New Staff Training (NST) - Part III

Welcome to the final episode of the NST saga. It was just so much to take in in ten days. Like a powerload experience. I don't even know what a powerload is, and in fact may have just made that up...but that is the word that comes to mind.

The Daily Flow

This might give you a better picture of a typical day on the river. The Daily Flow is different for every course, as much of the specifics are determined by the instructional team in charge. However, the flow we used during training looked something like this:

Wake up and get everything out of tents (5 min)
Take down tents (10 min)
Morning meeting, snack, and 1-10 check-in (How are you doing? 1=horrible, 10=great)
Stretch Circle (student choose stretches)
House of Gain (abs, push-ups, and “mystery exercise”)
Run (start at 15 min and increase 2 min each day)
Dip/Bucket Baths (10 min)
Gear Bag Time (10 min; students are only allowed to get into gear bags twice a day at specified times)
Personal jobs around camp – set up tubby line, cook, navigation brief, etc
Load Boats – first 90%
Breakfast! (30 min)
Load Boats – last 10%
Navigation Brief w/ entire team
Paddle, Paddle, Paddle
Lash canoes together for lunch on the river
Debrief on the river (students might journal or read)
Paddle, Paddle Paddle
Arrive at camp! (hopefully before dark!)
Camp set-up
Gear Bag Time
Personal Jobs
Dinner!
Evening meeting around the fire
GTB!


Behavior Sims and Instructor Blocks

From day 3 through day 7 of NST, we were grouped into teams of three, and each group was given two half-day long blocks of time to be the instructors. Our trainers, Katie and Jinky, then took on the roll of students along with the rest of the group. However, not only did they take on the roll of students, they took on the roll of students with particularly 'interesting' behaviors. During each morning or afternoon, there was a scheduled behavior simulation that the 3-person instructor team would need to deal with in addition to running the daily flow and getting the team out onto the river or into the next day's campsite.

The first round of I-blocks and Behavior Sims were a bit nerve-racking, but turned out to be more than manageable. Imagine going from almost zero responsibility to being responsible for the entire group, considering you’re operating on little sleep, minimal experience, working with new people, and based on your performance, you may or may not have a job at the end of all of this. Definitely in my learning zone. But, like most things in the world of experiential ed (and I would argue overall), getting ones toes wet is the hardest part. Luckily, it seemed like we dove in head first. The behaviors sims weren’t anything out of the ordinary at first – non-participation, bullying, stealing food -- although they got a bit crazier during the second round. I especially enjoyed participating in the behavior sims as a “student.” I got to do this at least twice, being assigned a behavior characteristic (such as bullying Nicole about not liking spiders) to play out as I wished. Oh, I had fun acting bad.

During day 4 of training, as I was acting out the part of the bully, we paddled about six miles down the Bayou Jezzamine – a little tiny rivulet on the map. It was my first bayou experience and I was excited. We twisted and turned down the jungle-like waterway, and as we went we were engaged in the climax of a several-day-long game of “Killer.” If you are not familiar with this game, it goes like this: everyone draws a card. In the pile of cards is one face card, and one ace. The face card is the “killer.” If the killer winks at someone, that person must die a dramatic death 10-15 minutes later. The ace is the “doctor.” The doctor can magically heal people who have been winked at before they die their dramatic death. The goal is to figure out the killer before they murder everyone. Well, when we drew cards, I pulled out the king. And I bided my time. How to wink at people in canoes without the answer being obvious? I waited for opportune moments during gunwale-ups and lunch when many boats were together. I called over a friend’s boat under the guise of wanting a different-sized paddle. I winked at my boat partner because he saw me wink at someone else. At one point I had a bug in my eye, which afterward someone thought was a ploy to wink at someone else, but that was genuine – I actually got a bug stuck in my eye. I was down to two living member of the crew when someone found me out. All this time I was also bullying Nicole about not liking spiders. I got to be sneaky and stealthful and bad all in one afternoon. What a glorious change of pace.

As we were paddling down the Bayou Jezzamine, it rained. At first it just teased us, raining on and off – not enough to make me want to don the full banana-colored rubber rain suit I was issued. But in the end, the clouds prevailed, and the rain did not cease. At this point, everything is wet. It rained so hard we had to bail out our boat. I put on my banana suit and was surprised at how much I enjoyed myself despite myself and almost everything I owned being soaked or damp. (Cross that – my sleeping bag and a few clothes stayed dry in my dry bag – but those that got wet didn’t dry for several days.) The rain was so thick and so unrelenting that it silenced all other noises, including our own voices, and all that existed was the river and my paddle and the rain. Forward, stroke, forward, stroke. I was in love with the intensity of it and began to sing, because no one could hear me over the sound of the rain against the river. Mother Nature, you are still Queen.

