35 minute read

Whispers From the Wild

Ivan Miller reflects on his career in teaching and how nature experiences changed the trajectory of the MINE program.

Ivan Miller

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Three days before commencing my first student teaching experience in Oregon, I met with my mentor teacher, a tall, bespectacled man who aggressively tugged and twirled at his beard. I sat awkwardly in an orange plastic chair, perspiring heavily in the final heat of summer, and was notified that I had to start the year with Homer’s The Odyssey. Having spent the summer preparing for a unit on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, I nodded my head in understanding.

I worked on new lessons in the early hours of the morning, my workspace covered in empty teacups, literature books, legal pads filled with scribbled notes. After a couple sleepless nights, I pieced together a unit that would surely rock the kids’ world, though I failed to address one small oversight. I was terrified of public speaking.

The night before my first day, I woke up in a sweat, panicked, and spent a couple hours staring at the ceiling, wondering what I was getting myself into. Devising a plan on the fly, in the car the next morning, I thought it best to come out in an authoritative manner, take a tough guy approach, set a tone, do a lot of jaw-clenching and muscle-flexing. Arriving with nine minutes to spare, I stared at the clock as the seconds ticked away. Luckily, my mentor teacher agreed to sort of disappear so I could figure things out on my own.

Ninth and tenth graders started filtering into class. Some tiptoed in, hoping not to be seen—others numbly entered and dropped lifeless bodies into desk units, the kind where the chair had been welded to the desk so as if to make it impossible to escape. They immediately trained their eyes on the towering teacher pacing in the back of the room, my arms crossed and chest puffed. Like trained dogs, they all awaited my orders. One girl, crossed her arms back at me, smacking her gum like some backwoods creature chewing on a piece of fat.

Don’t say anything. Look tough. Wow… this one gal probably wishes she could gnaw at me like that stick of Juicy Fruit. Try not to make eye contact.

I instructed students to prepare for a “pre-assessment.” Dumfounded, they had no clue what I meant.

Speak English, you idiot. They are all looking at you. Do something…

Suddenly, I tripped over my mentor teacher’s bicycle, bumped my rear end into a vacant desk, and emitted an awkward and desperate sound—something like the last distressed cry from a small woodland animal overpowered by its prey. Spinning awkwardly and tumbling backwards, I slid across the floor, and laid there, arms splayed out at my side, eyes closed.

The horror.

I waited for a wave of laughter, took a deep breath, and opened my eyes. Silence. Concerned looks in every direction, save for gum girl, who raised an eyebrow and grunted, her face scrunched in disapproval.

“You okay, man?” asked a sophomore girl sitting near the front.

“That’s a loaded question,” I answered.

Everyone laughed, good laughter, like good joke, dude, laughter.

“Let’s scrap the pre-assessment,” I suggested as I picked up the bike and carefully placed it back upright. I had their attention.

In the first few weeks I came out and swung for the fence—hooting, hollering, leaping on desks—trying to inspire students. Confident, I arranged for students to take a multiple-choice quiz to check for understanding. In four classes, half the kids failed. In my mind, this equation did not add up, and the next day I lost it.

“What are you guys doing?” I said, holding a stack of quizzes in the air and hollering. “You have to take this seriously. This is your life!”

The kids collectively shook their heads in understanding. Unwilling to give up, I lectured on Books 10 and 11, covering Odysseus’ time with Circe, the hero living in opulence and lusting in his captive’s bed while his men waited around twiddling their thumbs for an entire year. I paused and asked myself: Why in the heck are we reading this?

Odysseus is kind of a jerk. And they hate reading it. This archaic exercise only perpetuates subservience, conformity, and robs students of the chance to actually create something meaningful.

I must have been under for a while, but a kid brought me back to reality.

“Mr. Miller, are you okay?” they asked.

“I don’t know why we are reading this,” I admitted.

Same kid: “Miller, you told us to.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” I said shaking my head. “I cannot come up with a legitimate reason why we should read it. Do any of you like reading this?”

