Project Wet and Wild

Paradoxes, PR, and marketing cliche's

 

"The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox." 

Emerson's Eulogy on "Thoreau,"
(Emerson, 392)

"Project Wet and Wild is a different kind of summer camp . . ." 

I spent too much time listening to my voice-over, over and over, when I edited last year's public relations video. The cliche's of my own voice repeat in my head as I bounce along the gravel road to the dining hall on a mountain bike in ninety degree heat.

Dust rolls up the meadow before the parents' cars come into sight. The select indoctrinees are almost here. I carry a walkie talkie in my camera bag and direct traffic while shooting the excited or apprehensive looks on their faces. They think they are coming to a two-week summer camp.

Hormones!

One girl has already decided she likes the boys' tent area better than her own, and hasn't unpacked yet. Most of them have not figured out that I am not another camper who happens to be a camera bug, but really their bed-check enforcer and creative writing teacher. I'm short and I look their age, so they tell me things they might not otherwise reveal, such as how their parents made them come, how this camp was their second choice, how everyone else looks like science nerds.

I do very little to suppress their candor. When they take one look at the tent area, many want to turn around and go back home.

Nothing like a canned application essay

Summer camps emulating Walden and Henry David Thoreau's principles can be found anywhere, from the strenuous Outward Bound experience, to New Age, crystal journey resorts, to ordinary girl scout camp. Although this camp is very similar to others in appearance, it is still very different in its focus, and in the embraces many extremes, even as it seeks to homogenize its culture. There is a diversity of weather and geography, as well as of wealth, religion, ethnic culture, governing style, and social mores. Perhaps some would argue with this assertion. People who exist on the extremes more than likely feel underrepresented. I would agree with these individuals that the collective desire to level this range of diversity is always strong and often successful, from the not so subtle conditioning of television, to the changing of ethnic names on Ellis Island, to the exasperation of Thoreau's neighbors when he accidentally burned down a stand of good timber, a three hundred acre forest. That our society both tolerates and seeks to homogenize extremes is a paradox of its national character.

This camp has all but institutionalized and compartmentalized the program of the once-considered radical extremist, Henry David Thoreau. That in itself is a paradox, because what we've taken as our program is the gloss on Thoreau. A close reading of his "program" reveals that he didn't want others to do what he did. He dictates that each individual should, or rather, must, create her or his own program.

The newly arrived campers don't know this. They are here because they wrote short, generalized essays on "Nature," finely crafted to impress the selection committee, much like those short answers beauty pageant finalists give in evening gowns. They are here because they are what batteries of standardized tests call "gifted and talented." They are here because they were the thirty out of almost two hundred applicants awarded the scholarships this year. Even at ages fifteen to sixteen, many of them are such gifted program veterans that they have become professional application-makers with a keen eye for what looks good on a resume'. And they don't like the spiders in their tents. Spiders don't know a gifted student from a girl scout, and being usually otherwise engaged, are not susceptible to duplicity.

Where they lived, and what they lived for

The Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas roll with "mountains" and "hollers" in sparsely populated wilderness--karst topography of cliffs, waterfalls, river whitewater, fossils, and elaborate cave systems. Arkansas itself is a state of extremes. Militant Christian groups arm heavily in these hills. Pot farmers cache large crops in deserted hollows. They share the northwestern landscape with women's separatist land collectives, aging hippies, fundamentalist churches, retirement communities, chicken farms for Tyson, and one of the richest families in the United States. Statewide one finds rice farms in the Mississippi Delta, cotton fields with their residual poverty, a bickering state legislature dominated by redneck lobbyists, and some of the lowest taxes in the country. And the public schools are notoriously poor, I have discovered, gauging from the quality of freshmen I taught in composition classes at the state's flagship campus.

In many ways Arkansas is as insular a state as it is strikingly wild. When these campers arrive in the Ozarks from across the state, it is often their first trip away from home, and many from the Delta have never seen a "mountain" before.

Let's get naked!

