by David Rakoff
As a group, we are almost equally divided between the sexes, and we run the gamut from the ethereal to the pragmatic—from the unbelievably sweet eighteen-year-old vegan boy from Portland to the gun enthusiast who greets me throughout the week by saying, “Hey, New York!” He brought his own food, hermetically sealed decommissioned military MREs (“Bought ’em on eBay for ten cents on the dollar after the whole Y2K thing didn’t pan out. Best au gratin potatoes I ever ate”). There is the congenial soi-disant “hillbilly from West Virginia” in his fifties, and the twentysomething physics major looking to drop out for a while. For the most part, the people are friendly, intelligent, and environmentally and socially committed. I meet more than a few involved in education, in particular working with troubled teens in the wilderness. And, I am relieved to see, in keeping with the Tracker philosophy of forging an unmediated relationship with nature, they are refreshingly immune to the pornography of gear. They radiate good health as they unpack bags of gorp, apples, whole-wheat pitas, and huge water bottles. I have also come prepared with a deli-size Poland Spring, assorted candy bars, and four packs of Marlboro Lights purchased in nearby Easton, Pennsylvania, at Puff Discount Wholesale Cigarettes. (While smoking is permitted, the school is dry, with a no-drugs policy.)
I arrive on April 30, a beautifully sunny, albeit very windy, Sunday afternoon. We spend the first few hours battling the strong breeze to pitch our tents, the placement of which is overseen by Indigo, one of the eight or so volunteers, alumni of previous Standard classes, who help out for the week. Indigo hovers anywhere between fifty and seventy years old. With her sun-burnished face, craggy features, and rather extreme take-charge demeanor, she is straight out of My Ántonia. But she is not unfriendly, even as she tells one of the Italians, his tent staked down and ready, “Uh-uh, mister. You gotta move it about four inches that way. We’re making a lane right here.” She gesticulates like an urban planner dreaming of a freeway. Indigo is the Robert Moses of Tent City.
We are not actually in the Pine Barrens, sacrosanct locus of Brown’s childhood. The Standard class is held on the Tracker farm in Asbury, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border (not to be confused with Asbury Park, sacrosanct locus of that other South Jersey legend—and Tom Brown contemporary—Bruce Springsteen). The Barrens, while apparently magnificent, also very much live up to their name. The farm at Asbury is better for teaching novices owing to its rich biodiversity. Its landscape of fields, meadows, light forest, and the Musconetcong River, which flows a few hundred yards away, offers ample flora and fauna for this week of instruction. Aside from the barn where the (hours upon hours of) lectures take place, the farm consists of little more than Tom Brown’s house, a dozen or so Porta-Johns, a few wooden stalls serving as showers, and a toolshed with an awning under which sits a row of chuck wagon gas rings—our cafeteria. All activity is centered around the central yard, a scant acre-size area of patchy lawn that lies between our nylon sleeping quarters and the barn. In the center of this is the all-important fire, which burns day and night, heating a large square iron tank with a tap, where we get hot water for our bucket showers.
The instructors, whom we meet the first evening, are possibly the most organically appealing group of people I’ve ever encountered. They are all affable, all pedagogically gifted—there isn’t a dud public speaker in the bunch—and all chasteningly competent at the endless variety of primitive skills we will learn. Like some crack team of movie commandos, they can almost be differentiated by their specific areas of expertise: Kevin Reeve, forty-four, director of the school, a John Goodman type who opted for early retirement from Apple nine years ago after taking his Standard class, paterfamilias; Joe Lau, thirty-one, resident flint knapper—his stone tools are things of beauty—ranked second in ninjutsu in the state of New Jersey; Mark Tollefson, thirty-two, plant expert, wild edible savant, also in charge of food; Tom McElroy as the Kid—at twenty-three years old, youth personified, a thatch-haired Tom Sawyer, possessed of a sniper’s aim with the throwing stick; and Ruth Ann Colby Martin, twenty-six, resident beauty, who, it seems, can do literally everything. Polymathically dexterous, capable, strong, and funny. Joni Mitchell as Valkyrie. Even though she has earlier that day run the twenty-six-mile Sandy Hook marathon, she fairly glows. As an avowed homosexual, I generally make it a practice to seek out the amorous embraces of men over those of women, yet my heart belongs to Ruth Ann Colby Martin.
