Deep in the Olympic Nat’l Park of Washington, three irate campers were reluctant to get out of their warm, cozy, sleeping bags. But get out they did, me being the last. Obviously. As the only 12 year old preteen in the group, it was inevitable that I get up last. “Andrew!” my mom called. “Time to get up! We’re gonna miss the tide!”

            On a normal day, I would be the first to get up, but this wasn’t a normal day. Or a normal time. Even as the first light of day touched the horizon, I was flying down a rotten boardwalk, sipping my last dregs of hot chocolate, in the middle of the rainy, wet and cold rainforest. My mom, way out in front of us, shouted back, “Hurry! The tide starts coming in at 5:30! We have to get there!”

            “But I can’t run that fast at 4:30 in the morning!” I grumbled as my legs sent a pained message to my brain.

            “Yes you can! Now let’s go!” my mom cried. We were on a wild run to the beach from two miles away at our campsite because my mom had to collect (wait for it) worms for her school. Yes, worms. We were after small sea worms that lived under a special type of sea grass in the intertidal zone. So, here I was at five in the morning, running miles through a wet and sticky rainforest to catch the tide.

The rotten boardwalk acted like a rollercoaster under my feet twisting and rolling around. Amazingly, I never slipped! If I had gone down, I would have broken a leg on the hard boards, splashed into an evil smelling swamp, and landed in a big patch of skunk cabbage. Its name describes everything that you need to know about it. Luckily, this never happened to me as I jogged over the warped, old planks. The super long run of two miles seemed to go fast, and soon we were in the swirling tide pools, searching for the elusive grass. –Andrew Palmer