Teamwork builds character!

Isn’t delving into deep nature a feast for the soul? Yeah, sure it is! Except when it becomes more like ‘Lord of the Flies’. Here’s a new yarn from Tetsuhiko Endo on that all-American rite of passage, the Outward Bound adventure, and what happens when the counselors think you’ve reached a higher plane and  leave you to your own devices, lost in a giant bog. Enjoy — Ed.

In the summer before my senior year of high school, I went on a canoeing and climbing trip, with Outward Bound, in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Minnesota. I was seventeen, and had just spectacularly bombed out of a 10-year junior tennis career with a very public burnout. Suddenly finding myself without the usual summer of traveling to tournaments around the country, trying to smite other stressed out 17 year-olds, it seemed like an opportune time to go on a bit of an adventure.

Before choosing the trip, I had never heard of the Boundary Waters. It is a vast region of wilderness between the border of Minnesota and Ontario that was home to roughly 1,200 interconnected lakes. The pictures were pretty and I had just gotten into rock climbing, so, why not? What I failed to notice about the pictures was that they were all taken from the air. That’s because the Boundary Waters is a far nicer place to look down of from a bush plane than to slog through with a canoe. But more on that later… (more…)

(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Experts only? Esta bien!

You know when your friends are out there having a complete, unhinged blast and they email you from the road, fired up on life, making your workday feel even blander? (OK, OK, guilty as charged). Here’s a letter I got from my old college housemate Josh Boulange of Bozeman, Montana, who excels at making his old friends jealous whilst adventuring around the globe in search of untrammeled snow, uncaught salmon, and other delicious things generally beyond the reach of any cubicle. But things don’t always go according to plan. For one, down there, liftlines can resemble riots. Here, the intrepid Boulange on his experience of skiing in Argentina. — Ed.

Greetings,

            I write you all from an upstairs locutorio (internet outpost) from Bariloche, after a liter of quilmes and un hamberguesa completa (ham, cheese, lettuce, tomato). I arrived this afternoon after a hellacious bus ride. It was supposed to be 22 hours, but it was only 23. In the middle of the night the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere for about an hour, stuck in a line of traffic. I could see fires by the roadside ahead; everyone was talking about it, but I could not understand anyone. When we finally passed, there were dozens of men throwing logs on the fires and waving long branches at the bus—it seemed like a protest or strike—but I might as well have been in Timbuktu and I could make no sense of any of it. I was also too tired to really try and figure any of it out. There was a one-legged man sitting in front of me with a deep voice who kept going up and down the stairs (double decker bus) all night, like every 30 minutes…. (more…)

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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