To confront the "gross necessaries of life," Thoreau felt he had to strip away anything not directly related to Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel (although he seemingly does not jettison his books). Other things, he claims, serve only to obscure clear thinking and make people their own slavedrivers, "so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them."

That same stripping away of apparent necessities is one of the first things the campers notice here. As a group we are all deprived of many of the comforts of civilization. When it is part of a group indoctrination instead of individual choice, the deprivation also parallels military boot camp, where the stripping away is so complete not even the hair is left to remind the individual of who he was. Fortunately, the only direct attack on individuality here consists of the camp t-shirt, purchase optional. Further homogenization is carried out at the hands of the camper's peers, who, for fifteen to sixteen-year-olds, are probably primary enforcers anyway.

Deprivation is standard summer camp fare, here played against the backdrop of Noark Girl Scout Camp, leased for two weeks. Set deep into a second generation oak-hickory forest at least an hour from anywhere by car, the isolation at least matches Walden. Thoreau probably could walk to Concord quicker than we got a teenager with a broken arm to the hospital one summer. This camp customarily houses hundreds of brownies, juniors, and cadets on the one thousand acre property, so to our thirty campers, the woods seem deserted.

Shooting the moon

Food is simply provided in the dining hall, which is a good fifteen minute walk from the tent areas. Despite camper complaints about the hike, food is not considered one of the deprivations. Thoreau celebrates the wildness in himself, delighting in the impulse "to seize a woodchuck and devour him raw." Yet he claims he does not hunt, and feels guilty about fishing. At this camp, killing any animal or disturbing a habitat is strictly outside modern environmentalist tenets, although the cook does prepare a meat entree for nearly every meal. The animals seem aware of their protected status on the property, and white-tailed deer cavort freely, flagrantly mooning our impotent wildness almost every morning.

For two weeks the campers will live without electricity, save battery-powered flashlights and headphone radios. Four-hole, pit toilets sit just downwind of the five platform tents that campers will occupy in either the girls' or the boys' areas. Open air, common showers are at least one hundred yards away from each of the two campsites, and copperheads are known to be fond of the cement floor of the showers at night. Most of the girls and several boys usually complain that they won't be able to appear at breakfast without a place to plug their blowdryers. The girls are relieved to find a small mirror in a flush toilet outside the dining hall--a place to apply their make-up.

What are you looking at?

Because this is Arkansas in August, Fuel is not as important a consideration as it was for Thoreau, nor is Shelter. For several summers the temperature has soared to over one hundred degrees. In the counselors' tent we waste no time rolling up all four sides for air circulation--no mosquito netting--so we have what Thoreau only fantasized about on days when he washed his floor and left the furniture "standing amid the pines and hickories . . . So much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house." (158)

The forest becomes our walls. A canvas roof suspended over the platform covers the four metal cots with our ravaged suitcases shoved underneath. The decision to let in the breeze is a much more anguished one for the campers, who are at an age where they worry about lack of privacy, not to mention what the creatures rustling the leaves at midnight might see--or want. And in the utter black of woods in heavy undergrowth, uncut even by the moon, they soon learn the futility of a beam from the flashlight.

All WOMEN too

"With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike."

(Thoreau)
Walden

Gross Necessaries

Our purpose in bringing these teenagers to the woods is very simply set down in this passage by Thoreau. By depriving these kids of the distractions of society, we wanted to lead them to become students and observers of the environment and of themselves. This, rather than Shelter, and Fuel, became our "gross necessaries," the things that we as a staff believed, in all our modern pop-psych subjectivity, had fallen by the wayside. We saw generations growing up unaware of what was living and growing around them, or failing to live and grow. We saw a race growing up on auto-pilot. In truth, we saw the same things Thoreau saw.

