A BB&N Freshman Asked to Borrow a Bathing-Suit Pocket

In 2024 a student wrote up her own Bivouac for the school's blog, and it is the best orientation material I have read. She had been at the same school for nine years before BB&N. She had never loved the first day of school. This first day consisted of being thrown into the woods, for eleven days, with a group of kids she didn't know.

On the bus, her heart pounding, she couldn't see where to sit. Then a girl invited her to sit down, "Like the light peeking through the clouds on a stormy day." The two later turned out to be in the same squad.

The rest was, by her account, a chaotic blur, with hard beds and no showers. Instead, every morning, the group went down to the lake for a morning cleansing, carrying little bottles of soap. Which raised a problem nobody had warned her about: once you are in the lake, there is nowhere to put the soap.

I have stood in a lake holding something I could not put down. It was my phone, at a family reunion, and the lake won.

Then she spotted a girl whose bathing suit had pockets. Fighting off, she wrote, every bit of the hesitation she had learned at her old school, she went over and awkwardly asked whether she could use her pockets. The girl is now, she wrote, one of her closest friends at BB&N.

Her summary of the whole program: "11 days of laboring, wilderness, and Dr. Bronner's soap."

It is the most honest school brochure ever written, and a student wrote it.

Four years later, seniors go back. In 2025 around a hundred members of the graduating class returned for "Back-to-Biv," to visit old squads, walk to the lake and make pizza, with an open-mic assembly on the rock where the first class meeting happens. One senior summed up Bivouac for the student paper: "You go into the woods. Buh-bye. You're there, it might suck, but you all learn from it."

The eldest leaves for a week of camp next summer. I have bought her a bathing suit with pockets. She says that defeats the purpose. I said the purpose was soap.