White Sands Adventure

Last Friday my sister twisted my arm into helping her chaperon a group of high school kids on a trip to White Sands. She promised it would be fun and assured me that I would really be helping her out. So I went. It had been awhile since I'd been to White Sands and also awhile since I'd been around teenagers. There were nine of them, five girls and four boys, a mixed bag personality-wise--some very funny and outgoing, others more shy, trying hard to fit in.

We boarded my mom's old minivan and after an uneventful 50-minute ride through scrubby desert, we arrived at the Sands. It's completely strange how there are miles and miles of standard desert, and then suddenly there are these huge white dunes. There's a scientific explanation, I guess, but it is really so bizarre, these mounds of pure white sand in the middle of nowhere. There's a feeling of being on another world. There must be some planet out there in the universe that looks just like this.

My sister parked the van at a picnic area. We unloaded our supplies and then we attempted to set up a barbecue for lunch. I'm ashamed to admit it, but neither of us had started a barbecue before. That combined with the fact that it was a windy day made it slow-going getting the fire started. The fire finally got going after about an hour, so we put some burgers and then hot dogs on the grill. Success at last, I was glad that we could at least figure this out and not have a bunch of hungry kids on our hands. I was patting myself on the back, then I bit into one of the burgers. Yuck--it tasted watery and flavorless. I give a lot of credit to the kids for not saying anything about it. Hopefully the hot dogs tasted better.

After lunch, we headed to a steep dune to do some serious sledding. The kids took turns sliding down the dune on circular plastic boards. Then my turn came up. The board went down fast, much faster than I expected. It was like flying, and I both loved and hated that queasy sensation, that feeling that this could end really, really badly.

After a few rides down the hill, everyone got tired and three of the boys insisted on having the rest of the group bury them in the sand. Tradition, I suppose, it's a rule of going to White Sands that someone has to get buried. While they did that, I sat down and watched for a few minutes, running the fine white sand through my fingers. The white sand is amazingly clean. There aren't any rocks or plants or trash in it the way there might be with beach sand. One of the girls remarked, it's so quiet out here. And it was. Beyond the noise of our little group, it was very silent.

By then it was late afternoon. The boys extricated themselves from the sand and we all drove home in my mom's old minivan, every one of us tired and covered in sand. I had sand in my hair, behind my ears, on my arms. I touched my face and it was covered in powder. I turned my shoe upside down when I got home and at least a handful amount of sand fell out of it.

Overall the trip lived up to my sister's promise of fun. I don't think I have much of a future as a chaperon (or as a barbecuer), but I think I did OK. Until the next adventure...