OUR LAST SUPPER is one of our own harvesting. I'm on burdock detail, digging the rough, brown, footlong roots out of the red clay of a nearby field with a fellow student. Back at the cooking shed in the main yard, all 90of us spend an hour or so cleaning, scraping, and slicing. I have never had a meal so Edenic in its profusion and beauty: a salad of chickweed, violet flowers, pennycress, and wild onions; a stir-fry of burdock, dandelion, nettles, and wintercress buds; dandelion flower fritters; garlic mustard pesto over whole-wheat pasta (store-bought—cut us some slack); nettle soup; and spicebush tea. We are each given a trout to gut, wrap in burdock leaves, and place in the fire. After six days here, I approach this task with a strange relish. It is the best fish I have ever eaten.

The grand finale of the Standard is a nighttime sweat lodge. I generally try to avoid pitch-dark, infernally hot enclosures, but now that Brown is my new best friend I find his preamble so avuncular and sweet that I almost consider it. He tells us we are to enter in a clockwise direction, leaving the area behind him free for those among us who suffer claustrophobia. "The minute you want to get out, just say so and we'll open the doors," he proclaims. "I won't love you any less."

I resolve to do it until he cedes the floor to Joe Lau, the ninjutsu expert, who reads us the guidelines. When I hear "crawl in on your hands and knees," I realize that there is not Xanax enough in the world to make me enter the low, round, straw-covered structure. The other rules include taking off all metal jewelry that doesn't sit directly against your skin as it can heat up, swing back, and burn you pretty badly. And then there's the final admonition: "You are absolutely forbidden to pass wind in the sweat lodge," says Joe. "We wouldn't say it if it wasn't important."

The students assemble in their bathing suits, and there is something strange and primal about this nearly naked crowd in the moonlight. Their progress into the lodge is slow, and it takes a while for everyone to crawl in. I can hear Brown beginning his incantatory singing.

I rise early on the last morning. I'm almost the only student awake. I ask if there's anything I can do, and one of the volunteers asks me to build up the fire. "Well, how the hell am I supposed to do that?" I think to myself. Almost as quickly, I realize I know precisely how to do that, and much more. I have never taken in more information in one week in my life. Can I track a mouse across a gravel driveway? I couldn't track a mouse across a cookie sheet spread with peanut butter, but that's no matter. Despite Kevin's recantation in his final wrap-up, when he begs us, "Don't quit your jobs, don't make any radical decisions for the next three months, don't trash your relationships..." ("How many of us did that?" Ruth Ann stage-whispers), I can't help feeling like I could if I needed to, and survive. Lavishly.

Another student gives me a lift to the bus station. I count the roadkills on the shoulder of the highway along the way. "I could do something with that," I think. "And that. And that." I resist the temptation to ask my driver to pull over and let me out, so that I may part the trees and step through, letting the branches close behind me as I keep walking, until I can no longer be seen from the road.

David Rakoff has taken to starting fires without matches at parties. His first book, a collection of essays titled Fraud, will be published by Doubleday in May.