Leadership Lesson: One Flare in the Dark

One Flare

I was eighteen. No moon. Pitch black.

I remember pushing off from shore and losing the tree line almost instantly. One second there was a shape to the world, the dark outline of pines against a slightly less dark sky, and the next second there was nothing. Just water, black on black, and the sound of paddles behind me.

One flare burned at the front of my canoe. That was it. That was the only light I had, and the only light anyone had. A small hissing circle of red pushed out just far enough to show me the next stretch of water, and not one inch further.

Ten Boy Scouts paddled behind me. A handful of adult Scout leaders too, men twice my age, fathers, men who'd built houses and run businesses and raised families, and that night, none of that mattered. I was the one up front. I was the one with the flare.

Nobody spoke. That was the rule. Order of the Arrow ceremonies run on silence and ritual, and the silence that night felt heavier than usual, the kind where you can hear your own paddle enter the water and nothing else. Just the drip off the blade, the creak of a canoe seat behind you, and your own breathing.

My job was simple to say and hard to do. Lead everyone across two lakes, find the channel connecting them in the dark, and get the whole group to a small island where a hundred flares would be burning, waiting to induct these Scouts into the rank of Brotherhood.

I'd scouted the route before, in daylight, weeks earlier. But daylight and darkness are not the same lake. Landmarks vanish. Distance stops making sense. You start to second-guess a turn you made a hundred times before, because everything you'd normally use to orient yourself, a distant dock, a break in the trees, a bend in the shoreline, has been erased.

I remember the exact moment the channel opened up between the two lakes. I couldn't see it. I felt it, the current shifted, the paddling got a little harder, and something in my gut told me this was it before my eyes ever confirmed it. I turned. I didn't announce the turn. I couldn't. I just turned, and ten canoes turned behind me, trusting that the one flare up front knew something they couldn't see for themselves.

By the time the island came into view, a hundred flares lit against the water, it looked less like a destination and more like something that had been waiting the whole time for us to find it. We paddled in. The silence broke into ceremony. And somewhere in the middle of all that fire and ritual, I understood something I didn't have words for yet.

Leadership doesn't always mean knowing exactly what's ahead. Sometimes it means being willing to go first anyway.