. When he came up, the front of his snow pants had melted off! The funny thing was our Scout Master, Mr. Kline said, “Don't sit too close to the fire or you will burn!”

 Another funny event that trip was when we took a hike. On the left side of the trail, was a frozen stream that feed into the lake. The top had frozen over but water was still flowing underneath. Sean was walking on the frozen stream for some reason and guess what happens? The ice breaks and he falls into the 30 degree water!  He then jumps out on to the other side of the stream and Mr. Kline says, “ Now you have to get back over!” By this time the rest of us are laughing so hard because of how funny he looked soaked. Sean then decides to get back to our side of the stream he will shuffle across instead of jumping. As he was shuffling across he announces,” I can feel it cracking!” Sure enough, CRACK! He falls into the water again, drenching any part of him that was previously dry. As he clawed his way out of the water, he was meet by everyone rolling on the ground laughing so hard! As he walked back to the campsite, his clothes froze and we all laughed and watched him waddle up the hill to dry off.

I really enjoy Boy Scouts, and even though we do stupid things we actually try to make the world a better place by helping people do stuff they can't do on their own, which feels really good knowing you have helped someone. We learn valuable life lessons (like not to walk on frozen streams!) and get to do things I probably never would have done if I had not joined Boy Scouts.