The Story of Orion – Part 3

Sometime during my first collegiate year, Prescott College, mired in financial hot water, lost its academic accreditation. Significantly, the staff of twenty-four professors, despite being booted off their remote, wilderness-like campus, and in spite of a loss of accreditation, chose to conduct their seminars and classes right out of their homes.

I returned to Prescott after Christmas break, and though I admired the professors’ temerity, I did not return to take classes. I couldn’t see spending perfectly good money on an education that wouldn’t transfer to any other university program. I spent the winter and spring of 1975 umpiring volleyball games, trying to commit suicide by instructing myself in skiing techniques like negotiating moguls (the knee-pounding humps, not the rich fat cats), and hiking in the Grand Canyon with my Prescott College friends.

I researched alternative colleges throughout the Midwest and West — Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio(!), Colorado College, Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri(!!), Jordan College in Minnesota(!!?) and the University of Santa Cruz in California. But, in a sudden schizophrenic direction change, I opted to enroll at the University of Texas’ Honors College — theoretically, a college within a college — 200 undergraduate students selected out of an enrollment of 50,000. But the main attraction for me to attend the University of Texas was the reunion with my high school friends and the proximity of three siblings — my two brothers and a sister.

Though I was enrolled in the Honors College for Liberal Arts, all that I remember from the entirety of those two semesters, was playing intramural sports. My brothers and I, along with my high school buddies, organized teams for everything — football, coed football, basketball, coed basketball, soccer, softball, volleyball, badminton and racquetball. Looking back, I have no idea how I found time to study. Perhaps I didn’t. I mean, we played sports and organized pickup games, even when we were not involved in our intramural games.

But the ‘outdoor bug’ had bit me. The trouble was that Texas didn’t feel like it had an ‘outdoors’.

There was, however, one notable exception.

It was during my University of Texas stint when my brother-in-law, Ed, hired a kayaking instructor who guided Ed, my brother, Mike, my father and I on a three-day whitewater kayaking trip on the Guadalupe River outside of Austin, Texas. He tried futilely to teach us to kayak from scratch. Teaching a mule to bake cornbread from scratch would have been easier. At least, the mule would have been less stubborn and would surely have bellyached less.

I think you can describe our experience as ‘fun’, but we spent most of our time swimming to shore with kayak in tow, or refusing to make any maneuver that might jeopardize our upright, above water, natural air-breathing position. I distinctly remember being exhausted from doing the one-armed crawl-stroke in my stone-washed denims.

None of us reminisce about our kayaking adventure, without recalling our physical exhaustion, Mike’s ability to avoid turning over (which either stemmed from his low center of gravity or a well-honed sense of survival) and our incredulity that Dad managed to clamber out of his sleeping bag on that first morning following a day of ingesting water and dragging his ass back to shore. But, clamber he did. And he kayaked with us two out of the three days. On the third morning he wised up and ran the shuttle.

Afterward, I invested a fair amount of time perfecting my roll in a swimming pool, but it was a few years before I ventured onto moving water in a kayak again. Of course, for a Texas boy, the ice baths of the rivers in the Northwest were never as enticing as the bath tub water of the Southwest.

The whole time in Texas I dreamed and schemed of returning to the West. I imagined a program and a university degree entitled ‘Wilderness Education and Counseling Psychology’. I had visions of a life of therapeutic outdoor recreation. In fact, Boston College offered a program along those lines, but Massachusetts was a long way from my ideal setting.

My Dad rode to the rescue again. An old friend of his was the Dean of Recreation at San Francisco State. Dad suggested I pick his brain in regards to wilderness recreation programs in the West. I phoned him and got his list of recommendations.

San Francisco State topped his list, of course, but he also plugged the University of Oregon and Western Washington State College. My best friend from Prescott, Bob Ratcliffe, tried steering me toward Evergreen State College in Olympia where we could create our own program and wouldn’t have to deal with grades and a traditional education.

I met Bob during my wilderness orientation and admired his outdoor savvy which was light-years beyond mine, but I was impatient to be finished with public schooling. The small taste of freedom that accompanied the unexpected turn-of-events at Prescott primed me to get on with joining the ‘workforce’. The thought of attending a school, which required critical thinking in order to emerge with a degree, seemed overwhelming and daunting. I wanted a ticket out of school.

In the end, I selected Western because the Recreation program included an emphasis on outdoor recreation, their classes were bunched together in what they called ‘phases’ — similar to Prescott’s intensive one or two subjects at a time in month-long ‘blocks’ — the campus was lovely with red brick paths and towering evergreens and, as a bonus, the wilderness reaches of western Canada were a mere hop, skip and a jump away.