The second round of instructor blocks began with a bang when we arrived at out campsite on day 6. It was a beautiful sandbar campsite with a view of the river, where fish would periodically jump full-flung out of the water. That is not an exaggeration. I saw them. Jinky played the part of the student that afternoon, and his behavior sim was extreme non-compliance. He just blew up. “Man, f*$% this s#@*! F#%* you, instructors! Why do I always have to do everything? Jinky do this, Jinky do that, man f$*% you!” Et cetera. The rest of us continued business as usual, watching the show on the side-line of course, and slogging our way through until the debrief after dinner. I was just playing student that day, but my turn came the next afternoon.

That evening, the instructor block that had handled Jinky’s cursing and yelling act passed the torch to the next instructional team in a ceremony that became one of my favorites during the trip. I love ceremony when it is done right. Down on the sand beach, under a sky alight with stars, the Smokin’ Axels flag was passed to the new instructors. Each walked through a tunnel of headlamps to receive this emblem of our team’s full value contract. And as they walked silently down to the shore to take up the flag, we began to sing:

As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way

Come on brothers and let’s go down
Come on down, don’t you want to go down,
Come on brothers, let’s go down,
Down in the valley to pray.

And in that moment I knew: this is where I am supposed to be. It was beautiful.

The next day was fairly uneventful, although it saw us leaving around lunchtime (ahem, 3:00) for our next campsite- not ideal. Simon, Emily and I took over the reigns for the very last instructional block of the trip that afternoon. We made good time, but still only managed to get to our campsite as dusk was falling. Fish were jumping like crazy. Every few seconds, it seemed, I saw and/or heard a fish jump entirely out of the water. “Where do these fish get to be so agile?” I thought. “What kinds of fish are these?” As Jesse took a leek in the cut-out orange juice container that served as a bailer (one of the few reasons I am still jealous of men while camping), a fish almost landed in our boat of its own accord.

In the dimming light, we saw the dock that marked out campsite. We were camping on private land – owned by a friend of OB – which consisted of a small white house (with space to pitch our tents beside it) and an enormous wooden dock across from a turtle preservation area.

Jinky and Katie gathered the rest of the team as Simon and Emily and I passed out snack (corn nuts) and decided on a plan for unloading boats in the dark – complicated by the fact that none of the students are allowed to have their own headlamp/flashlight, and that the boats had to remain tied up to the docks instead of on shore. Jinky and Katie broke their circle. “Behavior Sim 3 has begun.” Now the game was on. Jinky was the first to show the signs and symptoms: sad face, little responsiveness, wanting to go home. I had a homesickness case on my hands. I let Jinky take a step-back and tried to get him to talk to me a few minutes later. No problems – I’ve dealt with this before. Until I noticed that three or four other students were also on step-backs. I consulted with Simon and Emily. “What happened to Kristin, and Jim, and Luke, and Nicole?” we asked each other. Until we realized: they’re all on step-backs. They’re all playing homesick…who is unloading the boats?

Only JoAnna was left unloading the boats – the rest of our team had gone limp with homesickness fever. Until JoAnna quit in frustration, and admitted that she was homesick too. Luckily, by that time, we had Jinky and a couple of other students back on their feet, feeling better and getting dinner ready. It was a whirlwind, and over before we could carry out all of the restore and discussion we had planned for the evening: our final dinner on the river, “Jinky’s mystery meal” of cous-cous, dried broccoli, tomato sauce, and mashed potatoes – world’s strangest shepherd’s pie, was served. We sat down to a hot-seat debrief, and then moved on to the main event of the evening: our transition to Final.

The entire team moved out onto the dock, where earlier that evening a full harvest moon had risen in a bold orange over the majestic, silent expanse of river we now faced. Now, at midnight, the moon had made its transition to silver goddess and had risen high in the night sky. We faced it. Behind us were Jinky and Katie, offering us the words of Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s “The Invitation” to begin the Final leg of our journey.

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dreams
for the adventure of being alive. …

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand on the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."
….

As Jinky’s voice boomed over the water with conviction and passion for the meaning of the poetry that flew from his lips, a single bird swooped over the silver water. It cut across the path of the moon reflected in its depths, and again I looked up. “Yes,” I thought again. “This is me.”

“This is what I was made to live for.”

At the end of the poem, we were each given an orange bead to put on our double-fisherman bracelet alongside the blue one we had received for Main. The orange – to hold my memory of the moon that night. And orange to be the fire of Outward Bound. We were only to accept the bead if we were willing to carry and to pass on that fire. We were each given a bead – not to keep, but to give away. Sometime on the river the next day, we were to pass along our fire bead to another, and so continue the circle of energy and compassion that encompasses OB.



