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Outside Magazine January 2005

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The National Outdoor Leadership School
Do It Our Way
The National Outdoor Leadership School is great at training kids to survive and thrive in the wild. So how does its boot-camp approach work with grown-ups? It's effective as hell—if you don't mind misery and suffering, and those nagging questions about what happened to all the fun.

By Katie Arnold


	(Illustration by Mark Stutzman)

The day starts like every other, black and silent except for the chorus of tinny watch alarms. They're faint enough to ignore, like telephones ringing inside locked houses, but somewhere in the groggy recesses, I know better.

I crack one eye, then the other. Something is wrong. I can't see or breathe. I'm suffocating behind steel prison bars, my hands clawing against an impenetrable wall of... nylon mesh. Plastered to my face, chilly and damp with dew, is my bivouac sack. Sometime during the night, the makeshift dome I'd fashioned using propped-up water bottles tipped over, and the bivy's gauzy face panel sagged down on top of my head. I grope for the zipper and tug it open, the cold night sky spreading out above. My sweaty sleeping bag is twisted around me like a down straitjacket. My watch reads 3:55.

We're due at weather check in five minutes. Enough time to pull on a hat and wind pants, not enough to put on water for coffee or snooze another nanosecond. Already, dim yellow beams from a dozen headlamps are lighting the sand, an illuminated ant trail. I'm nine days into a two-week sea-kayaking course off the coast of Baja with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and by now I've internalized several crucial life lessons, one of which is absolute punctuality. So I smack my soggy sneakers on the ground to chase out any scorpions—no one home today!—and hustle down the beach to the boats.

We assemble, facing the water, bunched together in pre-dawn misery. We can't see anything, so we're listening, and what we're listening for is waves. This morning they're everywhere—and loud: rolling steadily onto the beach in front of us, breaking on a rocky point a couple hundred feet offshore, pummeling the next cove north. This is our fourth pre-dawn weather check in the past week, and the steady drumbeat of water hitting land is something new and disconcerting.

Our three instructors stand on the sidelines, watching us through the slits of their eyes. Today is the first day that we, as students, have to make all the important decisions, and the closest we've got to an authority figure is Greg, the more experienced of our two designated "leaders of the day."

Greg isn't exactly the picture of confidence. At 45, he has a brown-and-gray wire-brush beard, slightly droopy shoulders, and sensible outdoor gear straight off the rack from Eastern Mountain Sports. A New Yorker and a Broadway set painter by trade, he spends his spare time trying to make an adventurous life for himself in the wilds of Rockland County. Not so secretly, he dreams of becoming a NOLS instructor, and he's gunning hard for it: This is his third NOLS course in four years.

Greg wears his expedition savvy like a badge of honor; unsolicited advice is his specialty. A few days ago, while hiking to a slot canyon, we came across a small pool of standing water near the base of a sandstone pour-over. "The instructors say it's not safe to drink," he told me as I approached. I shot him my best "as if" look. From ten feet away I could see the water was lime-green and fuzzy, like radioactive moss. Even a dying cow wouldn't drink it.

Now, as Greg undertakes his first official act of leadership, his voice is hesitant. "Well, what does everyone think about the conditions out there?" he asks, scanning the group, his headlamp blinding us. There are halfhearted mumbles in response.

"I hear a lot of waves."

"It seems pretty windy."

"Yeah, it was windy all night."

We just stand there, listening to the thundering surf.

Then Jerry, a student from Texas, pipes up. "I think things are big out there," he drawls. "I'm real concerned."

From the edge of the pack comes an unstifled groan and a nasally Boston squawk: "It seems fine to me," says Tammy, a 45-year-old mother of five. Under her breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear, she adds, "I'm going to commit suicide if we have to stay here another day."

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