I toiled through the scalding hot and blistering dry Dallas summer laboring as a nursery worker unloading semi-truck loads of fresh, chlorophyll-laden plants imported from British Columbia. Each time I climbed on board to start the unloading process, I would take a deep breath and the lure of the verdant Northwest grew more and more irresistible.

It was September of 1976. With just a week to go before classes were in session, I packed every possession possible into my 1972 pastel-blue Ford Pinto, the interior crammed full except for the driver’s seat, and set out on the interstate for one of the farthest corners of the lower 48 states — a sleepy little burg at the end of the interstate called Bellingham.

The Story of Orion – Part 2

Thirty days in the redrock country of Utah did not make me an outdoorsman. (Thirty five years hasn’t molded me into one either, for that matter.) In all honesty, I don’t recall learning very many ‘outdoor skills’. No survival skills, no map and compass skills, no river rescue skills. Since a majority of the river trip was a float trip, we barely learned how to steer the rafts.

It was a thirty day wilderness orientation trip with minimal structure. I remember a fair amount of hiking, as well as backpacking. We ate an enormous amount of peanut butter and jam on round crackers called ‘Bolton biscuits’ which was just one of the indestructible foods that we hauled down river in used military black bags referred to as ‘blags’. We also ate an enormous amount of tasteless granola and freeze dried dinners. We brought 5 pound bricks of cheese that we kept unrefrigerated for the entire time. The cheese blocks grew sweaty and greasy in the unremitting heat of the desert, but, remarkably, none of them grew moldy or had to be discarded.

We had three rafts and they were all paddled. The rafts were stuffed with thirteen people’s worth of gear. Two people shared one blag for their sleeping bags, ensolite foam pads, extra clothes and a second set of shoes which were, typically, boots for hiking. We carried no coolers. We had no tents. Our aluminum-framed backpacks were strapped to the rafts separately in one large awkward bundle.

As we paddled the silver-painted glorified military assault rafts, we sat amongst our gear which was spread throughout the raft from the bow to the stern. You may imagine that I learned knots from rigging gear every day, but until we reached the seventeen miles of whitewater below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado, we relied on gravity. The only knot I could tie in 1974, before the wilderness orientation and after the wilderness orientation, was the one I used to tie my shoelaces.

(And, everyone who watches me tie my shoes laughs because I do something back-asswards, but I can’t tell you today what it is. My mother taught me that bow-tie and I have no intention of relearning a more efficient method five decades hence.)

Two of the rafts we paddled were 15 feet long with large diameter tubes. The 15 foot model with the upturned snout was called a ‘Yampa’ after the Yampa River in northwestern Colorado. The smaller 13 footer was named for the Selway River in Idaho. Ironically, I have never paddled either of those rivers.

The rafts had been christened with names as well. The Selway was named ‘Guacamole’, perhaps because it was the craft most likely to be turned to mush in the whitewater of Cataract Canyon. The two Yampas were named ‘Merlin’ (I always presumed for the magician, but it might also have referred to the town near the Rogue River) and ‘Orion’, the company’s namesake raft and constellation.

Other than hiking and backpacking and eating ‘cardboard-flavored’ meals, the only other organized activity I remember — not including the three-day solo at journey’s end — was a rapell from a one hundred foot sandstone cliff somewhere in the bowels of The Maze. Somehow I was selected to go first. As I nervously hung over the cliff’s edge, my mind waging a battle between fear and humiliation, I remember Len Barron, the sociology professor who had accompanied our trip, leaning over the precipice and say in his East Coast accent through his brushy gray mustache, “You know, James, it’s perfectly permissible to smile.”

Len would later say during the campfire evaluations that I should consider breaking the mold, dare to go out on a limb, commit to doing something out of the ordinary. I was not a risk-taker, and it was obvious. If I played my cards at all, I always played them close to the vest. Len challenged me to think outside of the box I created for myself.

(Of course, he also told one of the slightly uptight female students that she should get herself laid. Len’s candor and generalizing repelled most Prescott students. Indeed, only a couple of us selected him as an advisor.)

I ramble about the Prescott wilderness orientation because it was during that period I realized there was something about being outdoors with a group of people that energized and inspired me. I sat down in the mouth of Dark Canyon at the beginning of those seventy-two hours knowing I valued family and community, but I don’t think I understood or fully appreciated the extent I valued them because I had never been forced to confront my values and to mull them over endlessly.

My time in slickrock country during the fall of 1974 did not seal my career path. I did not receive an epiphany that said, “Go forth and found an adventure travel company and you will be forever satisfied with your existence”. The whitewater of Cataract Canyon was sufficiently exhilarating but it did not convert me into a whitewater junkie. I did not pursue rafting or kayaking or hiking or rock-climbing immediately after my wilderness immersion.