One boy who had not said a word the entire first month lead a rising chorus.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

The bell rung, and nobody moved.

“We’ll talk about this next time,” I promised.

The following week I made a deal with the kids: “If you guys work your butts off, I will do something crazy, something out of the box, every week.

Just before finishing up graduate school, I found out about a teaching opportunity at an alternative outdoor school. I met with the principal and earned an informal interview. Answering questions from six staff members, I explained some of my ideas. One of the teachers, Charlie Wilshire, did not look impressed. Charlie was the elder statesmen at the school. Behind thin-framed glasses, he leaned forward and looked me in the eyes, his muscley shoulders hunching over the table.

“What do you do if a student calls you a douche bag?” he asked.

Dumbfounded, I fumbled through an answer. The following week I accepted the job to teach social studies and wilderness skills to at-risk teenagers. I was the fourth social studies teacher in the classroom that year—the students chewed up and spit out the two in between a loveable former National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) instructor who took a job elsewhere. Technically, I lacked the appropriate social studies endorsement altogether or any formal wilderness training, which is to suggest I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I fully embraced the freedom to do whatever I wanted.

Nothing could have prepared me for the depth of collective student suffering. In need of mental health counseling and support, many kids had fallen through the cracks of public education. Now they sat in a dilapidated classroom, some forced to attend by parole officers, and saw absolutely no point in buying into anything I had to say.

Feeling somewhat out of my league, I settled for a more traditional teaching approach, printing chapters from a history textbook I picked up at a used book store. Page by page, the hum of the copy machine provided a haunting reminder that I was very much situating myself into the box I so hoped to break out of.

A few weeks into the job, Charlie sized me up again. Having trained in a Master’s Track program in Eugene, he was still built like a sprinter and knew everything about wilderness survival. In his 30s, Charlie walked away from a successful contracting business to pursue a career in education. Before accepting the job at the outdoor school, he took a fourmonth mountaineering and sea kayaking course in Patagonia with NOLS. He earned the nickname huemul, after the iconic Andean deer known for scaling mountains. Having been pushed to the limits on that expedition, he had a sense that I might be ill prepared for any kind of wilderness survival, and decided to test me accordingly. After hosting an open house for parents, the two of us carried some food trays back into the cafeteria. I quickly rinsed off some of the dishes and stepped back out into the dark, empty cafeteria.

“Do you want to wrestle?” asked Charlie.

“No, I don’t want to wrestle,” I blurted a moment before Charlie charged me.

After some initial jostling, Charlie picked me up.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, trapped in an awkward bear hug, my feet helplessly dangling in the air.

Charlie started spinning me in circles until we both got so incredibly dizzy that we tumbled to the concrete floor, both of us laughing hysterically in the dark, everything still spinning.

The following month Charlie asked if I wanted to help “scout” a potential student backpack trip on the coast. I agreed. We settled on a 22-mile walk from Reedsport to Florence during spring break. Our walk commenced during the calm before the storm, the forest radiant and alive, but when we hit the coastline, heavy winds whipped at our back, propelling us forward. We moved north as the sky turned gray and dark clouds loomed on the horizon. As the heavens unleashed their fury, we set up camp in a wind-protected thicket and made dinner.

The next morning everything in sight dripped incessantly. Temperatures hovered somewhere around cold and colder and we soon found the makings of the Oregon Coast Trail, wading through calf-deep puddles, the rain never ceasing. We opted to throw on water shoes and followed what was left of the trail.

After several hours of hiking, my feet blistered and I started to mumble and shiver. I was about to receive a firsthand lesson in mild hypothermia. My fingers numb, I took a multitool from my pocket and used the pliers to manipulate the zipper on my rain jacket in order to get into the tent. That night we walked out into the storm, the wind ravaging everything in its path, settling into the chaos.

The next day, we plodded over and around sand dunes. Luckily, it was still pouring, hail occasionally blanketing the dunes, otherwise we would have been surrounded by various off-road vehicles, kicking up sand, motors reaching high-pitched squeals, something to the effect of hell on earth. But with the weather raging, we might as well have been traversing some alien planet.

