Lord of the Flies-ing
THE PERIWINKLE VAN bumps up the gravel drive, fifteen minutes behind schedule and looking as if it’s been retired from at least two earlier centuries. With its fading block letters and boxy frame, it belongs to the taxonomy of vehicles that once ferried public-school kids to zoos and municipal pools—the era of discmans, Goosebumps books, and forced proximity. Ten middle-schoolers spill out: nine boys and one girl whose posture suggests that her attendance is compulsory. Their teachers follow—three adults with the slack-jawed fatigue of June.
“The drive,” the kids report immediately, “was like twice as long because the AC didn’t work.”
I remember those rides well: the recycled air, the awkward geometry of growing limbs in a too-small space, a single cassette tape of 70s rock on loop, the sense that discomfort was part of the curriculum. It is faintly hopeful to discover that some rough edges have survived into the age of AirTags.
The group’s leader—a cheerful history teacher—appears with a box of donuts, an unspoken apology for what he is about to unleash.
The Maine air greets the Boston students with an assertiveness they don’t yet have language for. Salt, kelp, lobster tanks, a nearby shellfish farm—all of it collides with their metropolitan assumptions. They ask for a bathroom and are directed to a port-a-potty that, miraculously, smells better than the waterfront around them. Above the kayak shop, a warehouse hums with pumps and filters, tending to thousands of growing clams. Gulls wheel overhead; lobster traps stack like a vernacular archive.
Three days and two nights of kayak-camping lie ahead. My boss and his wife spent the previous evening packing meals into labeled sacks; the group gear—tents, pads, boats, wetsuits, PFDs—is lined up with ceremonial order on the beach. This is their end-of-the-year rite: the urban field trip rewritten for the tidal zone.
After introductions, the lone girl makes a beeline for me. She wears a petunia-colored rain jacket and an expression wavering between indignation and dread.
“I’m Em,” she says. “As you may have noticed, I’m the only girl here. My two friends bailed. I don’t know any of these boys, and I’ve never kayaked or camped before. I don’t want to be here.”
I open my mouth to reassure her but the machinery of group travel intervenes. The luggage erupts from the van: wheeled suitcases, expedition-sized backpacks, a vintage L.L. Bean sleeping bag packed at the insistence of a nostalgic father. My boss gestures toward the red twenty-liter drybags. “Everything you brought needs to fit in these.”
A pause—brief arithmetic—then compliance. Even the boy with the heirloom sleeping bag relents and accepts a lightweight loaner. It turns out air travel has prepared them well: the distinction between essentials and indulgences.
Then comes the real crisis: the history teacher announces that phones must be surrendered.
The freeze is immediate. These are less objects than organs—the central nervous system of their social lives. Still, one by one, they hand them over. All except Em. She stands by the kayak trailer, clutching hers.
“Okay, Em,” I say gently. “Time to hand it over.”
She places it in my palm, fingers lingering a beat too long.
“Great,” she groans. “We’re Lord-of-the-Flies-ing it.”
Once on the water, my boss calls out, “Muscongus means ‘fishing place’ in Abenaki.” The word’s sonorous weight holds their attention for a moment before paddling takes over again. Tandem kayaks wobble and drift like siblings learning to share space.
But the name stays in the air along with the layered reality of the place: two rivers feeding the estuary; lobsters molting beneath us; terns circling overhead; seals surfacing with whiskered appraisal.
“Will we see dolphins?” the kids ask.
“Maybe porpoises,” he says. “They’re like little dolphins. But you need to be lucky.”
He continues with the short history—Algonquian travel routes, George Weymouth’s 1605 landing, the colonists who felled forests and introduced sheep. The kids lean back, half listening, wholly elsewhere: absorbed by tide, texture, the mechanical strangeness of the boats.
Em paddles with D., a quiet boy in a T-shirt featuring cats in astronaut helmets. Their strokes fall in unison.
Crow Island is two acres of low pines and sea-scoured bedrock. Its improbable sovereign greets us at the landing: a lone rooster with museum-quality iridescence and the unimpressed air of a teenager newly aware that all rules have dissolved. He studies us with the patient appraisal of a local judging newcomers.
