While I was born and raised in the city, much of my life has been spent exploring
the wilderness. Here is that part of my history.
When I was about eight, my parents decided to introduce me to the wilderness, so I was sent off for a week at Camp Castle, twenty miles distant. This was the first time I had been away from home other than occasional nights at my grandparents who lived a mile away. I arrived at camp early in the afternoon, and within an hour I was attacked by my tent, and suffered a nasty gash on my left knee. A doctor was called to stitch it up and to this day I can still see the scar. The camp director suggested I might like to go home, but since there was no way to get there, I decided to stick it out for the week.
What bravery! While the other kids were enjoying the swimming pool, collecting salamanders from the adjacent Brandywine creek and tromping around the nearby hills, I sat in a room reading and weaving bracelets from long strings of plastic. At least I was safe from attack by another vicious tent.
Some years later I became a Boy Scout. While my friends were frantically collecting merit badges on their way to become EaglehScouts, I managed to evade these mostly outdoor activities, and was content to remain a second-class scout and to read longer and longer books. I did go on one overnight hike, but my third-hand scout uniform was far too small and squeezed all the blood from my legs, making walking almost impossible. Dawn finally arrived and I was carted safely home. I never wanted to do that again, so thereafter managed to keep my feet on the paved part of the world.
But when I was a college freshman I pledged one of the “social clubs.” While our college refused to have nasty fraternities, our social clubs engaged in some of the more despicable fraternity practices---including the hazing of pledges. So one night I was taken from my dorm room, blindfolded and driven about ten miles out of town where I was unceremoniously dumped. Now this city boy found himself at midnight somewhere in northern Oklahoma, which turned out to be one enormous wheat field populated by vicious dogs that resented my presence. I curled up on the ground and tried to sleep. The next morning a nearby farmer drove me back to town. As disgusting as I knew that practice to be, three years later I became our club’s “pledge master,” and guess what I did to our pledges? I knew they needed to be toughened up.
When my children Carol, Beth and John were pre-teens, the family did take a few camping trips, but I always felt better if they included a Holiday Inn. Wendy enjoys camping, and I am happy to have her and her three women friends
take out for the wild for a couple of days.
One time, about thirty years ago, a colleague convinced Wendy and me to go mountain hiking somewhere in the Rockies. The plan was to have my car parked at the campground, and his a few miles away at a lake that was to be our destination. We started out at sunrise and were due at the lake at about two in the afternoon. My colleague claimed to be an experienced mountaineer and came equipped with detailed topographical maps, a snakebite kit and a fishing rod.
We started our trek by hiking up an abandoned logging trail, planned to cross a ridge, negotiate a treacherous snow field, climb over another ridge, start down and by noon expecting to spot the lake in the distant valley. All morning we followed the carefully planning route—up the logging trail, over the ridge across the snow field, over another ridge and down toward the valley and the lake. When we had negotiated the final ridge at about noon, we looked for the lake in the distance, but alas, no lake appeared! Three o’clock came and still no lake. Four and five—still nothing.
When I was panic-stricken at the prospect of being lost in the mountains as night approached, Wendy pulled me aside and whispered, “I have a strange feeling about this place. It looks familiar.” It turned out that we had gone up the logging trail, crossed the snow field and the ridges, headed down and ended up about a hundred yards from where we had started. It seems we had hiked in an extended circle. So we retrieved our cars and headed for the Holiday Inn.
I thought I could tell the story of my wilderness encounters in a single column, but they have been so extensive, it will take another column just to hit the highlights. So next week I‘ ll describe two wilderness encounters in Australia, and one in Nepal’s Himalaya Mountains.
Stay tuned.
NOTE Wendy and I have cancelled our Pacific cruise om the advice of CDC and our physician
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