Armadillo Island
The trails on Cumberland Island, Georgia, are generally sandy, straight, flat, and wander through groves of ancient sprawling oaks covered in Spanish moss and other epiphytes. Saw palmetto and palm trees make a sharp contrast with their sword-like leaves. I had walked to the edge of the trail to pee; the waistband on my heavy pack was pushing on my already tiny bladder. I barely got things going before pinching off in alarm at the site of a diamond patterned slithering amidst the leaves at my feet. I quickly realized that this was no rattlesnake, just the tail of an armadillo who was otherwise buried in the undergrowth, busily rooting for bugs and fungus. He was soon as surprised as me and jumped toward me to escape. All in all, as far as unexpected wildlife encounters go when one has one’s pants partially fastened, it was relatively benign. A bit of pee on my boots and technically a misdemeanor for indecent exposure to animals, but no real harm done. Armadillos aren’t typically what I think of when I think of biodiversity, but I guess that’s what diversity means. The wild horses that the island is known for are a bit more statuesque, but as it turns out, armadillos are worth being curious about.
For some reason, I had thought that armadillos were marsupials like opossums but they are mammals and therefore give birth and lactate like us humans. Members of the dasypus species have the unique trait of “monozygotic polyembryony” meaning that, when they reproduce, they give birth to four genetically identical quadruplets. This may explain why armadillos will share a burrow with rabbits or skunks but not with another armadillo except during mating season. It has got to take some alone time to come to grips with the fact that mating season means guaranteed quadruplets. I have not found it in my research, but, to me, this clearly implies that armadillos are capable of going without sleep for months at a time. Armadillos also glow under a black light, which I’m assuming is how they meet their potential quad-daddies at dance clubs. I was also curious about how so many armadillos end up on an island. As it turns out, armadillos can hold their breath for up to 6 minutes and they are capable of swallowing air and inflating their intestines to regulate their buoyancy for crossing larger bodies of water. The idea of becoming your own pool floatie seems pretty practical. I’m assuming the deflation process could be a bit noisy and smelly but so are most swimming pool locker rooms.
I was on a 5 day backpacking trip with my daughter, Stella, and 7 other teenagers who were part of “Teen Forest Adventures”, a mentored wilderness education program. I was present, along with my friend Troy, as a van driver and occasional pack mule. The trip was lead by Kerensa and Scotty, two trained naturalists and facilitators.
When I tell people that I really enjoy having a teenager, they usually look at me like I’m some kind of crazy drunk. And while that’s a reasonable assumption about me in general, it doesn’t have anything to do with my enjoyment of the unfairly maligned demographic known as teens. Teenagers are curious, sarcastic, sensitive, physically immortal, and awkward as hell. It makes them pretty much the ideal partners for outdoor adventures. In all fairness, I am pretty picky about the teenagers that I associate with. I stick with homeschool weirdos and the teens that are capable of forgetting about their phones. My daughter and several of her friends have been part of this group and groups similar to it for years, but I had never been particularly involved in their adventures in person before.
On the day prior to the trip, Kerensa, one of the mentors/guides found out that she had the flu but felt well enough to do the trip. Spreading the flu in the outdoors is pretty tricky but it meant that Kerensa got stuck in the gear van with me on the drive down to avoid exposing the van load of teens to any unnecessary illness. I had just worked several ER shifts in a row and seen roughly ten thousand cases of flu so one additional exposure didn’t feel particularly risky for me. I’ve had so many flu exposures and so many flu shots at this point in my career, that my immune system just rips off its shirt and flexes when it sees flu coming, causing flu to pee on itself a little and run away whimpering. Yes, I’m cocky abut my immune system, but it’s not like I have good hair anymore; I need something to pin my masculine over-confidence on and it would be weird to brag about your endocrine system. “I’m totally just cranking out some gonadotropins, bro! My pituitary is ripped!” I’m digressing here obviously.
On the drive with Kerensa, I got to learn more about the Eight Shields approach to wilderness awareness that they use to approach mentoring. In addition to wilderness lore, they have been teaching the teens an intentional conversational practice. A pair of teens is given a prompt or question and the first provides an answer to their partner who describes what they have just heard the speaker say. The speaker then reflects on what it felt like to be listened to and have their answer described back to them. This is a level of proactive communication I didn’t learn until my 40s. There is also a lot of time spent just observing nature and reflecting on their observations with one another. There’s also group singing which causes me to sweat profusely and have palpitations, but they seem to enjoy it.
What I saw in this mixed group of boys and girls, some who knew each other and some who did not, was a level of mature socializing and conversation that I rarely see in adults. They played games, laughed at one another as easily as they laughed at themselves, accepted delegated tasks without hesitancy, and challenged themselves while encouraging one another.
When I had signed on, I had imagined doing a lot of the work of firewood gathering and food preparation like I would typically do on a family camping trip. However, Scotty and Kerensa had planned and delegated so well that often all I did was show up for well-cooked meals.
Cumberland Island is Georgia’s largest barrier island and a national park accessible only by ferry or by paddling around 6 miles from Crooked River State park. It is know for it’s biodiversity. Wild horses roam, sea turtles lay eggs, whales mate offshore, and ancient oaks support small forests in their sprawling limbs. There is an excellent book by Will Harlan, a local author, called “Untamed” that tells the story of Carol Ruckdeschel who almost single-handedly kept both the navy and wealthy aristocrats from developing the island. It is worth the time to read.
