Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Nature Girls


Two weekends ago, we spent the day in the woods with our son and daughter during their camp's visiting day. Soon after we arrived, I was in my daughter's tent (see photo above), watching her to sort her rather mud-caked laundry so that she could run it down a rocky wooded hillside to the unit director before we left the camp to resupply at Walmart and have lunch in the nearest town.

Outside, I heard one of the girls in her unit sing out, "Hey, a snake!" She was standing a few feet from my daughter's tent, next to a stand of trees roughly equidistant from several other girls' tents. In the next moment, five or six girls, including my daughter jumped from the raised wooden platforms of their tents and raced over to see the snake, which was burrowing into a hole that had previously been disguised by fallen leaves. They oohed and ahhhed and one of them even picked up the poor thing, so that it curled around her fist and forearm as the others yelled at her to let it go, and not a single one of them was afraid.

They didn't seem the slightest bit worried about a snake mere feet away from where they rested their heads at night. It was all just another day in the woods for them.

My husband explained to me that the snakes in this region are not poisonous, so the girls had nothing to fear. They obviously knew that already. Still, I was thoroughly impressed by them.

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