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The sound of a thousand disaster movies, a siren you might associate with nuclear war or alien invasion. A noise like a giant plucking forty trees from the forest, furling them into his fists, and snapping them in half as though they were only twigs. I lay still, half-asleep. Again and again, this rupture echoes from the sky while the siren drones on. Rain pellets down on the top of us. Jack continues to snore away. The tent doors are thrown wide open. A silhouette tells us to throw on our boots, his wafty curls illuminated by a dozen bright beams bouncing around the campsite. Flashlights. I grab mine. “Ah would’ye get da’ outta me face and put yer boots on”, Allen reiterates. I smack Jack’s back (he’s a heavy sleeper) and tell him to do the same. There’s something very Spielberg about all of this. The children running around in the woods at night. The sense of danger. Bursts of light in the sky. A man in high-vis is speaking to Allen and the other leaders. It seems we have all forgotten the way out. The blind lead the blind past bushes and under branches in an extreme sport version of a conga line. The route we’ve chosen, or rather the one chosen for us, proves too waterlogged to walk over so we circle back and pursue another arbitrarily chosen direction. With a little bit of luck, and a lot of muck, we find ourselves in an open field. I can see a yellow glow. The windows of the dining shelter. Our emergency rendezvous. An old auburn building with a solid roof and four strong walls, unlike the flimsy two-man tents we’ve been sleeping in for the last few nights. Unfortunately, there’s still quite the trek ahead of us. I can almost hear the taunting tone of the slippery grass. Suddenly, a blinding bolt of lightning zaps through the thick woolly clouds with such a distance that you can see the curvature of our planet simply by looking up. This blast of electricity explodes with enough intensity to turn the night sky white then disappears in an instant. In its absence the heavens fade back to black. I take a moment to overcome my awe. This feels less Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania and more Dracula’s Castle, Transylvania. We continue trudging towards our destination. Once inside, the owners of the campsite take a roll call and send us back outside. That’s it. No waiting for the storm to die down. No staying in the shelter overnight. No nothing. Back to bed, back through the field and the muck and the branches and the bushes and the rain. I’m unsure why we were brought to the shelter in the first place. It seems like this whole charade was just a health and safety formality. We’re reassured the storm is nothing to worry about but the droning sirens aren’t exactly a lullaby. Back in our tent, I stay awake and try to capture some footage of the lightning on my iPod. Once again, Jack snores away. I hear a scream in the distance, and assume one of the younger scouts are messing about. I realise the technology I’m using isn’t advanced enough to capture a subject moving at the literal speed of light, and reluctantly go back to sleep. In the morning, the sun shines like a Hollywood fantasy. The heat is more akin to how I imagined an American summer would feel. Over a breakfast of rainbow-coloured cereal and a carton of milk containing twelve grams of sugar I learn that one of my peers, Uisnea, slipped on the way back to his tent during the storm. He returns later that day with his leg in a cast. Looking back over my failed attempts to video the lightning, I discover that I have captured the scream I heard last night. The scream of a young boy breaking his leg. An omen of all the injuries yet to come my way on this trip: the bite of a wolf spider, a BMX stunt gone wrong in mid-air, sunburnt back acne that leaves me bedbound for a day… This journey has only just begun.