And now, back to the story of Aja. A few minutes later, I am in pursuit. Again. She is going fast this time, and I alternate between jogging and speed walking. I look back after about ten minutes of this and see Kim sprinting after me – remembering that we had neglected to make much of a plan this time. I divide my attention between letting Kim catch up to me and keeping Aja in sight. She’s carrying four granola bars. God bless her forethought. From my last conversation with Joe, this is Aja’s last shot. When I see that she is not turning around, I call base. We make a plan for them to come and get her. She is going home – or in her case, to the appointment her mother arranged with a judge, and possibly to a longer program. Joe will drive out to our campsite to pick her up around 7:00 pm, but not close enough for the other students to see – we don’t want an entire camp full of students thinking that if they just act up enough, they too will get to go home. Joe tells me to go tell Aja the plan, so that she will come back to camp. I inform her, and of course, she instantly becomes compliant. I inform her that she will not be allowed to enter camp or say goodbye to any of the other girls before she leaves – she does not care. And so, we walk back. Aja sits outside of camp until dusk, when Joe and her mother arrive. And that is the end of the story of Aja at Outward Bound. I dearly hope that she has found some direction, or something that works for her. For now, it is out of my hands.
Back at camp, Kim has gathered the other girls and informed them that they are rockstars. They have survived the first day and a half of outdoor living; she tells them, truthfully, that Aja will most likely be sent to a longer program because she chose not to complete this one. She gets the girls invested in finishing so that they can go home in 20 days. Wrya is still not participating, and while Aja is sitting out by the road, waiting to be picked up, she has inched her way out of camp. Alex, our assistant instructor, is in pursuit. In the meantime, I am eating dinner back at camp. It is about 80 degrees out, and we are sitting in long pants and long sleeves by the fire to keep the bugs away. I must laugh at the complete riduculousness of the things we do out on the river that make complete sense. The girls have learned that Jojo can sing, and she is giving a little concert by the fire. Oh, and Jojo can SING. She weighs about 90 pounds, but her voice is so rich and clear that if you closed your eyes you would swear it came from a grown woman. She goes from song to song, clearly enjoying herself, and the others applaud.
After dinner, I notice Cece complaining about washing everyone’s dishes that they have left on the sump screen. “How would you feel about talking to the group about this?” I ask her, not sure how she will respond. To my surprise, she sounds mildly interested in doing the group’s first CFR (concern, feeling, request – an assertive communication tool we use a LOT on course). I talk it out with her, catching the beginning of the approaching rainstorm. Luckily, Kim has thought to set up a tarp with one of the students, so we grab raingear and run to shelter. We think of Alex and Wrya, still out on the road on the dark, wet night. But, we proceed with the CFR and evening meeting around our kerosene lantern. About half an hour later, Alex and Wrya are back, wet but safe. As we head to bed – or rather, sprint, to attempt staying as dry as possible, I try to think back to the beginning of the day, amazed that it has only been one day, and not three for four, with all that has happened in the past twelve hours. But, I was proud of how I handled my second day of work and sleep straight through until dawn.
Day 3First day on the St. John’s River. Wrya decided of her own accord, after a day and a half of refusing to participate, eat, or drink, to rejoin the group. She writes an ownership letter and reads it to the group, in addition to stating her commitment to finish course. And just like that, she is back, and a star student. She sets a great example for the other students throughout the rest of course. I guess there’s something to be said for just waiting someone out.
Loading the boats is tricky – we have not talked about this yet, and we are parked at a public boat launch where we must load the boats from a dock. This means one or two people in the floating canoes, and others dancing around each other on the tippy, floating dock. It is hot – HOT – and we struggle to communicate with airboats coming in and out of the boat ramp. If you have never experienced the airboat, they are perhaps the loudest boats on earth, with the hugest fans. I am navigator for the day, and I attempt to teach Taylor a hasty navigation lesson, which I have never done before, and which probably would have gone over a little better if it was not 90 degrees out and if I had a better idea of where we were going. You see, the place where we were setting out at was a giant maze of reeds and river cabbage. Although the map showed a river with a single path, the river branched and wound between this tall greenery which allowed no view of the surrounding area – which, by the way, was just more reeds, and the occasional muddy cow pasture. It surprised us the first time, to hear mooing among the reeds. But there they were, cows right along the river, hanging out with white birds perched on their horns and hip bones – what I later guessed were cattle egrets. “Kim,” I whispered, “I’m not really sure where to go – the river doesn’t match the map…I just keep turning whichever way will take us north.” Neither Kim nor Alex – nor any other OB course – had ever paddled this section of the St. John’s before.
