On getting the f*ck out of dodge
A salute to dirty shorts, bouts of adolescent insanity, and leaving the city behind... for now.
In the photo above, about 15 years ago to the day in 1998, I was a 15 year-old camper in the boundary waters of Northern Minnesota. We had just completed an 8-mile hike–or portage, if you’re hip to it–with a wooden box strapped to my forehead, in the tradition of furtrappers and voyageurs of generations past. The wannigan—a thankfully-antiquated torture device designed to keep fresh food safe from nothing—was resting on my back, and carrying one was considered a badge of honor (or a job for suckers).
Every summer since 1921, the Taylor Statten Camps have extracted young people from their comfortable urban surroundings like the young protaganists of a Roald Dahl novel. Most of my fellow campers were from Toronto; I came from Brooklyn, traveling over 14 hours by late-1980s Honda Civic to arrive at Algonquin Park. The area is an exquisite provincial park full of sparsely-populated lakes, sand beachside campsites, and overly-friendly black bears.
As was the trajectory for many of my friends, our opinions of camp over the years shifted from cruel experiment to invaluable support system. The first reluctant trips to Canoe Lake were later replaced by furious anticipation in the weeks between the end of classes and the first day of camp.
Like many who attended camp as children, I could rhapsodize endlessly about the seemingly-unbreakable bonds of friendship that seem to typify the camp experience for many. But, well, I’m here to talk about the value of discomfort.
New York in the early 1990s was hardly the sanitized paradise it is today. I was mugged in 1995 (at the age of 13), stopped repeatedly by overzealous NYPD cops in 1996 and 1997 for nothing, and ran smack into my fair share of urban plight. But there was something knowing and familiar about the kind of challenges one faced in the urban jungle. There is a tunnel-like nature to your existence as a kid: home, school, fucking around somewhere, then home.
By 1997, I had been attending camp in Ontario for my fourth summer in a row. I had, up until that year, never felt completely comfortable at camp, partially because I didn’t grow up worshipping Neil Young, and partially because having a Jewish first name was a sort of novelty. This was less than a novelty of being from Brooklyn, which at that time was still devoid of hipsters and whose reputation was defined largely by the occasional episode of NYPD Blue, so I got a lot of questions about my choice of personal weaponry.
In 1997, I signed up for a canoe trip called “Kipawa,” offered by the camp to their more senior campers. A canoe trip is a human-powered s̶a̶d̶i̶s̶m̶ ̶e̶x̶e̶r̶c̶i̶s̶e̶ excursion through the wilderness, where young people get their asses handed to them and find redemption in the hard work of survival. Kipawa was a 23-day trip through lakes on the border between Northern Ontario and Quebec, with a single troupe of pubescent angry males feigning pride to hide their frustration and frequent rage.
Every day we woke up at dawn, packed up our still-wet clothing, put on still-wet socks and shoes, and began the day’s journey to our next campsite some 30km away. By paddle or waddle, by hook or by crook, we would move from one campsite to another, often traversing the incredible landscape of the Canadian outback.
On that trip, a Californian fell ill, a good friend was struck by lightning and I often spent the first few moments after arriving at a campsite off on my own, to collect my composure and scan the campsite for wildlife threats. It was… no walk in the park.
I took my last canoe trip as a camper in 1998, my last one as a staff members in 2002, and my last recreational trip in 2008. Each return to the wilderness bought me a fresh perspective on aspects of my life, an appreciation of the art of survival, and a renewed love of dried foods.
I can’t help but notice on a daily basis what an impact the amalgamation of those experiences has had on my being. I gained a healthy sense of mortality, an appreciation of the beauty and wonderment of still untouched lands, and an ability to observe and internalize the emergent properties of design in nature.
The each return to the woods, whether in the form of a hike, an extended stay or a weekend of loose focus in an unfamiliar environment becomes a personal a recharge is an easy cliché for urbanites bound by pavement and prominence. The value is not in a selfish accumulation of fuel or energy for endeavors purely human in scale and importance, but in the appreciation of our place in the order of things.
And we too know an appreciation of the progression of our history and time, of the bonds of progress that we share and the developments that dominate. We see how a stone became an arrow, which became a knife, which became a sword. One can retrace all of human history in a footsteps in the woods. It can re-ignite our soul, re-invigorate our spirit, put passion and purpose into our work and remind us how to play. See you in the woods.