Yet our program has a distinct twentieth century focus, because the world we live in hardly resembles an exterior and interior landscape envisioned by a nineteenth century mind. Science and reason have inherited full dominance, superseding subjectivity and imagination even in areas conventionally based on it, such as philosophy and literature. Everything that can be crunched into a statistic is tallied, examined structurally, and correlated for causal relationships. Surely this is taking the role of the observer to the -nth degree. Yet the individual, self-reflecting observations, unsubstantiated or uncorroborated, are often discarded as merely subjective.

Regardless, this is a science camp. Few parents in this age would send their children off to observe nature to discover personal metaphors and a sense of self reliance--or to develop a personal philosophy which may, heaven forbid, differ from their own. After all, how would that help their children get better jobs and more money, compared to all the other gifted programs vying for their attention?

Going beyond memorization

Our focus is a hands-on study of biology in the field, although we go beyond the narrowness of that scope. With numerous guest lecturers and a versatile staff, we have a separate instructor for almost every area in which  Thoreau was interested, and some he may not have gotten to. We have an ornithologist, an ichthyologist, an entymologist, a geologist, a black bear expert, an astronomer, an orienteer, a board member from the state Natural Heritage Commission, several State Park Rangers, a caver, a ground water expert, several local biology teachers, an art teacher, a recreation leader, and a creative writing teacher/camp photographer.

For the better part of any given day campers are directly involved, deep in the woods, or in a stream somewhere, observing nature by learning key guides, identifying species, conducting studies, and recording data in their field notebooks. When they return for lunch the task falls to the recreation leader and the art and creative writing teachers to make sure the campers can see the forest for all the different species of trees. By the games they play and the art and writing activities they do, the staff tries to get them to reflect on and synthesize what they learned that morning.

Postmodernists will hate this part

For my part, in creative writing, I am a bit torn. The indirect message I got from the camp director from my first day on the job is that they wanted someone to help the students write nice poems about loving the trees and birds and flowers, just as glibly as my press releases tell how wonderful the camp is. For the first several years I tried at least to give the appearance that that was what I was doing, because I didn't want to lose my job, but I now know that the staff actually appreciates the subversive side of what I do. I also try to direct student's reading, usually toward the Transcendentalists, not because I want to romanticize their thinking or teach what have now become cliches', but rather, to counter the boundless objectivity of the morning. I have some more enterprising campers memorize the first full sentence of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis," or all of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall."

Memorized poetry is easier to pack into the field, I tell them. And of course I send them to Walden.

A pause before the start of the rat race

Of Transcendentalist works from the 1850's, Thoreau's writing stands out from the rest, even if it is fashionable now to have fallen away from it. First of all, Thoreau wrote well. The concrete language and clear thought in Walden is a breath of fresh air compared to other Transcendentalists. Thoreau also certainly generalizes, but he usually develops his ideas with examples and experiences that support them.

The second factor I am attracted to in Thoreau's writing is its almost prophetic insight into what can still be seen as chronic problems in contemporary society. Surely this is what is meant by a piece of literature standing the test of time. But consider the issue of timelessness further. If the paradox I wrote about in the introduction is true, that Thoreau's philosophies have been absorbed and homogenized into society, taken as a national banner of rugged individualism, so to speak, and used so frequently as to reach the point of cliche' (i.e., "march to a different drummer," "quiet desperation," "to live deliberately," "to front only the essential facts of life."), then why are his criticisms of society still on target, perhaps to an even larger degree, today? If Thoreau's philosophy is accepted as conventional wisdom, why haven't steps been taken by individuals to free themselves of slavish materialism and to live by individual principle?

Therein lies the heart of the paradox. With it and the Socratic method, I try to touch the edges of the high school blinders the campers wear, and to get them to ask questions themselves. I have a group whose potential parallels Thoreau's. Yet they also will fall into the trap of treadmill existence Thoreau warns against, just as I have.

 

Like corn in the night

"Sometimes, in a summer morning, . . . I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, . . . until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been."

(Thoreau, 156-157)
Walden

Margin

Thoreau writes about enjoying a broad margin in his life. Perhaps his ideas about wasting a day in revery were discarded as a rationale for laziness in his time by most common adherents to the protestant work ethic.

