The Order of the Arrow by Levi Martin

The Order of the Arrow is the honor society of The Boy Scouts of America. It is an intense weekend of hard work, a very thin diet, and we learn to serve. I was 14 years of age. We arrived at Camp Ottari and signed in, we waited a few hours, trying to figure out where we were supposed to be. I was nervous and scared, because I was assigned to a group with no one I knew.

I was in Clan #2, and we sat in a circle around a small torch, waiting for instruction. It was cold and the ground was damp. We sat there for an hour maybe, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Then finally, we were led maybe a quarter mile to a small area where people dressed as Indians and spoke about the importance of scouting. Then we all tested the string on a bow, one at a time and made the oath of silence. We walked back the way we came, me, with my giant, warm, sleeping bag tied with rope around my back tugging at my shoulders and carrying my giant sleeping pad with my tarp and flashlight in a bird food bag. Along the dark trail we stopped, and I saw people climbing up a very steep hill into the woods. I followed them and found a sort of ditch where I put my sleeping bag so I wouldn’t fall down the hill in the night. The leaders had said before the oath, “I think it might rain tonight”. So I took precautions and lay my sleeping bag perpendicular with the hill so I wouldn’t be swamped in the ditch if it rained. Boy, was I in for a rough night.

I awoke several times in the night wanting for it to be over, peering at my watch with the glowing screen, waiting for six o’clock to come. Every time I woke up, I found myself a foot closer over the edge of my ditch, my feet were hanging off the edge. I had to constantly push myself back from the fall that would be my final wake up. The final wake up was my super power instincts that tell me when something is important. I woke up in the dim morning light, and I saw people packing up and I admit, I was grateful to have a reason to pack up. The ground was hard and uncomfortable and I was stiff and cold like Han Solo was when he woke up from the frozen/ stone stage, in Jabba’s palace. Anyway, I walked down the hill with the others and I nearly tripped over a root near the bottom, then quickly caught my balance and, a little embarrassed, got in line on the path. Then, we stood there in silence, waiting for a leader to come and direct us. I doubt that anybody knew exactly what to do. We stood for at least an hour. My back was starting to get really sore with the ropes pulling hard on a certain spot on my shoulders, so I put my bag down. Then, Huzzah! I saw someone coming through the trees towards us. I was so happy that I could have jumped to the moon.

Moving on, we got lf an egg sandwich and a small cup of milk for breakfast. It wasn’t warm, but it was about as good as my cooking skills would have done, adequate. We were waiting and waiting to get to work. Finally, we got in to a van where they took us to Claytor Lake for general maintenance. When we got there, there were three men with chain saws, giving us information for the first time. “I know you all are sworn to silence,” said one of the men. “But if you see something dangerous or something that might be a hazard, yell it out! Better to be safe than dead.”

So what we did for a lot of the time, was pick up the lumbar and brush that the men cut down. But most of the time, we were waiting for wood to pick up while they were deciding what trees to take down and how. One time, the one guy was cutting at the tree and we pulled it all the way down with a rope and ran so we didn’t get smashed. Somewhere along our time there, we had lunch and man was that lunch good. We a small cup of raisons and a cup of water. That was the best cup of raisons that I have ever had. We waited outside of a small building where that guys with the chainsaws went to eat and it sounded like they were having a feast in there. As we were waiting, I looked around at the lake and the surrounding trees. When the guys finally came back from lunch, we went to another area and did the same as before. We also played with a dog that was a great swimmer. We would throw a stick and it would hop right in the water and bring it back. It made loud splashes in the water and it threw water on us when it shook the water off. “Finally, we’re done,” I thought exhausted.

When we got back, I took a shower. I tried to avoid the spiders and the spider webs in the shower, but other than that the shower was warm. When I got out, the cold hit me like a speeding bullet. After some stuff we finally got food, but we had to wait for it of course. Halleluiah, real food! It was so good and I was so hungry that I had everything on the plate, even the healthy stuff that I didn’t like that much, I liked it then. It was all so sweet and made my taste buds have new meaning. After the food, I was doing something pretty risky. I was pouring out the water from the pitcher into my tiny plastic bottle. Then one kid did something that distracted me and I spilt it all over the floor, the table, and me. Wow, that was fun.

After a while, we went to the camp fire, called the onion ring and the Indian dressed people talked some more about stuff and I was so happy it was at what I’d done that the hour that they talked, didn’t seem to take an hour. And finally, we got our sashes that are white with a red arrow on the front. And then, I thought to myself about a part in the Avengers movie at the end when the council members said to director Fury, “So that’s the point to all this, a statement?” “A promise” Fury responded.

That’s what mainly stuck in my mind at the end of this weekend. “A promise”. Because they Indians were talking about following that high ideals of scouting, serving with a willing heart. And that is something that we all struggle with, Serving others and being selfless about it. And that is a great Ideal, but in their speech, they left out that we are not always selfless and we can’t be anything like it without God to help us. Because we are not perfect, we cannot keep the ideals without fail. But we can do, serve others with God making us selfless. And grow to be more so. We can make promises, but it is no guarantee we will succeed.