As we sat in a restaurant in Florence, our mission complete, trip scouted, I envisioned students toting backpacks, practicing self-reliance. If kids could carry a backpack over some foreign landscape maybe they could find some greater meaning and purpose.

During the first day of the following school year, I passed out journals and asked my junior class to take out a writing utensil in order to contemplate the importance of having some historical understanding of the world. A couple of kids started muttering expletives.

Soon after, in the manner of some mindless prison movie scene, a self-nominated alpha rose like a grizzly bear from hibernation, agitated and bloodthirsty. Three times the size of any normal teenage boy’s hand, his enormous right paw completely covered, then palmed, and finally demolished his journal like a normal person might crumple a Post-It Note. Dark, brooding eyes looked bloodshot under a furrowed brow.

“I’m not F***ing doing that,” he barked. Sweaty and breathing heavily, he shoved what was left of the journal onto the floor.

All eyes shifted my way. Momentarily, I pondered if the creature might rip the limbs right off my body, then calmly pivoting on a heel, I strutted to the front of the class, sat in a rickety chair, and kicked my feet up on my desk, never once making eye contact.

“I suggest you use that energy to write your prompt,” I said.

After a moment of uncomfortable silence, I added, “Would you like a new journal?”

Smiling, I tossed a new journal 20 feet across the classroom, a no-look pass from the hip just clearing another student’s head, the new journal plopping right in front of the massive paw.

He kicked the seat out from underneath him and screamed: “F*** you!”

All eyes on the raging beast. I sipped my tea and opened my laptop. His massive frame already blasting down the hall, he slammed the door so hard that it obliterated the threshold, wood strips splintering in all directions as if some elephant had lowered its rear end on top it.

All eyes on me.

After another “scout trip” with Charlie that fall, I took 14 kids on a four-day, 25-mile backpack trip through Oregon’s 984,602-acre Umpqua National Forest, climbing 4,000 feet in elevation, teaching basic survival skills. On the first day, Hunter Harrach walked through the forest barefoot, making sure all of his peers had their tents set up properly. Meanwhile, without telling any of the chaperones, Hunter peeled away from his tent group to set up his own shelter, which consisted of a flimsy sheet of clear plastic and some paracord. Overnight temperatures would hover just above freezing.

“Hunter, do you think that’s going to keep you warm enough tonight?” I asked.

“I know it will,” retorted Hunter, looking me dead in the eye. I understood, in that moment, he had survived much worse. So, I negotiated.

“I tell you what,” I said. “If you wear your boots the rest of the trip, you can sleep out.”

An ear-to-ear smile showed a chipped front tooth. I smiled in return and then waited for him to slip on his shoes.

Midway through the trip, we slowly trudged up Bohemia Mountain. At the summit, we marveled at the vast beauty of the mountains, standing above the clouds. Hunter was tall with long brown hair and vacant blue eyes, and though he was physically stronger than most of his peers he never appeared fully nourished. In monotone voice, he said it was one of the best experiences of his life. Sporting a Columbia jacket two sizes two big and a giant bucket hat, he sat pensively for a long time, connecting in a way I had rarely seen before, only in myself. I did not rush him.

Hunter suffered from crippling separation anxiety growing up, never wanting to stray too far from his mother. Whenever separated a full-blown panic attack followed, but when Hunter joined the outdoor school, the fear subsided. It was on a backpack trip that he started to see beyond the dire straits of his childhood. He remembers growing up navigating heavy amounts of abuse and neglect. Considering the chaos that dominated his time in Springfield’s Rainbow Village Apartments, Hunter routinely escaped outside whenever possible, often climbing false cedars, tamaracks, and oak trees, tucking himself high into the leaves and imagining he was in some forest far from reality. In elementary school, Hunter’s father left forever. Meanwhile, he might as well have been invisible at school. No one had any idea of the depth of trauma he navigated. Hunter did well in my class, not in any traditional aca- demic sense, his writing hovered just below average and he lagged behind in reading. But Hunter was the best outdoor leader I had, always taking charge. Working toward graduation, Hunter even helped his mom find a job. Then one day on her way to work, Tammy Glenn got off a bus and waited. As the walk symbol flashed, she crossed the street and was struck a by a vehicle, her feet and soul dislodged from the pavement.