In our time, this is more than laziness. Such lack of activity would represent discomfort to most people involved in the bustling, television-dominated world of Western Society. For our campers in particular, margin is something most of them have never known.

Why aren't all students like this?

Who are these people who are now coming out of school systems accustomed to the label "gifted and talented?" The tag is fashionable, to be sure, and falls into a class with "learning disabled" and "hyperactive" as one of the educational diagnostic catchwords of the end of the century. On our in-service day, before the campers arrived, a gifted and talented education specialist went over a list of generalizations, most of which will describe this camper, or that camper, and her or his special needs. She tells us that in relation to other students, gifted children learn more rapidly; they are superior in abstract thinking; they have a strong need to know things, often with intense interest in specific areas; they have a longer attention span; they are better at seeing and creating patterns, and sensing discrepancies; they are better able to perceive unusual relationships; they are critical of self and others; and they are sensitive to injustices. Many of these same generalizations also can be readily applied to the character of Thoreau as we know him.

The generalizations are comparative in order to point up the need for differentiated educational services, just as learning disabled students also require differentiated services. They can be translated even deeper into educational rhetoric, but I prefer to focus on my own observations as to how the differentiated services affect the groups of students I have grown to know well by living through this camp with them.

Why do smart kids need extra help?

I have noticed three different types of students who are often classified as gifted. The first group is the classroom stars, the ones who automatically come to mind because they are Mr. or Ms. Most Likely To Succeed-- as straight A students, class presidents, basketball captains, yearbook editors, drama jocks, you name it. Since these students excel in the regular classroom, school systems would have difficulty justifying differentiated services on their behalf alone.

The second group is less obvious to identify. These are the extremely focused introverts: the classic class nerds, bookworms, computer bugs, auto shop whizzes, classical violinists.

The third group is almost impossible to identify without testing, because these students represent the failure of the educational system. They are the intelligent underachievers. Bored stiff and frustrated with classroom pacing, they tune out, do as much busy work as they care to, and find other things to do, such as cut class, hang out in smoking areas, and perhaps even become disruptive.

Because students in all three groups can easily make the grade in their strong areas, a special trap is reserved for them, because a day will inevitably come when they will need to study in order to pass, something they've never had to do before. Some learn to study--others just flunk out.

Homogenized Milk

Supposedly, that was the way things were before GT pull-out programs, summer enrichment courses, and magnet schools. Now that these programs have been around for at least a decade in most areas, I spend some time with the campers trying to get a perspective on how these programs feel from the inside. I am particularly interested in the subject because of the experience of my younger brother, who was first tapped for a GT pull-out program when he started third grade at a brand new school. He had those high test scores teachers love to see.

Steve was teased every time he had to leave the regular classroom. He became so sensitive to his classmates calling him a brain or an egghead that he began deliberately failing his regular classes. In high school he quit GT and discovered partying and popularity, although he still wrote for his school paper a richly sarcastic column that kept classmates hanging on his pronouncements. Then he flunked out of college, three times, a disappointment to his family. Many of our campers are riding this same edge between the pressure to achieve, or to slide. One force pushes them to realize their potential and stand out from the crowd; the other force pushes them to homogenize.

Captain of a Huckleberry Party

Thoreau also must have known how it felt to disappoint his family. He was barely twenty years old when, in his acquaintance with Emerson, he made a strong impression as a highly gifted individual. Yet Emerson writes that Thoreau did not distinguish himself in literature at Harvard. Emerson calls him an "iconoclast who seldom thanked colleges for their service to him." And after graduation,

"Whilst all his companions were chosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be exercised on the same question, and it required rare decision to refuse all the accustomed paths and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing his family and friends . . ."

(Emerson, 379)

Yet in Thoreau's time, to drop out was to stand out from the crowd, although he was enough of an individualist to be righteous in the face of criticism and dismay. He quit what we would call white-collar jobs over principles, and preferred temporary blue-collar work that he could take or leave as he pleased. His forays into the professions ended in failure, except for surveying and woodworking. But, as Emerson also writes, "He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession," (380), which makes Thoreau sound noble. Emerson also despairs of this decision to deprive the world of his considerable talents, saying that "instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party." (393).

