For the fourth time, our Senior Class spent a week studying tide pool zoology–where scientists believe life arose–on Hermit Island, Maine. We joined 100 students from seven other Waldorf schools (75 students from 5 more Waldorf schools were there the week before) from Sunday, September 20, to Friday, September 25. We rose at 5:45 a.m.–the tide waits for no one–to slip over knotted wrack and other algae to discover more than two dozen different marine organisms, including crabs, sea stars, anemones, mollusks, tunicates, and urchins. Students planned the menu for the week and cooked for each other–steak, crepes, stir fry, lobster. We studied mollusks, worms, arthropods, and echinoderms in group seminars, studied algae and animals in labs, wrote beach poetry and painted pictures of the beach, had communal campfires to discuss deep questions with other students, lay on our bellies to see bioluminescent plankton, heard Jonathan Skinner, poet at Bates College and founder of the journal Ecopoetics, and attended a rousing contradance.