It was an annual event at our school and a coveted volunteer opportunity for teachers, because you could pack most of your required extracurricular hours into one weekend. You could get almost all of them over with at once instead of having to coach eighth-grade soccer every Saturday for a whole season or head up the After-School Mathletes or the Kool Knitting Klub (yes, although no one ever said it out loud: the KKK) for an hour and a half every Wednesday at the end of an already exhausting day. These activities were informally known as Lobster Duty, as many of us felt that they were the equivalent of being dropped into a pot of water and being slowly boiled to death. There would be some hiking on this trip—Josie and I accepted this unpleasant fact—and much of the weekend would be spent outdoors regardless of the unpredictable April weather, but these were ten-year-olds. The hikes would be easy. Activities would be short and punctuated by breaks. We would not be sleeping in tents but in fully equipped cabins (tents were for the seventh graders and their Outdoor Fitness Weekend in September), and the chaperones would dole out a constant supply of snacks so as to ward off cannibalism if things got dicey.