“It was like my childhood fears all coming true,” said Hunter. “Two weeks before it happened, I had this overwhelming sense I was going to die. Apparently, my mom had talked to [my brother] and thought she was going to die… I had always been pretty filled with anger and hate toward the world and then that happens… I got pretty close to going out into the woods and starving myself to death.”

After the death of his mother, Hunter traveled to the island of St. John to work for his grandfather. Rather than hide in trees as he had grown accustomed, he met a pretty girl, Leeanne, and opened up about his past. From there, Hunter biked across Oregon barefoot, fol- lowers clinging to him like Jesus disciples. One suggested he go visit a man in Alaska, where he learned to skin a bear and won a trail race, again barefoot. From there, he hitchhiked for six months through Central America, where he learned a new language, took up bouldering, and formulated an identity all his own. Later on, he took up horse archery, bareback on the run, and competed at the highest level in South Korea. Now living on a farm with Leeanne in Minnesota, Hunter’s still searching for answers.

Danyka struggled with the idea of spending eight hours a day preparing for a life she did not want. Impoverished of any evocative connection—a sense of community, purpose, or of self—Danyka, like so many other teens in the United States, fell into a state of depression.

As a sophomore at Springfield High School, Danyka Bratton noticed there was something unnerving, something she did not fully understand at the time, about spending more waking time in a school environment than with her family at home. At one point, Danyka begged her mother not to go, saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything that really means anything.”

Hearing that I had created the Miller Integrated Nature Experience (MINE) at Springfield, Danyka decided to try something new. She walked in the first week of her junior year wearing new black, three-inch platform heels, knee-high black socks, a white shirt with little pug faces, a red skirt, platinum blonde hair (almost grey), and designer red nails. Over the course of the day her shoes slowly obliterated the back of her heels. By the time we commenced preparation for a 27mile backpack trip into the Diamond Peak Wilderness, she worried that she could not complete the trip. I suggested Danyka simply trade the Tuck Footwear in for a sturdy pair of hiking boots, while promising to Duct Tape her heels every day. I added, “it’s all mental. Your feet will do what you tell them to do.”

Prior to departure, the contents of duffle bags, school backpacks, and garbage bags spilled onto the cement floor of my classroom, for all to see. Then I doled out sweat-stained backpacks, the smell of campfire smoke and musty hiking socks inundating the room. This is what I call the yard sale. Making a couple quick rounds, I helped eliminate unnecessary items—excess clothes, junk food, a chemistry textbook, various forms of technology—and echoed one sentiment repeatedly: “Take only what you need to survive.”

Late in the afternoon we arrived at our first camp, a little knoll with a view of Mount Yoran. As the sun fell over the horizon, a full moon radiated a deep blue sky, the stars twinkling in the lake. I had the kids grab journals and writing utensils to write sit spots (meditative reflections centering on a natural backdrop). Consumed by thoughts of her mother, of home, Danyka’s mind started to race.

The following morning, the temperature just above freezing, I asked students to come look at the map. I informed them that they would have to work together to travel 11.5 miles to our next camp. I set my pointer and middle fingers, the fingernails and cracks of my knuckles caked in dirt, on our camp at Yoran Lake and then pointed to the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). No trail connected the two points, meaning they would have to bushwhack their way through dense forest. Timidly, they all marched around to the other end of the lake and took the leap of faith.

About an hour later, we reached the PCT, the trail opening up to an endless sea of trees undulating for miles in the distance. I happily instructed kids to drop packs. Everyone exchanged hugs, celebrating the fact they helped each other make it up the mountain. Some students cried tears of joy, snot dripping, lips quivering, hands smearing dirt across the face.