That first evening, the entire class gathers in the barn for our initial orientation session, where we are advised of the school’s general guidelines and given our first taste of the ethos of the place, summed up by Kevin pointing to a sign above the stage. It reads “No Sniveling.” “This is a survival school, not a pampering school,” he tells us. As if on cue to prove the rustic authenticity of the place, the bat that lives in the barn swoops around our heads. We are reminded to hydrate regularly and properly, to be vigilant about the poison ivy that grows rampant on the farm. “And if you are taking any sort of medication to regulate your moods,” Joe tells us, “we request that you stay on that medication while you’re here.”
All of the instructors chime in, in unison, their voices weary with hard-won experience, “We wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t important.”
Finally we are warned about ticks and their dreaded Lyme disease. We are to check for the small black dots twice a day all over our bodies, particularly in those dark, warm, hairy places ticks apparently so love. A proper self-scrutiny is demonstrated by one of the (clothed) volunteers, who takes to the stage holding a small hand mirror from the shower stalls. He moves it over and around his torso and limbs like a hoochy-koochy dancer with a fan, looking into the glass all the while. As the coup de grâce, he shows us how to check our least accessible, most potential Tick Central. Turning his back to us, he bends over, bringing the mirror up between his legs. “Ta-da!” he says as he holds his triumphantly abject position. We applaud.
We meet the man himself the following morning. Tom Brown is handsome and, at age fifty, in great shape. With his silvering hair parted neatly on the side, trimmed mustache, and penetrating blue eyes, there’s a little bit of Christopher Street circa 1982 about him, but he resembles nothing so much as the scary gym teachers of my youth, men who said casually hostile and emasculating things like “You look like a bunch of girls out there.”
I’m only half-right. Brown, while blessed with deadpan comic timing and a Chautauqua preacher’s instinct for the performative flourish, also exhibits a disquieting and ever-present thrumming bass note of dwindling patience. This weird duality is an acknowledged fact. Kevin has warned us that Brown is “part mother hen, part drill sergeant.” For the uninitiated, it can make for a fairly bizarre, emotionally dizzying ride, sometimes in the same sentence. He begins with a little flattery, praising our very presence.
“The terms family and brother and sisterhood do not fall flippantly from our lips.” (That’s nice, we think, prematurely and mistakenly warmed to our cores.) He continues. “Even my parents when they call, the calls are screened. I talk to them when I want to. But you—” He indicates us, snapping back to sweetness. “You speak my language. When I say to one of you, ‘Hey, I heard a tree call your name,’ you’ll know what I mean. You’re more than eight to five. I’m an alien out there,” he says, meaning society. “But not with you. You’re the warriors.”
The only kind of warrior I feel like is perhaps one of Washington’s consumptive, freezing soldiers at Valley Forge. My first night in my small rented green nylon dwelling in Tent City was an extremely frigid one, making me wonder how I will survive a whole week on one hour of sleep a night. I am not the only one having doubts about this venture. “I didn’t come for boot camp,” one woman says to me. “If it continues too freezing, I’m just getting in the car and going home.” Morning ablutions are completely out of the question. I point out as how the chill also militates against our checking for ticks in the shower. “And the size of the mirror is this big!” she says, holding her finge
rs five inches apart. “How the hell am I going to see my ass in a mirror that size?”
Happily, the Standard class is not boot camp. We are not hiked miles and miles, made to gather fire wood for hours on end, or really called upon to test our physical mettle in any appreciable way. The course is not without its arduous qualities, but its rigor is an intellectual one. The days are long, from six A.M. to past eleven at night, spent largely in lecture, with actual hands-on experience making up about 20 percent of our time. During our breaks—primarily the hour set aside for meals—we practice our skills.
