Walking with Jason

The silence of the wilderness draws us back into our inner selves, into our spiritual selves. In that silence the mind quiets; the heart takes control. Our senses are no longer overcharged, one begins to hear things, new things like what Jerry’s campers hear that were there all the time. They also begin to learn more about themselves because it allows fears, anxiety, emotions, to come out and to be addressed. It is a silence we fear. Blaise Pascal, famed philosopher, scientist, mathematician and writer, wrote it was not the vastness of the universe but that “the eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.” It wasn’t the size of the universe that bothered him but that it could be and was so silent. The stillness of the woods, the stillness of the night, reminds us of our “human solitude” and that frightens us. We are masters of avoiding who we are and the confrontation of what is going on in the depths of our being. There is an old saying which claims the cure for loneliness is solitude. When we no long fear solitude we realize that we are not alone. We find we are in a presence neither stressful nor boring. The author Pico Iyer wrote, In silence, we often say we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below ourselves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think. I remember a radio show host once talking about the evils of silence or dead air time in his business. Seems he had turned the in-house speakers off so he could talk to a caller and forgot the time. The music ended followed by pure silence; it was the ultimate sin in broadcasting. Somebody paid for that time and it couldn’t be wasted on silence. Noise is our security blanket. The call of Nature is the call to enjoy her silence. It is a call to leave the noise, chatter, distractions of everyday life behind. It is a call to an awe inspiring place surrounded by the sounds of silence. The silence of the wilderness is not all that silent. I remember waking one morning to the sounds of what seemed to be two hawks dive bombing the lake just outside my tent. I had stayed the night alongside the lake at Woodson’s base camp. At first I thought that I was dreaming; then I realized the sounds where real and I was missing an extraordinary aerial show. By the time I got the tent flaps and, for that matter, my eyes opened they were gone. Their screeches were something I had never heard before or since. In the wilds of Alaska Steve Prysunka hears a pod of whales singing a song that has been passed down through the ages and will be picked up and carried by other whales. For us everywhere, just like for Steve’s children in Alaska as well as for Jerry’s youth in Georgia there are more sounds if we only stop and tune in. Water cascading over rocks, the wind rushing through the trees, coyotes howling at night, sounds are everywhere, in what Chet Raymo calls the “unsilent silence.” It’s more a tuning out and a tuning in. We tune out the normal sounds of everyday life, cars, school bells, our music, phones, and electronic games. The endless stream of chatter that is everywhere around us that we are conditioned to expect needs to be tune out. Then once the mind is quiet we can hear the other world. Sterling Wharton (Outward Bound NYC instructor) told me how often times a student would say; “I never slept where there’s no noise. I’m always used to hearing cars honking, or the subway passing overhead. I’m not used to being in the outdoors where it’s totally quiet.” There comes a point, the longer we are in the woods, where the fears begin to subside. Where what scares us loses its impact, where we begin to realize we can survive. It happens because the perceived risk is its own fiction. What first appears scary isn’t. To paraphrase Willi Unsoeld, we pass from adversity to become joined to the woods As guides and guardians, using the ethics of the child’s safety first, the staff allows the child the experience to find him or herself while in a safe trusting environment. It’s as Roy Charette (WS alumni, former WS field educator and Program Coordinator, and CEO of TrainingPath) explained, I think one of the things that allows the environment to work in working with teenagers is that it’s uncomfortable. Because, if the students earn a comfortable setting, then they will attempt to control that setting based on their previous experiences with home and community. It worked for Roy. In 1976 as a fourteen year-old, he was part of the first batch of inner city youth referred to the Wilderness School which, at the time, was in a different location, Goshen, CT. And, except for the members’ faces, the activities and results are the same today as back then. What started at the Wilderness School continued on for Roy with Outward Bound and then the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). At 19 he worked three months for National Geographic in Papua New Guinea on a photo shoot.