That night, I asked students to write a story about their day and ultimately share it with the group. I have yet to discover a more powerful tool in forming community. And this is the great irony of any success we have ever experienced: sitting in a circle and sharing stories costs nothing, even organizing an expedition is relatively inexpensive when you consider how much money is spent on education in the United States. Often in those reflective exercises, as was the case when students read about climbing a mountain and carrying a heavy pack, students gain a greater sense of themselves while recognizing the suffering, the beauty of others. This bonds them together but also gives them the courage to speak.

Danyka shared an epiphany, realizing that carrying a up a mountain, blood seeping through the Duct Tape wrapped around her heels, was the hardest thing she had ever done. And somewhere between the physical suffering and quiet moments sitting and soaking up the natural world she found happiness. One student shared a tragic anecdote—the day his father was hauled off to jail after violently attacking his mother, a day so traumatic that it made him block out much of his childhood. He realized, in the course of three days, that he could let go of the past and step forward, “no longer apart from reality, and a part of an adoptive family.”

In the early days of MINE, I thought the best way to build strong, critical thinking adults was to take them outside. I figured if I had students long enough and took them far enough away, they might forget some of their troubles, disconnect from everything virtual, and connect with the world. I believed that once kids connected to a landscape, they could discover some deeper meaning.

In the spring, we planned a conservation trip to the coast to work with the Siuslaw National Forest and Audubon Society of Portland. That first night we raced up to the top of Cape Perpetua to watch the sunset. Students giddily stepped off the bus in various shades of fleece and synthetic outdoor gear, their boots carrying them toward the sound of ocean waves gently rolling into the mountainous coastline. At the West Shelter, a rock refuge constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, Danyka stared off into nothing, trying to memorize the scope of color and space changing before her eyes. Contemplating existence, thinking about life and death, Daynka was set free.

“The waves stirred something inside of me,” Danyka later wrote. “They surrounded my heart and relaxed my brain until I could see the world through the ocean’s eyes. I realized how insignificant the car lights that winded down a distant road to my left were and how silly school desks are, because the water, the ocean, the land, all that is real. Because the knowledge that what I gain from listening to the ocean is far more powerful than that gained from a classroom seat.”

“And lastly I’m beginning to know myself,” she added. “I am not constrained by the jail of conformity and I realize now that I’ve always had the key in my hand. I have simply neglected to use it. When I first stepped outside of the metal bars, I realized I was mute. Words were caught in between my flawed teeth, and then finally I spoke through my pen. I know that I have found my voice.”

To finish the year, I put together an eastern Oregon road trip—six days through Smith Rock State Park, Fort Rock, Summer Lake, Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge, Steens Mountain Wilderness, and Alvord Desert—a 1,000-mile journey into the unknown.

This experiment included waking up at 4 in the morning on the second day to watch the sun rise over the Crooked River as the day’s first light bathed Smith Rock. Without complaint, everyone huddled together in the cool desert air to observe illuminated rhyolite cliffs, an idyllic climber’s playground, first in dull orange, then pink and purple. In a fleeting moment, the light highlighted an ostensible ecological balance, illusive imagery, for what appeared pristine in the moment would soon see an adjacent parking lot overflow with cars, people scouring the scene with leash-less dogs, all searching for the perfect Smartphone selfies.

Donning a mouth full of braces, oddly matted hair, at least three pairs of leggings, two fleece jackets, and untied Merrel boots, Paola Lopez snapped photos, as had become customary procedure throughout the year. Hesitant to join MINE at first, Paola purposively avoided our first trip. Having no experience with outdoor recreation whatsoever, Paola worried that she might be eaten by a bear or fall off the top of a mountain. Hearing reports about the first trip invoked reconsideration.

Growing up in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Paola was encouraged never to stray too far from home for fear of kidnapping, human trafficking, and the drug cartel. The perceived risk of danger was so high that her father crossed an unforgiving Sonoran Desert to seek employment in the United States, devising a plan that his family would eventually sneak across the border with fake passports. Paola was only 6 when her mother notified her that they would leave for California.

