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Happy Anniversary North Carolina Outward Bound

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Canoeing at sunset

A crew mate and I beginning a night paddle while on the semester course in Everglades National Park.

I am back in Asheville this week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the North Carolina Outward Bound School. When I arrived at Table Rock in the fall of 1996 to be a student on a semester-long course, I was 26 years old and utterly adrift. I was depressed, unsure of myself, and where I fit in. Eighty-something days and hundreds of miles hiked and paddled later, I awoke on a mountain in Costa Rica with a sea of stars overhead and something I don’t think I had felt in far too many years: possibility. After years of being asleep, my eyes opened to the wonders of the world around me, and the realization that I can do so much more than I ever imagined. Outward Bound not only taught me how to live, it taught me how to be alive.

Thank you North Carolina Outward Bound, and Happy 50th Anniversary.

Snapshots From Hurricane Irma

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After The Storm

After the storm, the mud lay thick on the floor, oozing its way into every crevice of the house.

After the storm, the building where Mary and I first kissed lay scattered in pieces throughout the mangroves.

After the storm, there were plenty of good things to talk about, so why does the news only report about the bad?

Watching Over The Island

The debris fan spread out from the West Cottage like an airplane crash, objects smashed and scattered into a million tiny pieces. Strangely, there is no mud here. On the island, it must have all been water, wave after wave washing over it, battering all in its path. I sift through the pile and run across a familiar face, the picture pristine amongst the carnage. Tucker never did much like storms, but he seems to have sat through this one just fine.

 

 

 

The Stories We Write

There is a pile of mud soaked things growing higher in the front yard. My well-curated collection of sea kayaking books and a good sized portion of my Outward Bound instructor resources are a sodden mess somewhere near the bottom. I’ve held onto these things for years, but I couldn’t tell you when was the last time I opened up one of those sea kayaking books or used any of my resources on course.

In the end, the pile in the yard is just a collection of objects, their only value is in the memories I have attached to them, and as I grow older, even those fall by the wayside, more stuff added to the discard pile. Life is not defined by the objects, or the memories that we cling to. It is written in disappearing ink about what we are doing right here, right now.