80: Running After Antelope
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At this point, all Chris McKinney has is a positive attitude, because frankly, the facts do not look too promising. What am I talking about? I'm talking about man against nature, one boy's story. Every weekend, 17-year-old Chris McKinney wades out into knee-deep water alone with a shovel and a wooden contraption, and nylon sandbags, and he proceeds to fill 20 sandbags, 50 pounds each, one at a time. I take it out of the sandbag holder, and I tie the top to the sandbag, and I carry it over to the sandbag wall and stack it where it needs to be stacked, and that's about it. I mean, it's not a whole lot to it. Doing this for a full day, Chris can add about five feet to his sandbag wall. It's not much. He's putting his wall on a thin strip of beach, a strip that's barely wide enough to stand on, and Mason's next state park in Virginia. The shorter is eroding at the rate of two feet a year, so fast that the ground has collapsed underneath the trees at the edge of the beach. For half a mile, these huge 60 and 70-foot trees have toppled over into the water one after another, because the ground holding them upright is gone, it's complete devastation, and there, in the middle of it, is Chris's tiny sandbag wall. Do you have a name for this wall? Yeah, it's the sandbag wall. He's been at it for a month and a half, and it's just a fraction of what it needs to be. He's trying to protect this one small stretch of beach where there's a pathway that's about to be eroded out of existence, as well as just 30 feet long, and that's probably, I don't know, third or maybe a fourth of what it needs to be. And Chris has a deadline. That's December 19th. That's my 18th birthday. Chris is doing this project as one of the requirements to become an Eagle Scout. His fear? By the time he finishes the sandbag wall, he will be too old to be a scout. Once you turn 18, you're out of scouting. You must be getting frustrated. How long it takes? Well, slightly. Usually I'm frustrated when the friends I've known for a while, they'll tell me they'll help out, but they don't always show up, but that's, I understand, there's things I'd rather do on Saturday than do an Eagle project. But it is my Eagle project, and no one else is going to come out there. Even with the stirs, but if you just get a big mission in the head, they're just going to make it happen no matter what. Right. Well, yeah, Christopher Columbus was one of them, and, you know, so, yeah, I've heard a lot of those things, you know, I'm pretty sure, you know, I'm one of those people. I can do this. Do you feel like this is one of those stories? Yeah, yeah. Well, not as big as those, but it's definitely, you know, whatever I set in my mind to, I'm definitely capable of doing.
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