A few hours later, we reach what I think could be our campsite – at any rate, it is a place to camp, and we scout the area. We give the students their first instructor challenge: a silent boat unload. I love silent challenges, because everything usually gets done faster. The girls had those boats unloaded in under 16 minutes – a task that, with verbal communication, would have taken much longer on an average day. We circle up and are making a plan for the rest of the evening, when Cece flags in: “Um, excuse me, there’s lots of frogs around here, and they are poison.” Our student nicknamed Kitten is terrified of frogs and seems to have convinced the others that they are dangerous – there are a good number of frogs at this site, but none of them are actually poison. In honor of this comment, the campsite is dubbed “Poison Frog” over a dinner of shepherd’s pie.
We finish the day with a bead ceremony in the moonlight. My favorite.
Wind in the WillowsThere were other adventures during the rest of our 20-day wilderness course, including several all-night paddles and a three-night layover at a place called Cow Island where we waited out extreme winds in hopes of crossing Lake Harney without capsizing. The first night at Cow Island (where we found no cows but lots of cabbage palms), we noticed the wind was really picking up during evening meeting. We were gathered around the fire, when one of the students commented: “Um, instructors…the tents are blowing away.” And they were. We jumped up and caught one before it rolled over and one before it blew toward the fire. These once-rigid structures covered in nylon had suddenly been transformed into giant kites that were determined to catch the gusts of air bursting at us from the nearby lake. We held them in place by weighting them with 5-gallon water jugs in each tent, after forcing them upright against the wind. All we lost in that fiasco, luckily, was one bandana, which was incinerated by the fire in our rush to save the tents – we found only the corner of that poor bandana. We awoke the next day hoping to set out on the lake, but alas – more wind. We took that day to do a mini-solo, hoping the winds would calm down by that night. No such luck – the winds were worse. That night, at about 3am, Wrya came “knocking” at our tent: “Excuse me! Our tent is blowing over!” I was by the door, and it was my turn to get up. Could the tent really blow over with three girls inside of it? It could. There was the forest-green nylon, flopping on top of two sleeping (?) girls and two full water jugs. I had Wrya hold the poles, while I lugged over the Ubu, our giant ammo-can full of paper work. I took out two of the stakes, which were doing do good in the sandy soil, and tied the elastic ropes to that heavy ubu. It wasn’t pretty, but it held all night. The next morning, we were up early – we had decided that we had to try the lake crossing no matter what. So we set out – the wind had gone down a little, but on the lake it was still blowing strong. This was also the students’ first day on Main, when meant one less instructor steering. I was navigator for the day, in boat one. Kim and Alex were in the last boat, and there were two student boats in between. It was a struggle from the beginning. Not only was it windy, it was cold. We were all wearing our yellow rubber rainsuits to keep warm. Jojo refused to paddle. Cece paddled but refused to get out of the boat to help her boat partner, Taylor, drag the boat through the shallow water before the lake. Brittnay struggled with steering and their boat went to and fro in the waves that covered the lake. Our boats were spread out much further than they should have been, despite my efforts to keep everyone together. We paddled for the better part of three hours along the shore of the lake, in the end measuring our progress at about ½ of a mile of the 6 miles it would take us to finish the crossing. We broke for lunch on a small peninsula. The students were stressed out, and Kim pulled out an amazing teachable moment called “Lessons from Geese.” She lined all of the students up in a V and told the story about geese flying in a V, and when Cece-goose was shot by a hunter, another goose would stay with her and help her until they could catch up with the group again – telling the students to care for each other through difficult times. This became a sort of teachable joke throughout course: “remember that time when Cece got shot??” When we set out again, the waves seemed worse. The student boats kept turning sideways to the waves and almost swamping. I was having trouble steering myself – it was taking all of my effort just to keep up straight, much less make forward progress. Kim called us back. “It’s too dangerous out here,” she said. “Someone is going to capsize.” So we made a plan to go back to where we had come from, and look for a more protected campsite along the river. We spent the rest of the afternoon paddling around the river upstream of the lake, looking for a campsite, which we never found. By the end of the day, we had some very frustrated students on our hands. At one point, Cece and Taylor’s boat went into the bushes one too many times, and they just sat there. Sitting in boat 1 with Kitten in the bow and Jojo in the duffer seat, I tried to refer to lessons from geese and not leaving people behind. Finally, Jojo was the only one to respond. Grabbing the extra paddle, our smallest girl was determined to go back and help Cece and Taylor. When our boat arrived, Cece released the fullness of her frustration by cussing me out and throwing a paddle. Apparently she thought I was taking them in circles because I didn’t know where I was going – logic was not going to work with her in this stage (the truthful “we were looking for a campsite” argument meant nothing in that moment), but somehow we got her to start paddling again, and returned once again to Cow Island. Jojo was so determined to set up camp that she dragged an entire canoe across the sand by herself to turtle it further inland. I may never see such a sight again, a 90 pound girl dragging a 17-foot canoe that I can barely carry by myself.
