OUTDOOR EDUCATION

Let me explain something about my childhood.

I was convinced that I went to the best elementary school, ever. Never mind that I'd only gone to two prior schools--Lakeside Presbyterian, Jefferson Elementary--both in San Francisco. My school was donut-shaped with an open air courtyard with a tree in the middle. If we were good, our teacher would allow us to sit under the tree to do our work. When, in the second grade, my teacher told me that once a week I would be put in a different classroom with other brainy kids from other schools in the district, I thought she meant they were transferring me out of the school and I wanted to cry. Actually, they just put me in GATE, the Gifted and Talented Education.

In elementary school, I enjoyed beating boys at tether ball during recess and being the first girl picked for kickball during PE. My girlfriends and I were twins, triples, quadruplets, or quintuplets on Twin Day. Best of all, I liked taking field trips. We went to the NASA Ames Research Center, sampled ice cream at the Dreyer's (or Breyer's? I can't remember) Ice Cream Factory, ran wild at the Exploratorium, developed our own prints at a photography darkroom, and more.

So of course, as a fifth grade rite of passage, I went on Outdoor Ed.

Outdoor Ed is a week-long, nature curriculum-based program that students from San Mateo County elementary schools participate in. I knew very little about it, except for what my older brother had told me: you slept in a cabin, ate good food, you have to pee in the woods and kiss banana slugs. The website didn't even exist when I went years ago, nor did we have things like cell phones and instant messaging, so I had no way of knowing otherwise. I remember it costing $79 after I sold one box of candy bars ("fundraising"), which I thought was an awful lot of money to spend on anything.

On the morning of departure, I was geared up with a duffel bag, a sleeping bag, and two 35mm disposable cameras. The plastic kind you wind up after each snap, and hold a button if you wanted flash. Yellow school buses took my friends and me to somewhere far away, in some woods by the coast. I remember feeling homesick as soon as the roads became less familiar. 

To children who have never been away from home, the freedom of being away from parents with friends was doubly compounded with the freedom of being in nature. It was almost too great. We took nature hikes at night with only our flashlights and senses of adventure. We happily munched on apples and peanuts as midday snacks and baked brownies with a solar powered oven. We sang songs about scat and moose before filing into the log cabin dining commons (and once, the boy I had a crush on saved me a seat!). We composted leftover food and took personal satisfaction when we wasted none. We took probably one four-minute shower the entire week. We learned about native plants and animals from our naturalist guides, who also had nature-y names (our cabin's guide was named Solstice, and I had no idea what that was). The website says that lights out is at 9:30pm every night, which seems crazy to me now. But man. I had the time of my life. And I think it's really affected the way I perceive nature and appreciate the environment today.

When I used to tell my non-Bay Area college friends about Outdoor Ed, they usually had no idea what I was talking about. For a while, I feared that I may have made up the entire experience. Well okay not really. I'm really glad to have randomly googled it today! I wish I were still in high school so I could be a cabin leader. My cabin leader was 17 years old and had a tongue ring. I thought she was so cool.

In the end, I didn't pee in the woods, but I did kiss a banana slug. It was gross and slimy and glorious.