PRINTTales from a formerly fanatic Girl Scout
Emergency landings, llama wranglings and other camp adventures
COURTESY OF BRIANNE SANCHEZ
Scout enthusiast Brianne Sanchez goes backpacking in New Mexico.
April 19, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
I guess in some ways being a 21-year-old Girl Scout is sort of like being the 40-year-old virgin. It’s not something that comes out in conversation right away. But get a few drinks in me, and I’ll blab about the time I chased after a missing llama named Buck on horseback through a national forest or the night I came home from climbing Pikes Peak to find a rat had made a nest out of my bed.
It’s not like I wear a sash with badges, a beanie or a heinous kerchief, and I certainly don’t sell overpriced cookies in subzero temperatures anymore. But don’t tell me I’m not a Girl Scout — for life.
Related ArticlesMy fierce loyalty to scouting landed me, a camp counselor, on the side of a mountain in Colorado during the summer of 2004. I lay prostrate and could hear the crackle come over the EMT’s walkie-talkie, “Yeah, this looks like a good L.Z.”
L.Z.? Landing Zone? I was going to be airlifted from the side of the mountain because the temporarily insane and protective camp counselor persona in me decided having her campers climb onto the limbs of a tree to retrieve the tangled “bear bag” rope, which is used to hang food out of reach from animals, would be a horrible idea. They’d have to hoist their crazy counselor up the pine tree so she could snag the rope herself.
Who was that crazy person? Oh yeah, me. I was too heavy for the meager branch on which I was precariously perched as I frantically untangled the rope.
I remember a whoosh of sky, screaming an obscenity and my spine feeling like it was a Coke can being crushed by an 11-year-old recycling enthusiast. I prayed for a hairline fracture or maybe a few cracked ribs. I waited patiently as my campers secured my neck with a makeshift brace that they’d fashioned out of my foam sleeping pad. I kind of had to pee.
I’d never been to the emergency room before and was mortified when the rescue team started to strap me onto the backboard because, as they positioned my body, I was trying to remember when I last changed my underwear. Oh Girl Scouts, how did I get to this point?
COURTESY OF BRIANNE SANCHEZAs proud member of Troop 784, Brianne Sanchez (left), participates in a ceremony and lives by the Girl Scout law.
Taking a job in Colorado as the pioneer specialist at the Flying “G” Girl Scout Camp was the result of a long winter in Missouri. I had a little cabin fever and was trying to think of something that would take me to the mountains — an adventure. I needed to be back by the first week in August, and the “G” had early starting and ending dates. And llamas. The llamas sold me.
I’d stuck it out through all of the cookie sales. I’d been a Brownie, a Junior and a Cadette, and I’d paid my dues. Girl Scouts repaid me with an Outward Bound backpacking expedition in California after my freshman year of high school and a month-long trip to Europe the summer before college. I have countless memories of earlier summers spent at camp and the influential counselors who instilled yearnings for eyebrow rings, an obsession for all things tie-dye and the belief, thanks to a counselor nicknamed “Pony,” that adoption is superior to procreation because the world is overpopulated.
Yes, I’d learned a lot from scouting, but as we flew over mountains toward Denver, my neck still ensconced in foam, I was worried that this final lesson would leave me laid up.
After a series of X-rays, the EMTs determined nothing was broken. I didn’t even have a hairline fracture in my pinkie. However, I did manage to accumulate a gigantic hospital bill that would be covered by workman’s comp but would continue to haunt my mom for months to come.
While waiting for my camp director to pick me up from the hospital, I had plenty of time to reflect on the other mishaps of the summer. I thought of poor Buck, one of our camp llamas who ripped up the stake that penned him into our campsite and wandered for days through the wilderness. In tears, I spent the afternoon following Buck’s escape in the counselor’s lounge and had lost all hope.
But then I heard my camp name, which I carefully chose after the title of a Grateful Dead song, being chanted by my campers: “Ripple! Ripple! Ripple!” I thought they just wanted me to lead them in a camp song, so I stayed put. That was, until my camp director told me the good news: Buck had returned — alive — in the bed of a pickup truck. I’d never been so pleased to kiss the snaggle-toothed face of a llama in my life.
On second thought, after a summer spent mucking llama poop, soothing homesick campers and recovering from falling out of a tree, I hope I’ll never work at a job that will lead me to kiss a llama again. I think that trying to land a position as editor of LEADER Magazine, a Girl Scout publication, would be better for my next decade of Girl Scouts. At least there, my tales of scouting adventures will be more appreciated than at the bar.
Return to the campfire for more scout stories.
