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What We're About... A NOLS course is not a commodity like a piece of software or a new type of weed trimmer. It is an entirely real and not totally pleasant experience.
I always imagine myself having to explain what I do at a Christmas party. I have gone back East to visit my Mom and some friends, and somehow I wind up at this party talking to a tall, well-dressed gentleman who is somebody's relative. He asks, of course, "What do you do?" I have an answer ready for that. I am a wilderness skills instructor. I take people out into the mountains - we start backpacking where the roads end. We stay out there the whole time: we don't see a newspaper or television for weeks. I teach them how to be competent travellers out there. Simple. But somehow the conversation always takes that subtle turn. Well, yes, it is pretty fine to be out there. Freedom of the hills and all that. Sure, it does feel good to be away from it all. Reflect back on your life? Sometimes I do. Changes people's values? Oh, I don't know about that. Things happen. But by the end of the conversation I realize the truth. I'm a professional revolutionary. I teach people how to escape from the system. I show them how to get away from the nightly news and the traffic and the telephones... into the meadows, the canyons, and the rain. That's what I do. In June, on an Educator's Course we run into a prolonged snowstorm. We find ourselves pitching camp and cooking dinner on the snow. In the evening as we hoist our food into the trees we are interrupted by a sudden period of lightning. We pause and squat apart and keep our heads down for twenty minutes. In the morning we awake to find fresh bear tracks in camp. Sixteen inches from claws to heel. To be exact, we teach outdoor skills, leadership and expedition behavior. We do it on real expeditions into real mountains, rivers, deserts and out onto some very real oceans. We want to enable our students to field their own successful expeditions. We believe in learning by doing. But there is also this side effect of going to wild places. It can do something to the soul. Out there it is still possible to encounter the Big Things. Sometimes they are without; sometimes they are within. When we return, that encounter comes back with us. It is not necessarily a measurable thing. Perhaps it is a faraway look in the eyes, the tendency to say less, to watch more. But to say the least, we are not engaged in a typical trade. Working here has some unusual requirements. This is not a job for people who complain. It is not a job for needing coffee in the morning before being able to deal. In the course of innovating solutions to problems, you will probably find yourself climbing trees, herding bulls, hitchhiking in darkest Utah, and counselling students on their shattered love lives. Statements like, "That's not part of my job!" are meaningless. This is not a video game. There is no skill, no experience, no dimly remembered bit of information, no long-lost acquaintance which will not, when least expected, turn out to be valuable. We are hired not only because we can handle ropes and people, but also because we enjoy meeting with amused and innovative creativity (and no outside help) the weird and the problematic. At the end of the year I receive three letters from former students. One has little to say about NOLS; she has moved to Japan and is teaching English. One (she was on the Snowbound Educator's Course) tells me that thanks to her course she has left the world of academics and waiting tables in the Midwest for a wilderness program in Utah. The last writes that as a result of her semester, "My family and I have not known such appreciation and compatibility since I was a knee-high towhead." I am totally mystified as to what we are about. Apparently we do a damn good job. - Tesuque, NM, 2/91 © Copyright 1991, Morgan Hite |