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.

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.

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?

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.

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.