Hante Participants aren’t the only Eagle’s Nesters that get to spend time on the Appalachian Trail. Outdoor Academy students also spend significant time on backpacking each semester. They are on the AT right now! Read on to hear about their preparations:
In the last days before Trek the rainy weather fits the students’ mood: pensive, with an acute awareness to the homey comforts of honey ginger tea and scones. At the same time, the dorms are a flurry of fleece and wool as packs are cinched and stowed in anticipatory readiness. Packing lists are consulted twice and thrice. Extra batteries and more long johns are considered, then crammed into stuff sacks. The whole bundle is tested for weight.
This past weekend the OA students left for a trek on the Appalachian Trail. Over the next eight days the students will walk sixty miles up mountains and down valleys, all the while carrying on their backs everything they need to live the good life in the woods: filters and iodine for drinking water; food, fuel, and stoves for hearty dinners; journals, wool hats, cameras, and maybe a bit of chocolate for the top of Roan Mountain. Finally they’ll lace up their boots, now well worn-in after Orientation Trek, two Paddle/Climb weekends, and Classes in the Field.
A comfortable boot this is well acquainted with your foot is a prize possession indeed. Boots are repositories of memories. I bought my first serious pair of boots when I was fifteen; they bore the cattle and horse brands of Philmont Scout Ranch, where I took my first long trek. A week from Sunday, when the students take their last steps and triumphantly swing off their backpacks at the trailhead, they will have worked a whole topography of joy and awe into the creases of their boots. Even after that pair falls apart at the end of some other trail, they will never forget the bonds they forged with their friends in times of struggle and celebration.
If you talk to the students after trek, you should ask them how they became heroes. In English class we have been discussing Joseph Campbell, a 20th century thinker who recognized in the classic epic stories and folk mythologies a common cycle: a hero or heroine steps away from the comfortable and familiar realm of hearth and home out into the strange wilderness, contends with hardship and forces of opposition, and finally returns home to share the special knowledge they gained through their tribulations. This cycle is as present in Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings as it is in the Gospel of Matthew and Gilgamesh. When the students return from trek they will tell the story of their heroic journey—how they made dinner despite numb fingers and cold rain; how they cheered their companions up the final push of Big Hump’s windy bald. When the students imagine themselves as heroes, they will come to terms with the immensity of their accomplishments and the outer limits of their powers. Until then, they have only one assignment: Get out in the woods! Be a hero!
