IT HAD BEEN years since I ran a river with just men. I was starting to remember why. When you take eight perfectly nice middle-aged guys, drag them into the woods, and add 15 gallons of alcohol, they revert instantly to a savage state known as Mancamp.

"Who's got the fucking Knob Creek?"

"If it was in your ass you'd know it."

"Bite me."

"You'd like that."

I'd never been able to match these guys at the bar, and now as they gulped bourbon from the bottle and chomped cigars, I felt the gulf widen. My days in Brooklyn had softened me, sipping wine in bistros where not a single animal head was mounted on the walls. I had become sensitive. I had subscribed to The New Yorker. All I wanted to do was kneel among wildflowers, composing verse about love lost. I might as well have been wearing hair gel.

Mancamp is oppressive, a whirlpool of barbarity that sucks us in and holds us there. But attuned as I was to the sensitivity of the human condition, I noticed that I wasn't the only one longing for something else. At dusk, Ken disappeared; he returned after dinner, soaked to the skin, having charged into grizzly country in the downpour and located a good fishing lake a few miles up the slope. In the morning Mancamp resumed, but as we marched up to the lake with fly rods and beef jerky, instead of leading the charge Adam spent the day by himself, surfing a wave in front of camp.

I was with Mancamp as it moved up the trail. The woods were dripping, a rainforest of swollen mushrooms and spongy moss. A creek blocked with fallen logs cascaded down, and you had to speak up to be heard over it. The last of the snow was melting off the trail and we found fresh heaps of black-green bear scat.

At the lake the fish weren't biting, and after a while the rain returned and most of us dispersed. Bruce set off hiking alone. Nate and Doug headed back. Damon and I scrambled up a cliff band and got lost. Ken and Tiff bushwhacked along the lake to the mouth of a rushing creek; there, in a pool partly dammed by fallen spruces, they started pulling them out. Cutthroats: 14, 15, 17 inches long. In an hour they each landed ten trout.

That night the consecutive hangovers, combined with the day's bits of solitude, diluted some of Mancamp's aggression. It was quiet. More than three cases of beer had not been drunk. We were grilling steaks, and I asked Nate why he'd worked at Outward Bound in the first place.

"Outward Bound was just a starter kit," he said. "That was four or five years to get to know the guys I plan to adventure with for the next 30 or 40 years. It's the same way dogs sniff each other to figure out who they want to run with."