Day 4 - Why Girl Guide?

Snow at Rock Cut State Park, Illinois, on layover day while the storm passes

In case you were wondering, there is a backstory to the name of this blog, A Girl Guide in Alaska. 

I credit the Girl Guides (aka Girl Scouts in America) with fostering my love of the Great Outdoors. Or perhaps I was a little deranged right from the start, given how inauspicious were my early experiences of life under canvas.  My very first camping trip was in a farmer’s field in Hertfordshire, where I awoke to find a river of rainwater running through my sleeping bag.  It had rained all night, and it rained all weekend long.  The mud grew so deep it spilled over the top of my wellington boots.  The wood in the cook tent got so sodden that even the very best Girl Guide could no longer light a fire.  We were sent home early. 

My second camping trip was in Buckinghamshire, and it rained equally hard. This time around the Guide Captain wisely secured an old windmill where we performed jumping jacks to keep warm when it rained and sang campfire songs to raise our dampened spirits. 

My third trip was to the Lake District, one of the wettest places in England.  It rained all the time, I was woefully ill equipped, a sheep died 100 yards from our tent and it stank out the campsite. My mother had dispatched my sister and I in lacrosse boots - I don’t think we knew what hiking boots were, let alone could afford them.  Their canvas soaked through within the first hour and their plastic studs slid precipitously on the rain-slicked rocks.  All the same, it was here that I fell in love with mountains, in addition to camping, and the Lake District to this day remains one of my very favorite places.

Smitten. I earned all the badges for the Queen’s Guide award, and for my efforts received a framed certificate from Her Majesty the Queen. My siblings tease me about to this day.   

Here's the evidence

Whether Mary was to be the fortunate recipient of my Girl Guiding experience or its unwitting victim is for others to judge.  By the time I met her, I had graduated from canvas tents to backpacking.  Our first trip together was in the Shenandoah Mountains. This time it didn’t rain, but unbeknownst to me, Mary set me a different sort of challenge: she decided mid trip to quit smoking.  A clutch of kids and a grandmother had whizzed passed her on the trail while she huffed and puffed up the mountainside. In disgust, she had thrown out her pack of cigarettes.  There we were, miles from anywhere, camping beside a stream swarming with mosquitoes and Mary in advanced stages of nicotine withdrawal, a topic insufficiently covered in my First Aid Badge for the Queen's Guide award to be of any use.

I fell in love with Mary anyway.  And three decades later, she would say to me, in equal parts affection and despair, “You know what I am going to call my autobiography?  ‘My Life with a Girl Guide.’ ”