What I learned in my wilderness sojourn with Prescott College was the value of community and a method by which communities can be formed, strengthened, reinvigorated and grown. Up until that time I had blithely wandered through my life cherishing my friendships, my family and viewing from afar my father and mother growing church communities throughout Texas, but not fully appreciating that I needed to maintain contact with the process of community-building or I would wither away.

This wasn’t fully clear at the end of my wilderness orientation either, but it was beginning to be a niggling irritant in the back of my mind. The sort of irritant that might just blossom into a pearl if given sufficient time.

The Story of Orion – River Rafting in Washington – Part 1

The Story of Orion

As told, and remembered by the Grand Poohbah Hisself

In Twelve Parts. . .

~~~

I am going to begin at the very beginning.

At a time when Orion was not even a gleam in anyone’s eye. At a time when I had no idea I would spend the majority of my life in ‘The Great North Woods’, as my high school girlfriend’s father liked to call it, or ‘The Great NorthWet’, as Emily Johnston prefers to call it. A time when outdoor recreation meant Starcraft pop-up trailers and the word campground was spelled with a ‘K’ as far as my family was concerned — as in Kampgrounds of America, aka KOA.

It was the early ‘70’s. I was in love with iconoclasm, progressive country and environmentalism. I was out-of-step with everyone who lived in north Texas. A high school classmate reminded me the other day that I would recycle my paper lunch sack until it was as limp as toilet tissue. I had begun questioning the twin Texas sacred cows of competition and football. If old enough, I would have voted for a Hispanic (a relative of Fidel Castro) for governor. My father campaigned for him, a sacrilege in the Republican fortress of Dallas.

The Vietnam War was winding down. Watergate was heating up. And disco, thanks to the BeeGees and John Travolta, was catching on.

I did not have a single clue where I would go to college or what I would study when I got there. I wasn’t even certain college appealed to me. Even though I was a member of the National Honor Society and a successful public school student, I sensed an ‘emptiness’ to my education.

‘Garbage in, garbage out’ was a popular expression of the time. (Had something to do with technological hunks of junk known as ‘computers’.)

For some unknown reason, since I deplored mathematics, I applied and was accepted to the University of Santa Clara’s engineering program. In fact, I was offered an academic scholarship to study environmental engineering. I have a vague memory of wanting to work on the reclamation of strip mined lands. I distinctly remember the program stretching through five years with practically every single class predetermined — all the electives were clustered toward the fifth and final year.

Despite my antipathy toward math and science, I felt I needed the scholarship in order to attend a college, so I awaited my enrollment like a prisoner awaits his execution. I have no idea what I was thinking. It seemed the ‘thing to do’.

Out of the blue, my father, a Presbyterian minister with a nationwide audience through his weekly column in the Presbytery’s national magazine, came to me with an alternative proposal. Perhaps he had noticed my lack of excitement. Perhaps he saw something in me that I hadn’t plumbed. Perhaps he played a hunch. Maybe he hoped to live through me vicariously.

In any case, he told me about a small liberal arts college in northern Arizona called Prescott College. A reader of his from Arkansas had mailed a letter and a National Geographic article featuring Prescott and its unusual curriculum, educational style and freshman orientation. This reader told my dad that she thought his youngest son, whom she had read so much about in his weekly essays, might enjoy this sort of education. (I don’t know the name of this ‘angel’, but in hindsight, I send a much-belated and deeply heartfelt thank-you.)

When my father suggested I consider Prescott College, and that he would foot the bill, at least for the first year, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. If nothing else, I could postpone deciding my future for another couple of years while I explored alternatives at Prescott. Those of you who know me well, know I do not tend toward excitability. So it won’t surprise you that my father was more excited about Prescott than I was, and what excited him the most was the orientation program for all freshmen and transfer students.

Prescott’s wilderness orientation program, following a week’s worth of matriculation, was a thirty-day sojourn somewhere in the wilds of Southwest. The incoming students were divided into several groups of ten and then trucked to Baja to sea-kayak, the Manti La Sal mountain range to trudge about in the snow, the Grand Canyon to hike or to the Green River in Utah to raft. Each group was joined by several other students with outdoor recreation experience and one faculty member.

As it turns out, and quite by accident, I was shipped off to Moab, Utah, for my very first experience whitewater rafting.

I was eighteen. I had never camped without running water. I had certainly never camped without a physical structure over my head. I had never been on a river with whitewater and, the concept of controlling a boat in cataracts (for we were rafting down the Green River to and through the Colorado River’s Cataract Canyon), was incomprehensible to me.

I don’t remember physically shaking in my boots. But I do remember being infinitely relieved I wasn’t in a lecture hall with a couple of hundred other students listening to a professor drone on about trigonometry equations and the importance of slide rules.