Personal story:
I was 11, not quite 12, when my Boy Scout troop backpacked a 70-mile section on the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah National Park. I think my backpack weighed almost 30 pounds – and I weighed about 90lbs dripping wet. We were wet, loads of rain and humidity and mud, mud, mud. Type 2 fun for sure, and I loved it. Well, mostly.
It was physically tough. I was sensitive to the teasing from the older boys. A couple of times I was glad it was pouring rain because I was crying a bit. I wasn’t homesick but exhausted. I slept hard every night. (One night our tent was pitched on a slope, and I woke up in the morning about 3 yards downhill from the door in a wet sleeping bag.) The trail was a sloppy mess; the only good thing about being smeared with mud was that the bugs couldn’t bite you there. We grumbled.
I remember one of adults would overhear our grumbling and ask “Duck or chicken?” The older boys would go silent at this. I worked up the nerve to ask what he meant. He told me “A duck has oils in its feathers and water slides right off. A chicken doesn’t, and will squawk if there are even a few drops of rain. Decide how you’ll respond when things happen you can’t control. It’s up to you.”
“Duck or chicken?” is a good leadership mantra.