“What’s he doing here?” the kids ask.
“I have no idea,” my boss replies.
The kids pitch camp. The work of guy lines and rain flies is halting, earnest. Only D. operates independently; his one-person tent rises with unshowy competence. Em, Dr. S. (the English teacher), and I claim the girls’ corner of the site. D.’s tent is an adjacent outlier.
As dinner prep begins, two fishermen idle up in a skiff asking whether we’ve seen a rooster. Someone dropped it off “as a joke,” they say, not expecting it to last the night. The students exchange glances. “We haven’t seen anything like that,” they assure them, with diplomatic gravity.
Riccardo—christened shortly thereafter—has already melted into the underbrush. He resurfaces at dinnertime to slurp skeins of spaghetti that have escaped our pots and landed on the schist. The kids proclaim him a “leave-no-trace master.”
The next morning, Riccardo’s 4:30 reveille sends us paddling to Louds Island. Wind and tide push stubbornly against us. My boss tows two stragglers; I tow another. A sunken working boat sits half-submerged just offshore, an object lesson in maritime humility.
Lunch is behind a windbreak of rugosa roses. I ask Dr. S. what sixth-graders are reading these days.
Their list, she says, is “shockingly conservative—forty years out of date.” They’ve just finished Lord of the Flies, a novel she thinks “no longer maps onto their reality. It’s too grim, too anchored in Cold War pessimism.” Literature, she insists, should help kids imagine a better future—not just fear it.
The phoneless kids court boredom. They’ve “scrolled” the beach with their eyes and can’t take photos—what else is there? Then the old instincts reemerge. A rock-skipping contest materializes. Minutes later they discover the bilge pumps double as water guns, and the shoreline dissolves into a gleefully unregulated maritime skirmish.
By evening, they’ve settled into a functioning small society. Em rules the card table; D. retreats early to his tent. The others follow as a July drizzle begins, scattering the stragglers to their tents.
Then—just before midnight—footsteps. A bathroom mishap in the now-torrential rain. Tents unzip in a chorus. Teachers triage. Dr. S., unfazed, gives up her tent. D., wordless as ever, shifts aside to make room for the displaced tentmate.
By morning, everyone knows—and no one mocks. Hot chocolate circulates. Tents come down. Riccardo pecks at leftover oatmeal with the entitlement of a small autocrat. We bid him, and the island goodbye, and paddle toward the base in a straight, determined line.
The van absorbs all the gear, still without AC. Phones are handed back. But something in the kids has shifted; no one reaches for theirs right away. Em lingers last.
“Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t think I could do this. But it wasn’t bad. I actually loved it.”
Lord of the Flies endures on syllabi because it reassures adults that our darkest suspicions about children are correct: given enough time and weather, they’ll eat each other alive. It’s a strangely comforting myth. If kids are innately feral, then none of us are to blame for anything.
But Crow Island offered no such reading. The kids built something closer to a mildly dysfunctional start-up: inefficient, occasionally chaotic, but fundamentally cooperative. Their instincts were stubbornly practical—observe, adapt, carry on—more field-biologist than barbarian.
On the last evening, before the midnight bathroom catastrophe and its soggy reshufflings, I was scrubbing the cookware on the western rocks where the granite tilts toward the sea. Riccardo lurked nearby, riding the high of a day spent free-ranging and stealing calories. He watched each pot with the confidence of someone who has realized he cannot be fired. When it became clear I had no further offerings, he gave a theatrical shake of his feathers and strutted off, dignity intact.
Which is when the porpoises arrived.
Two of them—one small, one large—surfaced in neat tandem between a red nun and the dark spine of Hog Island. They moved with the kind of casual coordination group projects only dream of. I considered calling the kids. Then I imagined the stampede, the dropped headlamps, the inevitable questions about whether this “counted” as seeing dolphins.
I let the moment pass.
The kids would have loved them, of course. But it felt right to leave them something undiscovered—proof that the island still held a few surprises in reserve. A reason to return someday, when they’re older, or more patient, or simply bored enough to look up from whatever replaces phones by then.