Paola started school not knowing any English. By the time she entered tenth grade she had surpassed many of her peers. The following year she joined MINE.

We soon entered the 422-square-mile Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge, planning an overnight backpack trip to a dilapidated Barnhardi Cabin, with an option for a mountain summit. Early in the afternoon, we weaved through a thick forest of quaking Aspen, which created a maze of trees up the drainage until we reached a notch. From there, Danyka led us upward, bushwhacking through bitterbrush, sagebrush, and sticker brush up DeGarmo Canyon toward Warner Peak.

As we continued to climb, Paola stopped repeatedly. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “Something’s not right.” She looked anxious, uncomfortable. I suggested we take a break.

Having been to the top two years earlier, I explained that I was happy to stay with Paola while the rest of the group summited with my other trip leader, Sara Worl, Wonder Woman to my Batman. After giving Paola half a Clif Bar, I parked myself next to a patch of snow, soaking in the sunshine, very different from my previous trip, when a snowstorm loomed in the distance. For a second I closed my eyes, the memory still burning in my psyche.

Grey skies fill the horizon. The wind howls down and around the canyon. I purposely dodge slick patches of ice and slog across the frozen terrain, gaining elevation, my boots crunching into the earth with every step, the chilly air penetrating my synthetic layers. On the summit, wind stings my face and bare hands. I walk out toward the black mass in the distance, hail and snow heading straight at me. I am about to be a father and wonder if I can cut it after what happened in my own childhood. The storm looks like it could swallow me whole, and in that moment, I wish it would.

Leaning on my backpack, coming back to the present, I remembered waking up to snow that next morning, everything blanketed in white, desperately wanting to share the moment with my wife. Then I watched my students climb, and smiled. I scanned the arid expanse, suddenly appearing so unthreatening. I looked at Paola, who had her back turned to the mountain, and muttered a simple question: “Isn’t it beautiful?”

She looked up, her eyes following my right hand as it slowly pointed across the landscape, and then up the opposite side of Warner Peak until the rest of our team came into view. As if awakened from a trance, Paola giggled heartily and said, “yeah.”

“This is better than being in class,” I said, thinking about how far we had traveled in just a few days. “I’m so glad we’re all here right now.”

Paola responded, “me too.”

After surviving a cold night, we headed to Steens Mountain, a spectacular product of Ice Age glaciers that trenched themselves half a mile deep into basalt and later rose to form Kiger, Little Blitzen, Big Indian, and Wildhorse gorges during the Pleistocene Epoch. Just north of the Alvord Desert on the eastern side, we pulled up to Mann Lake, our backyard for the next two nights.

I asked students to gather in a circle so we could read excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Then all dispersed to find a place to reflect. With the sun setting behind Steens Mountain, I sat my rear end in the road, chalky dust enveloping my clothes. Pulling out my notebook, I marveled over the last few days, feeling lucky that I had the opportunity to engage students in some transcendental dirtbagging.

I thought about school and about what was transpiring in the desert, and how an incomprehensible chasm seemed to separate the two. In the classroom, I had been charged with providing some kind of evidence that academic growth occurs throughout the school year. This in hopes of meeting common core standards. I could not possibly explain the type of growth that occurred not only on the trip but throughout the year. It felt as if the kids had set their own standards, lofty ones, surpassing what I thought was even possible. Looking out at all of them writing, noses buried in journals, I sensed them connecting to something much bigger, to each other for sure, but to something that cannot be measured, only experienced.

For a few minutes I sat awestruck, unable to write. I considered Thoreau’s theme of seeking poverty, stripping life of everything unnecessary and unimportant. I thought of all that was important in my life—my wife and family, the students I was trying to inspire, the earth I sat on.

An hour later, I told everyone to come back together so we could start dinner. Some, including Paola, sat and continued to scan through the Thoreau text, jumping back and forth from one underlined passage to another, erasers furiously at work, pencil tips flipping back to the page, still trying to find the right words. After dinner, sitting around a campfire, dancing flames illuminating the faces of those present in the circle, the kids read their reflections.