The main yard outside the barn buzzes with preindustrial activity: there are people making cordage, lobbing their throwing sticks at a shooting gallery of plush toy prey—an assortment of stuffed animals perched on top of logs, their foreshortened limbs, furry bellies, permanent smiles, and cuddly expressions simply begging to be taken out by a lethal piece of spinning lumber. The top prize, the object of the most murderous and blood-hungry violence, is the purple demon himself, Barney. Other students are silently fox-walking and stalking slowly across the grass, while the majority of us are trying to start fires with our bow drills.
This last endeavor is our primary milestone, survival skill-wise. The squeak of turning spindles and the sweet smell of the smoldering cedar, occasionally followed by the applause of whatever small group might be standing nearby, is a constant. I make three attempts before success, but when it comes! The thrill of sawing the drill back and forth, watching the accumulation of the heated sawdust, now brown turning to black, the small plume of smoke that rises, the gentle coaxing of the tiny coal into fragile, orange life, the parental swaddling of that ember into a downy tinder bundle, the ardent, almost amorous gentle blowing of air into same, the increasing smoke, and the final, brilliant burst into flames in one’s fingers—it simply cannot be overstated how fucking cool it is. The charge is pre-verbal and atavistic. If, as Fitzgerald writes on the last page of The Great Gatsby, the Dutch sailors’ view of the New World was the last time in history when man must have held his breath in the presence of something commensurate with his capacity for wonder, then this overwhelming awe at having finally harnessed the power of conflagration was surely among the first.
Recapturing and maintaining that sense of wonder is at the very heart of the Tracker School philosophy, which is “to see the world through Grandfather’s eyes,” in a state of complete awareness, living in perfect harmony with nature, attuned to what is known in the Apache tradition as the Spirit That Moves Through All Things. This awareness will provide the key to tracking animals, both human and otherwise. “Grandfather didn’t have two separate words for ‘awareness’ and ‘tracking,’ ” Brown says. Tracking is Brown’s claim to fame. He has helped solve hundreds of forensic cases. He is undoubtedly a master at gleaning the progress over the landscape of both humans and animals, but his description of the brief, hundred-yard walk from his house to the barn is so strange and omniscient, he calls to mind Luther and Johnny Htoo, the delusional chain-smoking twelve-year-old identical twin leaders of Burma’s Karen people’s insurgency movement, with their claims of invisibility and imperviousness to bullets. “There had been a fox. The hunting had not gone well. She emerged at 2:22 A.M. Her left ear twitches. Another step, now fear, and suddenly the feral cat appears, she’s gone!”
We won’t be able to reach this level by week’s end, but apparently we will be able to “track a mouse across a gravel driveway.” Just one of the many skills that will save us should we ever find ourselves in a full survival situation.
“Full survival” has nothing to do with the amassing of alarming quantities of canned food, a belief that the government is controlled by Hollywood’s Jewish power elite, reality-based TV programming, home schooling, or Ted Kaczynski. Full survival means naked in the wilderness: no clothes, no tools, no matches. Full survival is both worst-case scenario and ultimate fantasy. Worst case being that the End Days have come upon us, the skies bleed red, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have torn up the flower beds, and we must fend for ourselves and our loved ones. (The more prosaic version of that might be a bear eating your food or your matches getting wet.) Alternately, the ultimate fantasy is we’ve gotten so sick and tired of taking crap from “the man” that we just park our cars by the side of the highway and step into the woods and disappear. An oft repeated joke throughout the week is “Next Monday when you go in to work and quit your jobs . . .”
Regardless of the circumstances that catalyze our move back to a State of Nature, we will survive. And survive “lavishly.” Being in the woods, we are told, will become an experience akin to being locked in the Safeway overnight. “The main danger in full survival is gaining weight,” Kevin avers. Nature is a bounteous paradise for those who play by the rules. That would be nature’s rules, not the government’s. Since much of the nation’s remaining wilderness falls under the protective jurisdiction of the National Parks Service—whose rangers don’t look kindly upon the wanton building of debris huts and the killing and eating of local animal populations—much of what we learn turns out to be illegal.
