Project Wet and Wild

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.