Paola opened up about feeling disconnected from the world. She read, “I used to think this land was not meant for me, an illegal alien. An illegal alien. One that breaks many laws and should be deported to their home country immediately. One that does not come to find refuge, better education, or a brighter future. An illegal alien.”

Paola burst into tears. She opened up about crossing the border, and in turn how it had since limited what she could see and do, always living in fear her family might someday face deportation. She continued, “Thoreau says, ‘for the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position.’ Today, I stand in the middle of two worlds. A culture I was born into and a culture I was brought into. The hardest part of it all has been trying to fit into this landscape knowing that this is all a false position.”

Taking a deep breath, Paola looked up from her journal, face aglow. She added, “There are five million illegal immigrants in the United States. I’m one of them. Here’s my story. I hope that getting to know me, getting to know my struggles makes you think a little differently about those statistics. I just wanted to share my story.”

In the glow of the firelight, we finished reading. For a long time that night, I sat watching the flickering of hot embers, pondering how Paola felt, thinking specifically about the complexity of the terrain, physical and psychological, she had covered. Then I thought about the mountain.

According to Northern Paiute mythology, the world began at the base of Steens Mountain. In the book Legends of the Norther Paiute, oral historian and Warm Springs Paiute spiritual leader Wilson Wewa explains how the father of creation, Wolf (or Mu naa’a), worked with Coyote to construct the world from darkness. Wolf and Coyote asked who would dive under water to search for land. One by one, Otter, Muskrat, Mud Hen all tried, and when Mud Hen returned with mud on its bill, Wolf sang a “doctor song” to make the tiny spec of earth bigger until it formed the landscape we now know.

In the spring of 1860, a year after Oregon officially became a state, General William S. Harney sent Major Enoch Steen to explore transportation routes for moving military supplies and weapons needed to deal with potential conflicts in Oregon. In June, traveling east to the Harney Basin, Steen encountered “hostilities” from the Northern Paiute. Steen and company pushed all the way to what was then called Snow Mountain before returning to their post. The Pauite vanished into the mountain like ghosts.

As the last embers flickered away in the dark, I thought about how the Burns Paiute—after years of resisting encroachment, surviving great oppression, never ceding their lands, and fighting to preserve their culture and traditions—may be the only free people left in Oregon. I puzzled over the paradox of Paola’s current situation, an alien in a country commandeered by past immigrants, now camping with a group of high school kids purposely seeking an escape from a faltering American education system, one that sometimes alienates even the most privileged. I thought about her comment on Thoreau and wondered if I too was in a false position. If Paola was labeled alien, was I no more than an accomplice in a governmental ethos shrouded in lies and misery, one that has hurt millions of kids? I continued to lay in the dirt as the last fire light fizzled away, searching for the right words.

Climbing several switchbacks, we plodded our way to the grossly overpopulated Mirror Lake, endlessly stamped on postcards, overrun with backpackers and dogs, but about five and half miles into the walk Charlie asked to stop.

“I am bonking,” he said. “I have no idea what’s going on.” Shortness of breath, congestion, headache, extreme fatigue, Charlie had contracted Covid.

Last July, Charlie and I made our annual trip to the Sierra Nevada. After ten hours of driving, we arrived at Topaz Lake, where a black haze turned the sun an ominous orange, the result of forest fires near Yosemite. After five minutes, driving through smoke, we turned around and retreated to Reno, Nevada, where we stayed in an absolute dump of a motel.

Looking for a safe place to disappear into the mountains, I opened the AirNow smoke and fire map online—showing a large, virtual haze looming over most of the western United States. I suggested we travel back north 600 miles to the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon, thinking Glacier Lake would make a suitable basecamp. Two days later, Charlie and I commenced a hike from Two Pan Trailhead toward the Lostine Valley.

A few hours later he collapsed into a sleeping bag and did not move until the sun started to bake the tent the following morning. Finally emerging, he didn’t think he could leave camp.

