Survival Camping

My brother Will and I just got home from seeing Rescue Dawn in a theater peopled with another dozen or so various riff raff....mainly older war vets with their frail, white-haired wives who held hands and both guffawed at certain bitterly humorous places in the film. A few boys my age hung around the back, one with a beard and a thin face who I maybe would have approached if I were a more forward type of girl. A couple of girls in flip flops left the movie about twenty minutes in and came back at the credits to pick up their dates.

It wasn't one of those movies a person goes back to see again and again. Steve Zahn scored hugely in my mind. His sunken eyes and bitter, broken spirit were worlds away from his goofball "presidential flashcard" antics in That Thing You Do. This film ripped me up while at the same time sickeningly enticed me to look forward to survival camping in Arizona again this fall. I have a lot of questions about wilderness therapy and what all the point of "survival camp" really is. I always felt the word "survival" is a bit heavy when you take into consideration the real survival stories like Dieter Dengler's or Chris McCandless's (whose story is also coming out in the theaters soon). Though...if the person doesn't survive, I suppose you can't classify it as a survival story....?

But McCandless or Everett Ruess or even Edward Abbey aren't really the same type of survivor (erm...wannabe survivor?) as someone who didn't just go off and live in the desert of their own accord. Dieter became a hero for not dying, but would Aron Ralston, the guy who cut off his own arm in a Utah canyon, also be considered a hero for not dying? If he had died, wouldn't he have just been considered foolish? Wouldn't he have become just another worst-case scenario to warn hikers and climbers about in order to get them to pay attention in safety seminars? Does it take a war story to make a survival story heroic? Surely, Aron would have racked higher on the scales had he at least saved some babies on the way home.

Today is the day I would have hopped a flight to Japan, had I decided to go. With a sore throat and inflamed lymph nodes, I admit I am happy not to be on such a plane ride at this point in time. Still, I recognize the sacrifice of not going, and, still unsure why I wasn't supposed to take the opportunity, I bide my time trying to make up for it, trying to escape to whatever other adventure will bring me close to something real, something worth doing. Things I can only see and feel while I'm tied down to nobody but myself.

Ed Abbey kept himself in the desert saying, "I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock." With a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes and having just walked out of a movie about Vietnam, I confess, currently, that Abbey's words only make me want to lie down in a bed and eat otter pops while I can. "Gather ye popsicles while ye may...."

The cynic in me also knows that not every young teenager I'll walk with in the desert will see a juniper tree the way Abbey sees it. Wilderness therapy obviously isn't a sure deal for anybody. And in the few months I experienced the desert last year, I had enough scrapes with real danger to know it's folly to trust that Nature won't cream you just because you consider what you're doing as valiant or even God's will. Though at certain points, trust in God's hand is about all you can lean against. Still, even after leading seven teenage girls crabwalking over loose shale five feet from a 30-foot dropoff into dry creekbed in the middle of Bronco Canyon, letting the girls rest in the laughable shade of two-foot mesquite while the other leader, Gina, and I wept in prayer in a crook of rock a few feet away, I still feel "survival" is a heavy word. Yet didn't I change from the moment? Is this what I'm going back to look for? The raw starkness of man vs. wild....as close to a real survival story I'll allow myself, knowing that I have a med kit, radio, GPS, and satellite phones to ensure I'll definitely live through real danger?

As a girl, I'm not supposed to understand this escape as much as a man would. Okay, I'll grant you that. I can feel the urge to nest when it comes out. I find comfort in sweeping myself a place in the sand; I enjoy camping in the same spot for two or three days at a time. I always felt more comfortable when Huckleberry and Jim had made it safely back to their raft--their home base. Even so, there's something about the weight of everything I need on my back, the choice solitary opportunity of appreciating the scenery while squatting behind a tree, of falling asleep to the stars above the cliffs ahead while coyotes howl in the distance. There's something about drinking water out of shallow divets in boulders or chewing the sugary bases of century plants, or of sitting back on your heels next to other dirty people and watching the dance of a hundred fireflies twinkling over watercress in the dusk. Even to be able to distinguish how one person smells from another I find intimate. There are people I walked the trail with whom I loved so much, I have their smell memorized as if they were peppermint or strawberries. Maybe it's that I have to have companionship...maybe that's the girl in me. I think so. It's in my blood to sniff out partnerships, not trails. Maybe? ....Maybe I'm still a bit feverish.

Reasons to Quit Academia

I just got my teaching evaluations back from my last semester of school. Well, hot damn. They were the worst yet. Statistically, I was still above average and given an overall "well done" but the supplemental comments were biting and immature. I'm ready to throw in the hat and take up a secretarial job, one where I can blend into the background and be required of no more creativity than to find different ways to say, "How may I transfer your call?"

Sure, maybe the last semester before graduating is supposed to be tough. Along with teaching two classes of sophomore composition, I was in the middle of revising the final drafts of my thesis and meeting for various defenses (that seemed to only get held between my two classes, requiring me to run across campus). I can blame this on my classes being held in dorm rooms, one room being completely unusable one morning because the door lock had run out of batteries. So we sat in a dim, dingy commons room next to a broken full screen television, underneath movie posters of the most intellectually challenging showcase (Star Trek: Nemesis, Never Been Kissed, Zoolander, Cheaper By the Dozen, I Know What You Did Last Summer). I could blame this on the lack of working dry erase markers, the complete lack of any kind of technology and of broken technology with missing parts I don't realize don't work until after I've wheeled big screen televisions and three foot high speakers across campus to the dorms in a wheelbarrow provided by the media warehouse. I could blame this on one classroom's replacement of erasers with large dirty white rags and a white erase board that actually pressed into the wall as I wrote on it, requiring me to place my other hand on the board to steady my writing area.