Case in point: animal skinning. Even picking up roadkill apparently requires a permit. For the lecture on skinning and brain tanning, Ruth Ann comes in wearing a fringed buckskin dress of her own devising—it must be said, a fringed buckskin dress with a Peter Pan collar. She tells us the story of coming upon her first roadkill buck, while taking a much needed break from writing college papers. She is, as always, adorable, sympathetic, funny, and extraordinary in both her competence and introspection. My immediate reaction the entire week to anything Ruth Ann tells me is eagerness and a wish to try whatever it is she is proposing. When she tells us to first cut around the anus and genitals of the animal and then pull them through from inside the body cavity, I think regretfully, I wish I had a dead animal’s anus and genitals to cut around and pull through its body cavity.
I almost get my wish. After donning a pair of rubber gloves, she leaves the barn and comes back in bearing a very dead groundhog. It has already been gutted and the fur pulled down partway. It looks like a bloody baby in a nutria car coat. It hangs from a nail by the Achilles’ tendons of its hind legs. The lifeless face points down, the small clawed hands sway back and forth. Grabbing hold of the pelt, Tom McElroy—the Kid—pulls, using his entire body weight. Groundhogs have a great deal of connective tissue. There is a ripping, Velcro-like sound as the fur comes down. Tom briefly loses his grip, and the wet animal jerks once on its nail, spraying the front row with droplets of groundhog-y fluid. The bat flutters around the barn throughout.
Next comes the tanning. Amazingly, almost nothing is better at turning rawhide into supple leather than the lipids in the animal’s own brain, worked into the skin like fingerpaint. A further, beautiful economy of nature is that every single animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide.
Ruth Ann made her own wedding dress from unsmoked buckskin, as well as her husband’s wedding shirt. I expected her to look rough-hewn, disinhibited, and slightly tacky—like Cher—but when she takes it out of the box and holds it up against herself, we see that it is actually lovely: soft, ivory, and beautifully constructed. My crush is official.
But there will be time for infatuation tomorrow. It is getting late, and, as happens every evening, a kind of rage starts to set in around ten forty-five when people still keep asking stupid questions. I’m desperate to get to bed, having concluded the obsessive urination during breaks that starts just after supper—safeguarding against a cold, confusing pitch-dark walk through Tent City across the yard to the Porta-Johns. A small cadre of exhausted fugitives has already disappeared, making their ways back to their tents slowly and silently, without flashlights—how I envy them.
The man beside me, apropos of nothing, raises his hand and says that there is “a story” that man started society because he was “cast out of a garden because of a sin.” He doesn’t attribute this anecdote, leaving it a blind item from a source we might not kno
w. He seems nice enough but potentially dangerous.
Ruth Ann’s face is a placid mask of patience as she listens. “And did this bring up those associations for you?”
“Yup.”
“Cool,” she says.
(By week’s end the instructors are pretending not to see his raised hand. He opts for making his comments under his breath. In the wild edibles lecture, when we are told to keep our grains dry to protect them from ergot, the moldy blight that causes hallucinations, he mutters, “That was before the Dark Forces turned it into LSD.”
“Oh, you don’t have to call them the Dark Forces with me,” I want to josh him. “You can just call them the Jews.”)
Perhaps it’s the country air, but I rise early the next morning at five A.M., completely refreshed. Without making a conscious decision, I head out to the surrounding fields and woods. There is a Tracker School tradition known as “the Twenty-Eight Club,” referring to those twenty-eight individuals who managed to approach and touch a live deer during their Standard week. It has been at twenty-eight for six years. In my heart I know I will be the one to make it twenty-nine.
Ruth Ann has taught us the Stalk, a walk of such slow, silent, and fluid progress that one’s movements are in perfect accord with nature. One step of Stalking, properly executed, should take a full minute of achingly precise placement of the outer ball of the foot, followed by the inner ball, the heel, the toes, and then a deliberate and bomb-squad-careful shifting of the weight. We further have to squint our eyes and close our mouths (the whites of both will give us away) and keep our arms folded across our middles. “Otherwise you show the human silhouette and you’ll stick out like a turd in a punch bowl,” she tells us. Key to attaining the grace and calm necessary for the Stalk is going into wide-angle vision, a relaxing of focus that not only increases one’s sensitivity to one’s periphery, but has the added benefit of clearing the mind: a moving meditation.