“Can you make it to the other end of the lake?” I asked. “I know a great place that looks down on the water. I’ll carry your pack.”

“No,” he said, “we’re going to Glacier Lake.”

Wanting to escape the cacophony of barking heelers and Labradors, Charlie climbed 1,000 feet in a hurry to a beautiful rock promontory jutting out toward an emerald lake, Eagle Cap booming in the distance. An hour later we were listening to Jimi Hendrix, lounging on our inflatable rafts. As Charlie rested in the shade of a pine tree, I floated aimlessly in the sun, contemplating the slow rise, and eventual collapse, of the immense expanse of granite all around us. I thought about my own transient existence within that timeline, and desperately wanted to be with my sons. Then I thought about education.

After winning a third national award in the fall, knowing the students had just put one of the best climbers in the world on the cover of the eighth edition of Backcountry Review (eventual winner of a fourth award), I considered the absurdity of creating something so incredible while returning from the Covid lockdown. It seemed as if the more chaotic and weird things got, the more professional the magazine became.

Yet, any temporary success has been largely overshadowed by the fact that public education has undergone a tremendous change, something the late French philosopher Bruno Latour ponders in his book After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Latour suggests that nothing resonates the way it did before, that the world students now occupy is nothing like that of their parents.

Returning from lockdown, donning masks, it seemed like all involved—administrators, teachers, parents—wanted to return to normal as quickly as possible, everyone except the kids. And who can blame them for not wanting to return to their obedient classrooms, operating in a system that basically left them to fend for themselves for a year?

In those first few weeks, people watched the economy, everything, shut down. Suddenly, whatever identity students had within the school system disappeared. Meanwhile, during “online school” kids hid their faces behind icons and muted microphones, perhaps opting not to buy into a virtual system they had absolutely no voice in creating, one in which they were forced into. In creating distance learning, we tried to control the outcome, to keep kids safe, but simultaneously silenced them.

Latour calls for radical change, writing, “we need to reinvent everything all over again—the law, politics, the arts, architecture, cities. But—and this is stranger still—we also need even to reinvent movement, the vector of our actions. We need to not forge ahead into the infinite, but to learn to step back, to unplug, in the face of the finite. That’s another way of liberating yourself.”

With the sun warming my face, I spun my boat 360 degrees, slowly taking in the mountains, trees, Charlie lost in thought, the lake itself. I thought about Robert Macfarlane’s book Mountains of the Mind: Adventures Reaching the Summit, in which he reflects on landscapes, “that our responses to them are for the most part culturally devised. That is to say, when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there.”

The image I had of us in the boats was one of adventure, escape, rejuvenation, but it was not reality, only my projection of it. Macfarlane continues, “what we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans—a mountain of the mind.”

At one point on the trip, Charlie and I both lodged the end of our aluminum paddles into a floating chunk of glacier and just let go of any navigational control, our boats and bodies swaying in our watercrafts. Coming to life, Charlie relayed a route up the eastern side of Eagle Cap that we had climbed the day before, recalling the whole experience from memory.

That evening, back at camp, I pulled out my journal, custom procedure on such expeditions, intending to reflect on teaching. I just stared blankly at an empty page, pinpoint frozen against lined paper, the ink eventually starting to bleed. After two years of navigating Covid, I did not want to think about school.

I walked out alone to a granite seat overlooking the lake, the water plaid rolling off into nothing, the mountains acting as a sort of canvas for the evening’s alpine glow. I soon melted into the scene, soaking up the beauty of the landscape, the final light of day, working to preserve the imagery in my mind, to be called upon during tougher times.

After 13 years of teaching, I think we need to develop a higher level of consciousness, and I’m not talking about the artificial variety. Over the years, I have learned to thrive in the mountains, and have yet to find a better classroom. Every once and while I wander into the wilderness, find a good place to sit, and just listen. I have watched this simple formula help transform high school students into heroes, climbers pushing themselves to new artistic levels, summiting mountains that once seemed unfathomable.

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