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…)

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