Life of the "Average Outstanding Student"

Modern gifted and talented students find themselves in an odd dilemma. The niche that they now have in school systems carries a good deal of status. Parents often push their children to get into the stimulating GT programs on grades alone by enforcing intense studying, whether the standardized test scores are there or not. Many campers who come to us usually show symptoms of stress from the pressure and competition. Certainly many are absolute perfectionists. They have no margin in their lives, no margin for error, no time for leisure. Every effort goes toward being The Best.

One day I had several campers come to me in creative writing class, after a relaxed session of journal-writing in the woods, to ask when the deadline was, and how many poems they were expected to have finished. One girl, Nancy, looked just stricken when I told them I planned to work with them one-on-one with their revisions, but I had no intention of collecting anything. I consider such a policy my obligation as part of the indoctrination. I am one of the representatives of the philosophical side of Project Wet and Wild.

Perhaps I pushed Nancy a bit hard that year. She brought a fat folder to camp with her,  spy stories created from whole cloth that she wrote compulsively and circulated among her classmates. They were precocious and wonderful, and I looked for more to come. But she became so self-conscious she couldn't write. Finally, it was the experience of camp that drew her out--we confronted her claustrophobia by telling jokes during the twenty-foot belly crawl of a wild cave. Another day, on a laundry trip to a small Ozark tourist town, I unknowingly took her with me into a very pagan, metaphysical, crystal shop, and ran smack into the indoctrination of her fundamentalist minister, who had terrorized her to the point that she thought she would go straight to hell for even looking at the handpainted scarves. She had tears in her eyes later when she told me how her minister was going to yell at her for going into the store. Then she started writing, and became one of my most introspective essayists.

Ulcers in the woods with no grades

Another student's mother contacted us before camp to see if we could do something to help Sally relax while she was in the woods. She was beginning to have ulcer problems. I honestly did everything I could, but she was unstoppable. Even while riding the bus to the cave, Sally was constantly scrolling a list in her mind of all the things she had to remember to do, from writing to her best friend to working on her final project.

Who will lead the average?

The irony for many strivers is that the students who usually look the most gifted in any given class, the Mr. or Ms. Most Likely to Succeed, are usually not the top five percent targeted for brilliance. The differentiated programs are in place for children with extreme problems or gifts.

But modern society is still bent on homogenizing; thus the students who are rewarded with status among their peers and unwitting teachers are the ones who are the best people-pleasers, best able to fit into the crowd as leaders of the average.

One doesn't need to make too much of a leap to see that this is just a microcosm of the evolution of our current political system, where leaders are no longer great figures taking risks in statesmanship and diplomacy to improve the world, but rather cultivated politicians who manage to stand out from the masses by giving people what the demographic polls show they want to see and hear.

Hey, give them some credit!

The prophetic side of Thoreau seemed to anticipate much of what has occurred in Western society. Surely he would not be too surprised at the natural extension of the very things he was critical of in his neighborhood. These days the television sings about an unmanageable national and personal debt level, and the problem of borrowing from our children.

This is the world our campers will venture into when they get out of school. Creditors will find them by their junior year of college and offer them a wealth of plastic at high interest, no co-signer needed. But the government loan programs will have snagged them first. Even as he questioned the value of an education detached from the reality of experience, Thoreau knew something of the inevitable student debt, which in his day was borne by the father. Now the debts of education run higher than most parents can carry, with their full load of encumbrances.

Do or die

The media talk almost daily of the problem of borrowing from future generations. Yet the current generation has already been borrowed from, going back over a hundred years. And we are held hostage by the debt, even more so than Thoreau's generation was, first, because the debt level is many, many times higher now than it was then, and second, because a person has fewer alternatives to incurring that debt. Civilization has grown increasingly interdependent. A person could literally be tracked from cradle to grave by the limited number of life choices available--college or work, steak or macaroni and cheese. Thoreau's alternative, self sufficiency, is always symbolically present, although he had his education.

