And the students rose to the occasion.

When we went to visit the girls, expecting to find a damp, miserable and cranky group, we were instead greeted by students sharing their sweatshirts with those who were cold and excitedly recounting what they remembered learning in school about Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with lightning.

When we offered our sympathies to the tent-less boys, they informed us proudly that they now had a story to tell everyone back home—a story that seemed to get increasingly hair-raising the more times we heard them tell it.

And though our morning began at a time when many college students have yet to go to sleep during the school year, we all passed the time together walking around the beach, skipping stones on the ocean surface and finally getting that charcoal to light.

After seeing the way our eighth grade students and staff made the most of the camping trip where everything went wrong, I found myself filled with an appreciation for the powerful connections that can be made when a group decides not to let a few rain drops—or maybe even a downpour—get in the way of a chance to bond.

I also found myself filled with a renewed appreciation for dry socks.

Jessica R. Rubin-Wills ’06, a history concentrator in Quincy House, is a news editor of The Crimson. Although she has yet to fulfill her Quantitative Reasoning requirement, she is spending the summer teaching fractions and integers to eighth graders and preparing to audition for the next season of “Survivor.”