Night Paddle

We walked from the dock, ears full of poetry and eyes full of moonlight, back to the campfire, where Katie explained our final task. It was now almost 1:00 a.m. Sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. that same morning, we were to arrive at our pick-up point at Muir State Park, 11 miles down the river. Katie showed us where to go on the map, and left us to make a plan. We would navigate, decide our departure time, and organize the re-packing of all the gear. The debate ensued: to leave now, and guarantee ourselves enough time to arrive on time, or to sleep for a while, and then depart. I was of the former persuasion. We had been averaging 2-4 miles per hour in canoes thus far – in the daylight, with help on navigation if we got stuck. However, being strongly outvoted, the team decided to sleep for one hour and break camp at 2:15 a.m.

Just before heading to our tents, Jesse points to the river and says “Look!” There were Katie and Jinky, paddling away in their canoe. Inside of their now nearly-empty tent we found an emergency cell-phone, a note, and a back-packer’s cheesecake made on the underside of a Frisbee. We were on our own.

We arose at 2:15 and started loading boats. By 3:00 we were nearly ready, and re-juvinated our blood sugar with a cheesecake ceremony – nine sporks digging into one sugar-laden Frisbee. Excellent. At 3:23 we hit paddle to water, trying to make miles as fast as we could. Luckily, weather was on our side that night.

Around 5:00 a.m. we came to a confluence in the river. We came to what seemed to be a dead end, and our navigator informed the group that we were probably in a small inlet, and that we needed to go back and turn around to find the main river again. We did, but our location still didn’t make sense. We took bearings on compasses and passed maps around to try to determine where we were, but to no avail. We went back to explore our original position, but found the same result: a dead end. We again returned to our second guess. We sent a boat out to “scout out” the bend ahead to see if we could get a better bearing. At this point I was very frustrated, like many in the group – in my particular case, I was thinking “If you all had tried listening to me at the beginning, we would have left earlier and had time for mistakes like this!” As it was, we were running out of time. I was also bothered by the fact that we had broken our promise to follow policy by letting one boat go ahead of the group (we were supposed to stay within one boat length of each other).

Luckily, my boat partner, JoAnna, had an excellent sense of humor that turned complaints into four-letter words and four-letter words into laughs, and laughs into a positive, determined attitude. And there was Simon in the boat behind us, a kindred spirit always ready with a joke or comment to make me laugh off the situation. Around 5:30 Simon noticed the colors begin to appear in the east. “There’s the sun,” he said. Now it was on. We knew we had at least 6 miles to go, and not much time. The group had come to the verge of falling apart, but with the light of day, we got it together. We decided to try our original route one last time. It worked. The river bent sharply to the right, a feature that, without the help of daylight, we had been unable to see and unwilling to explore.

The waterway opened up to a wide expanse of river leading to the Gulf, as buildings and powerlines and fishermen began to appear with the sunrise. The wind picked up, the birds came out, and we hauled our canooty-booties as fast as they would go, stopping only once to pee off the sides of the boats. At 7:55 we crossed underneath the giant I-10 bridge that connects Mobile, Alabama to Fairhope across the bay on which we were now paddling our tiny crafts. The entrance to Muir State Park was not clear, but by good fortune and 9-minded map-reading skills, we found the inlet that led us to Katie and Jinky and the 15-passenger van at 8:02 a.m. Luckily, the 2-minutes-past-due was not in our debrief that evening, and there was much rejoicing. We made it.

It was 8:00 a.m., although with our internal clocks disturbed by one hour’s sleep, we couldn’t tell exactly what time it was. We stopped at the gas station at 9:30 a.m., and JoAnna bought herself a hot dog. Jesse bought candy for the group with $10 he’d found on the ground. We had a long day ahead – gear clean-up was a three-hour ordeal. Each gear-bag, bucket, and piece of rain-gear had to be scrubbed in giant black tubs which, when we finished, looked as if they had been dipped to the bottom of the river. I was perfectly at home with a laundry brush and a board, although – I have never scrubbed so many rubber suits in my life. Still, it was a joyous day, with music, chatter, and laughter over last night’s adventure.

That evening, we were re-united with the other team and were assigned the challenge of a joint “craftsmanship dinner.” This meant we were to come up with the craftiest menu, presentation, and atmosphere we could, using the few materials that we had. It turned out spectacular. With vines from behind the shed, tea-lights from the dollar store, and headlamps illuminating gallon water-jugs, we served up veggie spaghetti, and – I cannot describe to you the atmosphere of that night. It was as if someone had stopped time and all that existed were those people and those moments – “look at this community that you have created,” someone spoke. And we looked. It didn’t have many things or expensive tastes. But it had diversity, it embodied integrity, it was alive with compassion, it included everyone present, and it was dripping with excellence. We looked around, and we saw that these simple surroundings had been made beautiful by these qualities – the values taught at every Outward Bound school – and that they had come alive to us in these past ten days.

“There is more in you that you know.”
- Kurt Hahn