But the level of "real" education is dropping in the United States, and a college undergraduate degree is now hardly the knowledge equivalent of what a high school diploma used to be. To have the wherewithal to reach Thoreau's level of enlightenment, one has to be exposed to the great ideas that went before. High school barely touches the tip of that iceberg. Colleges and government loan programs have students pinned against a wall; the decision to take on the debt is hardly made of free will. It is coerced.

Genuflect, Genuflect

I have one further paradox to consider. What is to become of the gifted student in the adult world? In school their achievements are the world. Teachers see how a gifted student scored the maximum on the SAT his sophomore year of high school, and seem to fall down and genuflect when he walks in the room. At camp we try not to remind the students how smart they're supposed to be, but part of the exhilaration of their experience in the woods comes from being around others like themselves. While at school many feel like isolated oddballs with no one talk to on their level; at camp they often immediately bond into a close-knit group. What happens when they are in a land where test scores and grades count for nothing, and all that they have valued is to be cast aside?

Here is where they get conflicting messages. While in school, academic excellence is highly rewarded. For an already motivated student that is all the impetus needed to begin what wants to be a lifelong pursuit of knowledge. Then at some point the rewards fall off. Parents start making noises about having to support a terminal student, and wondering what kind financially wonderful job is going to support all this learning. Something resembling truth sets in. We are all homogeneous when earning a living wage, and fresh out of college, the surface-skimming business degree promises the highest reward. What happens when these driven, gifted students realize that to be a success they have fade into the mainstream and become average adults? For this they fought the current and got called names in high school?

And is this the way it should be? Does anyone ever question a system that seems to value the lowest common denominator? Where does all their talent go if there is no consumer demand for it? In this sense, Adam Smith's invisible hand of capitalism is a tyrant.

Nah, just teach what's on the standardized tests...

Thoreau "declined to give up his large ambition for knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession," and his style of self-realization that comes from reflecting on pure knowledge is probably the only reward GT students will ever get for all their honors readings, language study, or historical perspective. Their math and science skills lead to somewhat more marketable careers, but field biology is not one of them. Knowing nature intimately has got to be its own reward, although I'm not sure our ambitious campers are ready to hear that, not from us. But by the end of their two weeks, most have already taught it to themselves.

Paradox

"The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox."

Emerson's Eulogy on "Thoreau,"
(Emerson, 392)

Mike

By far one of the most interesting campers I've met in my three years here is a young man who was not even considered gifted and talented. Mike is learning disabled. We accepted his younger brother, who couldn't come at the last minute because he won a statewide math competition and had to go to nationals. Mike had applied for camp--his science test scores were near genius level--but he had been rejected because his other scores were far below his age level, and the lack of language skills showed in his essay. When his mother called with regrets from the younger brother, she mentioned Mike's enthusiasm and love of nature. She told us Mike would come to our camp on the spot if an opening came up, even an hour before camp started, even a day late, if it were possible. This was followed up with a phone call to his guidance counselor, who also gave a glowing recommendation.

Mike was tall and lean, with a terror in his eyes. He wore his hair long in the back and splayed out shorter at the sides, like the mane of a horse, a wild mustang. When I first met him I saw his hands shaking as he filled his water bottle, and his mother told me that part of his learning disability was from being hyperactive. Although he was no longer on medication, he needed to drink lots of water to keep from getting shaky. At a camp where many were used to being the odd ones out, the campers quickly formed an adolescent society where Mike was one of the odd ones out. He talked too loud and too much, and offended people. Worst of all, he didn't act cool. When he was into something, he was really into it, and he didn't care who knew it or what they thought.