“Kids reveal an obvious truth: natural wonder is built in to us,” she wrote in her journal. “We are instinctively attracted to nature.” Nature tugs on us like gravity, Carol believed. We travel long distances to stand atop mountains or stroll along seashores for reasons we can’t quite put into words. Nature keeps alive a childlike wonder and enables us to see the world anew through fresh eyes.”
― Will Harlan, Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island
After the drive from Asheville we spent the night at Crooked River State park and got our gear organized. As I’ve gotten older, my version of backpacking has gotten increasingly less focused on food and more focused on keeping my pack light. This was not going to be that sort of trip. I got a little sad as I saw the trip leader pull out cans of beans, skillets, sauce pans, bags of carrots and apples, and an anvil or two. This trip was shaping up to be more about carrying large amounts of food for short distances. Based on my calculations we could have disassembled a small food truck and carried it with us just as easily. I ended up with a 10 quart pot full of canned goods in the top of my pack and my calves kinda hurt just thinking about it now. I have also noticed that this particular subset of the woodsy crowd really loves giant tarps. It’s something I cant quite figure out. I’ve spent 30 years hanging around in the woods without a tarp or imagining that I needed one. But poor Anjali, my chosen niece, had a 10ft by 20ft tarp strapped to the outside of her backpack along with all kinds of odds and ends. If she had passed out next to a dumpster, no one would have ever seen her again; she looked like a yard sale that had become conscious and wandered off into the woods.
After a quick breakfast, we headed to St Mary’s to board the ferry. Almost immediately after leaving the dock, from the front of the boat, I saw two dolphins pop up and immediately start swimming straight for the boat which alarmed me at first. As smart as dolphins are, I didn’t see any reason they wouldn’t be capable of a well-planned mugging and we were easy pickings with our week’s worth of snacks. As it turns out, they were just thrill seekers though, surfing and rolling in the bow wave of the boat. It was the closest I’ve ever been to a dolphin and they seemed to enjoy having an audience for their tricks.
One thing that I really enjoyed on this trip was lots of circle time. I think this would have made me irritable and insecure when I was a teenager but I really liked the frequent breaks we took to just stop, drop into out senses, and express some gratitude or share some experience that we were having. As a middle aged hippie, I really appreciate that kind of intentionality on a vacation. It really makes me realize that I’m somewhere new and how much I appreciate the moment. I was amazed to see this group of young people so adept at gathering their thoughts and sharing them openly. The ability to be present and vulnerable with new people in a new place is a life skill I still struggle with. These “kids” made it seem like it’s just a normal way to go about things. As it should be, I guess.
Troy and I generally made ourselves scarce when possible, wanting to allow our daughters to escape the parental eye as much as they could. The first night, we walked out to the vast empty beach at moonrise. The moon was an upward crescent, like abstracted bullhorns. We were able to see Venus, mars, and Jupiter stretched out in a line along the ecliptic, showing us our orientation in space relative to orbit of the planets around the sun. It was one of those moments where you perceive a vastness that inspires awe and insignificance simultaneously. The opportunity to comprehend unfathomable distances is an odd paradox.
Likely because of the age and rarity of many of the island’s majestic oaks, they do not allow hammocks on Cumberland Island, forcing me to sleep on an inflatable pad. Stepping out of the tent the next morning, Troy saw me and said “You’re making me feel old.” It took me a bit to get stood completely straight up after I got out of the tent and I was hobbling around like I was auditioning for the role of aged grandmother in a play. I just needed a cane to threaten some “scalawags” or “hooligans” with. I hope I end up being the sort of old person who calls young people “punks” though, if i I get any say in my eventual decrepitude.
Over the next coupe of days, Troy and I went for some long hikes while the teens did art projects, nature identification, wilderness first aid, and played games. All in all, they were more productive than I’ve ever been on any vacation and it made me feel a little lazy, just walking around eating trail mix. In the evening, we told stories and jokes. After long encouragement from his friends, a teen named Kevin told “The Cheerio Joke” which was an exercise in patience and disappointment but intensely memorable. And in all fairness, he was essentially forced into it. No one should voluntarily tell that joke to people that they like.
On the last morning of the trip, we had to get out of camp by 645 am to make the five mile hike back to the ferry dock in time. In general the idea of getting 10 humans organized and moving before sunrise seems fairly unlikely in my experience of vacations, but this crew was up, packed, fed and ready to go. I feel like I can pack up a tent pretty quick but before I could even get my sleeping bag packed, Siri was walking around with his pack on. Turns out he didn’t even unroll his sleeping pad, managing to enjoy the anesthesia of adolescent sleep. To be so alive during the day and so deeply asleep at night is a thing I envy about youth. Facing an unknown future in this country, not so much.
Some of this group had never been backpacking before, and I remembered how formative some of my early trips had been in my life and felt grateful to witness others having this experience, grateful that they were willing and eager, and grateful that they had this particularly curated experience to judge future experiences by. I felt lucky to be around these thoughtful young humans and my time with them made me hopeful that a better future is still possible. I’d put these kids in charge of the world and sleep easy at night. (As long I wasn’t on an inflatable pad, anyway).