The next day, not able to make our miles because of the wind, we arranged to be picked up at a nearby highway, and dropped off half a mile upstream of our solo site, which was protected from the wind. It was an exhausting day of unloading and loading and unloading and loading again, but in the end it was the best we could do without putting our crew in imminent danger.
My Sponge ExperienceThe rest of the course had its ups and downs for me. It was very much a learning experience. I put forth a lot of effort, had some struggles, and soaked up everything I could like a sponge. My biggest struggle was a loss of rapport with many of the students, which led to a great deal of blatant and passive-aggressive disrespect that I did not know how to deal with very effectively.
At OB Discovery, we work a lot with something called Reality Therapy, which I explained in an earlier post. The first step in this technique is building rapport with each student – essentially, getting them to respect and trust you enough that when you call them out on a behavior, they don’t completely turn against you or lose all their investment in course. Building rapport ranges from telling riddles in the canoe to active listening and taking care of students needs, to following through on what you say you will do.
I don’t know how it started, exactly, but something about me seemed to strike Taylor the wrong way, and she very soon decided that she did not like me. This spread to several of the other girls, and I couldn’t figure out quite how to fix it. I had good times and less good times. I laughed and had a good time, taught some good lessons, did my best to hold the students accountable, and take some useful things away from course. However, through my struggles with losing rapport, I learned some very important lessons. I learned not to take student’s behaviors personally, and to not be offended by disrespect. I learned to deal with behaviors by simply setting consequences and following through with the expectations that have been set by myself and other instructors, instead of reacting emotionally. I learned to WANT students to act out – to a degree – in order to work with their behaviors and teach them to handle emotions and stress in a more productive manner. I learned what “figure eighting” is, and how my attempts at convincing students logically was really a quiet sort of argument that gave them power over me. Or, as Sandy would say, gave them the chance to think about “how awesome they are, and how much you suck.” Which, of course, is exactly what happened. I built back some rapport during solo, during those 48 hours when the girls were all camped out by themselves, by having some great discussions with them when they just wanted someone to talk to. I came away from this course proud of having completed it and having given my best effort, but also tired and in great need to rebalance my “love and belonging” need after an emotionally exhausting month.
Alex during our all-things-orange Halloween dinner during follow-up.
Follow-UpAfter the girls went home, we began our ten days of follow up. This was an interesting experience in which we instructors, as well as our Program Coordinator, an experience social worker, visited the students and their families in their homes and schools in the surrounding counties. This is as close to social work as I have ever, and may ever, come. Learning more about the environments in which most of these kids had grown up, I was less surprised at their behaviors. Some had no boundaries, some had way too many, and no hope of earning any privileges. Only one of the students still had a father in her life at all – and in that situation there was lots of arguing with the student’s mother, when they communicated at all. We tried to help the parents set up a Training-Main-Final progression of responsibilities and privileges for the kids to earn…doing chores and being respectful and having family meeting might earn them the chance to talk on the phone for a certain amount of time, etc. We encouraged the parents to set consequences so that the kids would know exactly what was coming when or if they stepped outside the boundaries. We also did a lot of paperwork – never-ending paperwork. ;)
In the end, I hope the students took something away from course. Maybe it will slowly seep in over the coming months – maybe it will dawn upon them several years down the road. I wish I could say I changed the world, or even the world for one kid, in 30 days. But that is not really what our program does – people generally don’t change completely in 30 days. But we do raise the questions that could start the process. And that’s something I’m glad to take ownership for.
