Beach Trip
by Sam Harthun
Oregon City, OR
Sitting on the bus…waiting, waiting, waiting. We were on our way to Agate Beach, Oregon. We had headed to the beach as a school field trip in eighth grade. It took a total of about three hours to get there with lots of “educational” stops in between. I’m pretty sure it was Mr. Barrett’s goal to cram every bit of info on sealife into our heads as he could.
One of the stops before we got to Agate Beach was the tide pools. We walked all over the tide pools, looking at all the sea life swimming and crawling or just sticking to rocks. The tidepools were so beautiful, but something I enjoyed even more than that was Devil’s Punch Bowl. Devil’s Punch Bowl is a giant cave in which waves wash in, making the most incredible view of the ocean. Luckily for us, the tide was out so we were able to enter the punch bowl. The water would wash up onto the rocks foaming up and misting onto my face while looking out at the ocean reaching back into the gray horizon.
While at the tide pools, our teacher, Mr.Kmetic, had warned us that it was slippery and to watch our footing or we would fall in. Unfortunately for my friend Travis, the warning didn’t help at all. He slipped on the seaweed that had been exposed from the tide being out, which happened to be, as Kmetic said, “very slippery”. So Travis slipped and landed on some nasty green slime. The back of his pants got covered with slime and he was forced to walk around with green slime on his butt for the rest of the day. Lots of people fell that day, but luckily for me, I was not one of them.
When we finally got to Agate Beach, everybody was taking their shoes off and running and splashing in the water. Personally, I don’t enjoy being cold and wet, so I stayed with one of my friends while most of our friends frolicked in the ice cold water. Now, something they didn’t consider is that once you get your feet wet, there wasn’t anything to get them dry. So, while they had fun in the time at the beach they were miserable walking back up to the bus.
While at the beach, we were having just as much fun as any five year old would playing in the sand, however the only difference was we were a huge group of eighth grade twelve year olds. We did everything that you would do at the beach, but we weren’t allowed to go full on swimming in the ocean, which happened to be fine with me seeing as it was about 50 degrees on the Oregon Coast.
