Walking Moon: The Scary Story

This is the first in a two post series about what went wrong at Girl Scout camp this year! I couldn’t fit it all in one post!

Two of my girls are in Girl Scouts, but only Sweet Angel gets to sleep overnight at the annual Girl Scout Encampment weekend. This is not because Sweet Angel is a Junior Girl Scout, but because Feisty Girl’s troop is lame, overly cautious. Frankly, I hate camping, but feel badly that Feisty Girl’s Brownie troop is one of the only troops not to camp out.

So I got up at the crack of dawn and drove Feisty Girl over an hour so she could participate in the daytime camp activities. When I arrived, the other moms from Feisty Girl’s troop were hanging out waiting. One mom asked me,

“Where’s your older daughter?”

“Oh, she slept here last night with her troop.”

“Really! You feel comfortable letting her do that?”

“Yeah. She loves camping.”

“Wow, I’d be so nervous.”

These words are still hanging in the air when one of Sweet Angel’s friends comes up to me and asks,

“Did you hear what happened to Sweet Angel?”

I inhale sharply. “No! What happened!”

“Oh, it’s so funny!”

I exhale loudly. Funny is good. I like funny.

Just then I see Sweet Angel and start walking toward her. I don’t even get to her before her three troop leaders start giving me bits and pieces of information, simultaneously.

“We couldn’t find her shoe!”

“She was so close to a five foot drop!”

“She woke up to the sound of running water.”

My mind is reeling. I see my daughter, I know she is alright, but something clearly went terribly wrong. As I’m trying to process what the leaders are telling me, the girls in the troop start bombarding me with more details.

“She thought the walkie talkie was a flashlight!”

“We found her shoe about twenty-five yards away from the tent!”

I look at Sweet Angel,

“Mom, I woke up in the woods.”

I desperately wanted to know what happened to my daughter and the fragmented conversation was extremely stressful. Amazingly, I remained eerily calm while I probed for facts, processed the information and listened to details. Finally, I got the full story. Here it is:

In the middle of the night, Sweet Angel had to go to the bathroom because she had not gone before she fell asleep. She got up, grabbed a walkie talkie thinking it was a flashlight and left the tent. In the darkness, she walked by the bathrooms. She continued walking for several yards before she tripped over a fallen tree, lost her shoe and dropped the walkie talkie. She got up and continued walking deeper into the woods. When she neared a five foot drop into a rocky stream . . . she woke up.

My Sweet Angel was sleepwalking in the middle of the night, deep in the woods by a pond and a stream, and no one knew it.

I was sick to my stomach with fear of what could’ve happened, and am tearing at the thought of it right now.

I didn’t know she was a sleepwalker. As the gravity of what happened sunk in, I realized her troop was sleeping over that night as well.

The moms from Feisty Girl’s troop were flabbergasted. Needless to say, that troop will never sleep over now! But after a lot of thought, and arranging the tent so Sweet Angel would have to crawl over five cots, and wake the leader blocking the door to go to the bathroom, I decided to let her camp out again. I knew I couldn’t penalize Sweet Angel for something out of her control. (I also made sure the leader had her go to the bathroom right before bed, because that is in her control.) Although I didn’t sleep through the night, Sweet Angel did.

The girls in Sweet Angel’s troop were very supportive and did not tease my daughter. Though in a good-natured way, they all walked single file with their arms extended like they were sleepwalking, and gave Sweet Angel a new nickname: Walking Moon.

For another harrowing story about what went wrong at Girl Scout camp this year, read Knives: The Bloody Activity.