And Mike was into nature. He rolled in it, smelled it, tasted it, carried it around in his pockets. When everyone else was seine-netting in a stream, wet to their knees, Mike was in up to his chest. He brought his own full-size notebook from home, and in it he wrote down the name of every species of every thing he learned to identify, from trees to birds to mushrooms to fish. He wanted to fill up that notebook in two weeks. Although he gravitated toward art, he always wanted to see what poems we were reading. And when we took the group through a wild cave with the two, twenty-foot, belly crawls and numerous ravines, Mike was the tall one who jumped to the side and gave everyone a hand across. And Mike was the wild one who talked about drinking and parties, who didn't care if he broke the rules. He would leave his tent after lights out if he wanted to look at the moon, or chase an armadillo, or try to whistle to his camp sweetheart.

I saw something in Mike that could seize a woodchuck and devour it raw--that could sit for hours and watch an ant battle--that could live on what he could carry in his pockets and water bottle and not miss anything civilization had to offer. He didn't worry about what was on his resume, or if it would get him into the best school. He was a purely thinking animal, and he had an intense need to know--everything. More than any of the other carefully cultivated nature-lovers who have come through this camp, I saw in Mike a piece of Thoreau.

Higher Laws

"Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? ... Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit."

(Thoreau, 373)
Walden

Solitude

My last year at camp I had an intriguing dream, and I'm still not sure what to make of it. My grandfather died of the paralysis that comes with Lou Gehrig's Disease. I tend to dream about him at camp, perhaps because I did so much camping with him when I was little. In the dream, I am in the tourist town where we take the campers to do laundry on the middle Saturday.

I walk into a restaurant along the row of shops and find my entire extended family sitting around a large table, having a reunion. Grandpa is down at the end of the table, alone, in his wheelchair. Immediately I become angry with my family because everyone is talking and having a good time, but no one is paying any attention to Grandpa. He is happy to have me join him, and asks if I want to take a walk.

I say yes, and jump up to push his wheelchair, when he surprises me by getting up and walking out of the restaurant. No one notices us.

Outside, in the manner of dreams, the street has changed into the 1930's. Old jalopies chug up and down the steep, rutted roads of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Grandpa walks over to a parked car and gets in. I am amazed at his hands on the thin, black steering wheel, and I remember watching his feet work the old-timey foot pedals as he drives us out of town. We take winding roads, climbing, through a wooded area. The forest falls away as we reach the crest of a hill.

From the hill I can see we are out of the Ozarks and somewhere else, maybe Wisconsin or Minnesota, our native states, overlooking a city. There is a fork in the road, and Grandpa stops so we can get out and see the view. Dusk has crept up on us, and in the city below lights are just starting to come on. I think the city may be a customized version of St. Paul that is familiar to me from other dreams. One fork of the road will take us there.

I point to the city and tell Grandpa I think we should go that way. I remember him putting his hand on my shoulder and turning toward the other fork, which is barely even a road. It is overgrown with vegetation on both sides, and tree limbs meet over the top in a dense web of branches. Tall grass grows between the tire ruts. "Wait a minute," he says. "Over here is the way you need to go."

That's it. The dream ends there. I don't know why I wrestle with it so much. It is a Freudian field day with a tunnel-path overgrown with foliage. And I have no intention of ever moving into the woods. I'm not sure how much I believe in the symbolism of dreams anyway, although I still unnerved by how Grandpa was invisible to everyone but me in the dream.

The dream brings me back to Thoreau, and life choices. Thoreau wrote, "No man ever followed his genius till it misled him." (263) The first time I read that line I decided it was a hasty generalization. "How does he know that?" I thought. Can he vouch for everyone on earth? Surely there are many who have been mislead by their own ambitions or ideas.

When I read it again later, I saw that the statement was neither true nor false about humanity, but rather an assertion about the relativity of one's own mind, or perspective. But how much of what we do is solely based on our own points of view, and how much of it is the group mind of homogenization?

Thoreau went to the woods to attempt to shut off the distractions of the group mind so he could hear his own genius. Whether he actually heard it is not is beside the point.