I’ve been on the island with Steve Bees for over a week, now. We’ll
head home, soon. I do so like it here.
I
served again as Charlie’s assistant, though not alone, and not
quite as before. Traditionally, Charlie divides the yearlings into
two groups because the workshop he leads involves a lot of hiking
over mountains, including over some sensitive terrain, and larger
groups are much harder to corral into Leave No Trace habits if those
habits aren’t ingrained yet. He takes one group and his assistant
takes the other, but for the intertidal portion of the program, the
groups combine and he leads the whole thing himself. The group is so
big this year, though, that he actually divided it into thirds for
the mountain hike—the man he uses when I’m not available took the
third group—and in half for the intertidal exploration. I led the
other half for intertidal, so my role was much greater than it has
been in the past.
In
fact, we left it up to the students to decide which group they would
join, and to my astonishment some chose me for both the hike and
intertidal, so they never had Charlie at all. It’s not that they
made a mistake, either, because some of my loyalists had attended
workshops I led on campus. They knew me. And liked me, I guess.
And
I can actually sort of see why. I hadn’t assisted Charlie on the
Island since I was a novice, and I’ve been to grad school since.
I’ve also done a lot of reading on natural history, including that
of this island (I do like this place), and I have a lot more
experience teaching. I feel less like a fraud reciting somebody
else’s lecture, and more like an actual adjunct college professor
with something to offer. It was nice.
Steve,
meanwhile, was doing nothing at all. I mean, he did a lot of hiking,
I made sure of that, and while I was busy leading the workshops (that
took two days), David, Allen’s son, took him adventuring. But he
wasn’t responsible for learning anything or doing anything in
particular, and when it rained for three days and Steve got too cold
to enjoy much, I let him spend that third day in a coffee shop in
town reading and drinking coffee.
There
was method to my madness. I’ve only recently really articulated to
myself what I’m doing with him, and what it is is that I’m
teaching Steve to leave his work behind when he’s not working by
taking refuge in field and forest—eventually, I hope he’ll learn
to bring field and forest with him to work. So my plan was to give
him a week and a half, mostly outdoors, with no responsibility at
all—no clients, no causes, no baby, no sick wife—so he could
wholly decompress and use the way he feels at the end of it as a kind
of internal baseline, so he knows what being relaxed actually feels
like.
The
only assignment I gave him was the same one Charlie gave me some
years ago—to identify a favorite place on the Island. Once he’s
discovered it, we’ll spend our final full day on the Island there.
I
don’t know why Charlie gave me that assignment, but I gave it to
Steve because I want him self-aware, paying attention to how he feels
in each place we go.
It’s
no good establishing a baseline if he doesn’t remember it.
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