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.