A New Year

School is starting up all over the country. Boys and girls toting their new, shiny backpacks, boxes of pencils, and squeaky clean shoes stream into classrooms throughout the fall, ready to begin a new year of learning.

The five of us at the Trackers Hunter Gatherer Adult Immersion Program are starting school, too, but we look a little different than the students sitting in rows clutching neatly sharpened pencils.

We’re dressed in an assortment of wool and polyester, rain jackets, pants, leather boots. All five of us sport some kind of beanie--it’s cold out here at the Tracker’s property in Sandy where we’ll be spending significant amounts of time this year. Hat head is pervasive. The three men sport robust, luxurious beards. We joke that the two women will have them by the end of the year, too. We carry water bottles, notebooks, knives, sticks. Other tools we need we make over the course of the week, bringing them home to practice with.

Like all new students, though, we share some anxieties. Will I fit in? Will I be able to learn what I need and want to learn? Will I overcome the challenges in front of me? Will my instructor be knowledgeable and kind?

The first four days of our journey together, spent camping out at Sandy, answered those questions and a host of others. On the ride out, we were silent, awkward. A group of five strangers who shared their nervousness and little else. On the ride back in, we have in-jokes.

In between Monday and Thursday, we shared an action-packed week full of new experiences and perspectives. Our very first activity once we had arrived on site--carrying a large log through forest paths so that we can use it in a hide tanning process later--brings us together in the shared experience of sore shoulders and physical labor. We are all very capable people. The log was no match for us.

Later, in a quieter moment, several of us gather around the pond with bamboo fishing poles and worms we’d dug up ourselves as bait. We crouch on the banks, staring into the murky depths, fingers splayed out along the length of the poles. We wait. The rain patters down, drawing small expanding rings across the surface of the water. The reflective ripples call to the fish, and in short order we have a pile of four fish ready for dinner.

For me, it’s an odd moment. The life of the worm and the life of the fish are both sacrificed so that I can eat. It’s not an unknown feeling--I have fished before--but it is always an uncomfortable one. To confront the reality of my own life is to be intimately familiar with death. Normally, such uncomfortable facts can be ignored--pushed to the back of the brain in the sanitized, brightly-lit aisles of my local Safeway as I select sterile cuts of chicken neatly wrapped in cellophane and styrofoam.

But facing discomfort is, in part, why I am in this course. To spend nine months learning the ways of life that have been left behind by modern convenience is to invite discomfort into my life in a visceral and constant way.

Through challenge, I grow.

Photo taken by Mae Mae at Eel Creek, Oregon.