From My Year in the Woods

So my year in the woods living with twenty-five adults and seventeen children commences tomorrow morning. 

So, for those of you who’d like to know a little more: I live here. I’ve been volunteering at this school and editing for the director for the past three years, and I was finally ready to do what I originally wanted to do, which was take the yearlong wilderness immersion program. This year’s going to be different, because the focus is going to be on families.

Twenty-five adults, seventeen children, eleven months, in the heat of summer, the dead of winter, living in the woods. We’ll start out in tents and with matches, and graduate to bark and thatch lodges and bow drill fires. Our food will be supplemented with mostly organic fruits of agriculture, and we will have no sugar, no coffee, no processed foods, no media. We’ll be learning how to forage, collect and prepare craft materials, tan hides, make fire, and most importantly how to work as a community. I’ll be living a lot of what I write into Alan’s culture of origin, and Efeddre and Toney’s people, the ldridrisy and limdri.

The most challenging thing we’re going to be doing is not pooping in the woods while covered in mosquitoes, or running around in -20 F temperatures. We’re going to be facing a lot of things in ourselves that are easy to cover up with TV, reading, comfort foods, movies, music, sugar, caffeine, and drugs. We are going to be forced to look at how we relate to other people, food, the natural world, non-humans, and ourselves. We’re going to be discovering our gifts and our challenges (and having witnessed this program for four generations of students, I know there’s a lot of challenges) and how they all fit together. We are going to learn how to operate not just as isolated individuals, couples, and nuclear families, but as a community. We’re going to be constantly reminded to take responsibility for our own feelings and our own actions that have put us exactly where we are in our lives. We’re going to be examining and coming face to face with the unpleasant reality of the unspoken contracts we have with the people in our lives that allow everything to seem to run smoothly when there’s so much more underneath.

“You don’t do that, so I don’t feel this.”

“I give you this, so you don’t feel that.”

“I didn’t tell you that, because I was afraid you’d do this.”

We’re going to be learning how to communicate consciously, how to listen to what’s really being said underneath, how to say what’s really going on for us. We’re going to learn how easy it is to say we’re saying what’s really going on for us, when really we’re not doing it at all.

Michel Scott, the director of The Horse Boy, is going to be doing a documentary on our experience. So. Movie. For real.

I am utterly terrified, and I know that I am doing exactly what I need to. This is the cliff, and all I have to is jump. I’ll learn how to fly on the way down.

From Arrival

The lake wears a new face each morning.

Neon pink and lavender kissing the mist rising from the water, or the bowl of the lake capped by a rippling, iron gray sky, ten thousand cloudscapes. I used to take hundreds of pictures of the sky, trying to preserve each stunning, sensual instant, and I was so busy taking pictures I had no time to see. The the lines of the overhanging branches of a cedar, a pine, and a wave-worn log frame the swim area, for all the world like a landscaped natural picture window.

I will never see this face of the lake again, and I treasure the gift as I treasure the loss.

“High definition reality,” Marcus calls it.

“I’m stealing that,” I tell him.

The camp is waking up.

We’re crazy.

Twenty-five adults, seventeen kids, three generations, four languages, and all our different beliefs, opinions, biases, experiences, triggers, wounds, living in the woods together for eleven moons. There is only one explanation: We’re all insane.

It’s amazing and fantastic and terrifying and uncomfortable.

We sit around the fire cracking nuts and roasting eggs. A mother translates her delicate toddler’s exuberant outbursts, like closed captioning for the Swedish impaired. Her little girl plays chase with one of the boys and she scrambles over mom, screaming in one part hysteria, one part triumph.

A few of the boys are playing something they call “Dungeons and Dragons,” and I have no idea if it means the same thing to them as it does to me. We have no dice, no books, and not much paper. I smile to myself as I overhear a five-year-old from my tent, “And I told him I was a god and he didn’t want to fight me anymore.”

In our ranks we boast three people who know Thai massage, three who know myofascial release, a smattering of energy workers, and a lot of people who just know how to give with their hands. Almost every sun there’s one or two people in the quiet, sunny spots by the wigwams giving and receiving some kind of massage.

Everyone is basking in novelty and gratitude as the whole camp comes together to help level ground and erect tents and tarps. This is the honeymoon phase, when everyone loves each other and I wonder what it will be like when all our idiosyncrasies and habits start to snag each other like thorns.

But this is the Now. I decide to enjoy it while I can.