But I was optimistic. I knew I wouldn't score as high this semester because my mind really was focused on graduating and filling out all the red tape. But perhaps, after all, I am still too young to be teaching, too immature and too close to the students put in my classes. Yes, it IS difficult to compose myself academically when an old district leader signs up for my class, or his girlfriend signs up the next semester. Ward members who think it will be fun or easy to take my class sign up and label me immoral or disgruntled when I ask them to read essays entitled "Shitty First Drafts" or Tim O'Brien pieces. I do not like finding out I'm dating my students' roommates. I do not like hearing from my roommates that my students want to date me. I do not like having friends tell me they cannot date me because I've been an English teacher to all of their friends.

I get discouraged when one asshole writes in his teaching evaluation, "You drove the point home and were easy on the eyes." I do not like getting other evaluations that end with, "Overall great job, Babe." I am tired and I am finished. Some students plead for an easier workload while others chastise me for making class so mindless and cheap. Some students despise the reading assignments while others remark as an afterthought, "you should have had us read stuff sometimes." Why didn't you give us stricter deadlines? they ask, after I granted them an extension because they begged and begged for an additional weekend. Why all the redundancy about the rhetorical triangle? they ask. It is because your compositions obviously lacked the most simple components and the further I drilled them into your frizzed out, earbudded, selfish minds the better your essays actually became.

The hardest bit of feeling this way towards my classes is that before I know how they truly feel, I really appreciate and enjoy all of them. Yes, these evaluations are the worst I've ever received. But regardless, I really enjoyed my students and tried as well as I could at the time to make class rewarding and interesting. And now I am tired. One idiot a year ago confided in me that when he took my class, he stayed awake by staring at my ass. How the hell am I supposed to engage students in persuasive thesis statements and library research when I am nothing more than a piece of low quality meat to these jerks who ought to know better. I should have taught elementary school. Because at least then I could have avoided these know-it-all 23-year-old boys who just got their trophy wives and learned everything they needed to know on their missions and define their idea of "bringing home the bacon" as undressing their foolish, childish, rambling English instructor in their minds.

And THIS is ALL I will ever say about THAT.

Raising My Glass of Kittens to Both Future, Past

I'm almost done cleaning my room. For those of you who know me, you will understand what a feat this is. It got so bad, I admit, I had to pull the mattress out of my room and into the family room because I could no longer get from the door to my bed. In my defense, I have not allowed myself more than 48 hours at a time in my parents' house since school got out. I dumped everything from my apartment into the middle of my floor and scavenged for pants and books for each next trip/tour/job I subsequently embarked on. I had never been so bad. My mother took pictures behind my back and showed them to my Aunt Lori who didn't believe it until she saw it.

It is now possible to once again frolic in my room. I'm working on the borders now. I bought two bookshelves last night and spent the evening organizing all the books I've collected and boxed and stacked during the past ten years. I cancelled my Planetarium Marathon with Cagefighter Kev to do all this (but mostly because my Planetarium card is still somewhere in the hidden crannies of my border stacks). I did manage to find my USB cord to my camera and I distinctly remember taking it out of my room and setting it "HERE, so I won't lose it." But now I don't remember where HERE was...... So I pulled a picture from my 75 cent copy of Cats Quarterly I found somewhere past the seven consecutive aisles of fireworks at Odd Lots in Bushkill, PA. I sometimes find myself collecting weird and tacky cat mementos because of the ten freakiest men with feline obsessions found on this planet, I know three of them. And you never know when you're going to need to make a birthday card or a mix-cd cover. Plus, the wine glass full of cats appropriately reminds me of the fabled Poconos Palace located approx. five minutes from my Aunt Lori's home, where the "world famous" 7-foot champagne glass whirlpool honeymoon suites await your eager arrival. Along with trailer parks and several thousand white-tailed deer, the Poconos Mountains are known for ridiculously kinky and cheap love getaways. Oh the giggling I did in the Poconos....it was most seriously the finest few days I've had with my aunt and grandmother in years. I'm a bit disappointed that the champagne glass whirlpool is opaque....it is a rare conversation topic to have with your grandmother--that of what a naked body must look like smashed against the strange angles and concave shape of a see-through champagne glass....surely not romantic. I mean, how would one even sit in a manner inoffensive to the one watching from below? I wouldn't be the one to get in first, that's for sure.

So actual current pictures of the friends back east still to come. In the meantime, I've expanded my blog profile with small gems I've unearthed in the mines of my bedroom so I can look as sufficiently self-absorbed as I am at this point of existence. It is a rough patch to clean out one's closets. This, Jen, is why I procrastinate room-cleaning. It's hard on my heart. You never know what hidden memory is lost beneath last semester's papers or within that old backpack kept behind the clothes hamper. But surprisingly, I've done well this time. Maybe this means I'm finally at peace with all the soreness of the past. Maybe I am growing up a bit. I feel good, cathartic. I'm learning to let go, throw things out. Clear my drawers, level the playing field for whatever is coming next.

But I'm still not getting rid of my Grover doll, and I just KNOW I'll figure out what to make with this old salvaged seatbelt if I hang onto it for another five years.....