All Posts Tagged Tag: ‘Davidson Outdoors’

I had one of those days earlier this week that got just a little bit too file-management-y and status-update-y and sit-on-my-butt-y at my desk-y. By five o’clock I just had to get outside with Dodger and go jump in the lake.

“Aaaiiiieeee!” I went, as I hurled myself off the end of the dock into Lake Norman. The plunge purged and defragged my noggin to an extent that life in real space and time was good again under a darkening sky.

Some Davidson first-years relate to one another as paddle-mates on the river before they ever set foot on campus. (Click to enlarge.)

The simple combination of fresh air, relatively fresh water, and my own kinetic motion recalled to me how much I love to get outside. Sometimes my sofa makes me forget.

In the Carolina Piedmont region, we’ve got a great place to take advantage of the good green earth, right in our own backyard or further afield on the coast or in the mountains. Adventures with Davidson Outdoors, the student outing group on campus, are always special-favorite road trips. I particularly love plunging down the French Broad River with DO’s Summer Odyssey crews of incoming new students. Odyssey first-years are fun as a box of puppies, tumbling fast toward their freshman year all yap and pizzazz, bonding by backpack and relating on the river in small groups for a week before freshman orientation.

One Sunday afternoon in mid-August, I drove up the side of the Blue Ridge Mountain range and fjorded the stream at Silver Mine Camp in Hot Springs, N.C.  The DO river logistics crew, aka “river logs” or just “logs,” were away on a river paddle. They’d left me a “Welcome, John!” sign on the blackboard. I had also learned earlier that at the log camp when I arrived there would be a first-year student recuperating from the epizoodics contracted on the trail. Not a happy camper, that.

Click to read "Get Out There!"

So as not to disturb the napping student, I walked up the hill from the parking area quietly, past the familiar fragrance of the fa-foom facilities toward the picnic shelter. There on a long table, in wildlife-proofed disarray, lay the outdoorsy household accoutrements of a week roughing it. What caught my eye was the pile of reading material gathered on the end of the table: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, the Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, Healing Appalachia….

I snatched up the Fitzgerald short stories, dragged a camp chair into the brightest patch of light then making its way to the forest floor, and dove into “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”

Ah, reading outdoors for the pleasure of it, there’s a status update for you. I need to remember to do it more often, away from that damn sofa. One man’s woo-woo, of course, is another’s deeply held belief system (lifted from a New York Times writer whose name escapes me just now, but I thank him), so I need the reminder of the Tao Te Ching quote taped to my computer monitor, to slow down and just be sometimes:

At the “River Log” camp in Hot Springs (l-r): Andrew Wilkins ’11, moi ’85, Lilly Wilson ’13 (Click to enlarge.)

“Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about other people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work and then step back. The only path to serenity.”

Later back at the log camp after the crew had rolled in, we all shared a simple supper made more savory by the summer mountain air cooling to woodsy damp around our shelter. We took turns churning orange-coconut ice cream and played Liverpool Rummy by headlamp, until finally we started to melt away to our tents, one by one.

I slept like a puppy.

[Next up: Day Two on the river, Section 9, plus more photos. Meantime, Get Outside! with a Davidson Journal article I wrote about Davidson Outdoors in the Everglades.]