They are already dead … those who had lost track of their own absurdity.
—SHIRLEY HAZZARD
THE NIGHT HUMMED AND CRACKLED AROUND ME WITH LIFE: CHIRPS, buzzes, squawks. Moths dive-bombed my headlamp. I felt an insect chomp my ankle, then another behind my knee. In Vermont, mosquitoes and blackflies can be a nuisance, but what I quickly realized is the mosquitoes biting me in Florida were in a different league. It was like someone was dancing around me under Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak with a cattle prod, zinging me with abandon. Each bite brought a sharp, stabbing, wasp-sting pain. I slapped and swore, stamping my feet. Panicking, somehow I got the tent up into a rough facsimile of shelter and dove in through the door, pushing my sleeping bag in front of me and hysterically zipping the screen shut.
But somehow all the mosquitoes had gotten in the tent with me. They continued to bite everywhere now; I felt their needle-like proboscises stabbing my ribs, back, arms, even my face. Trying to muffle my screams, I wriggled into my sleeping bag despite the oppressive, armpit-like heat and humidity of the Florida outback. The stings kept coming. Popping my head out of the stifling bag, I used my headlamp to examine my body, and that’s when I saw them.
I was covered in fire ants.
I had unknowingly pitched my tent on an anthill populated by Sole-nopsis invicta Buren, commonly known as the red imported fire ant, or RIFA.
The next period of time exists in my memory as a shattered, frenetic series of jump-cuts. Me, twisting wildly about as I pinched ants off my body, their mandibles visibly jabbing my skin; a frenzied, tent-bound discotheque striptease as my headlamp strobes wildly and I twist and writhe, ripping off clothing; half-muffled screams and curses that sound as if I’m speaking in tongues.
I spent the night hunting down ants in my tent, crushing their little exoskeletons while my body buzzed with painful bites. I was too embarrassed to sprint back to the bunkhouse and admit my stupidity, yet sweatily desired nothing more than to escape the sheer hellishness of a tent infested with fire ants. Caught between a self-imposed Scylla and Charybdis of idiocy. I barely slept, as the occasional well-hidden ant wriggled out of hiding and made its location known with yet another savage bite.
I was in Scottsmoor, Florida—a godforsaken place to begin with, fire ants notwithstanding—to train as a wilderness instructor with Outward Bound. Training I clearly needed, as I aptly demonstrated that first night. The landscape around Scottsmoor doesn’t look like stereotypical Florida. No glitzy schmaltz of the beach cities farther south, no soul-sucking tourist lures of Epcot and Disney. But it’s still Florida, so it’s flat and hot. Gridded by dusty roads, Vidalia onion fields alternate with orange groves.
Earlier in the evening, at the tender age of nineteen, I landed at the Orlando airport to begin my training as an Outward Bound instructor. I was nervous and unsure of what to expect. I had lived practically my whole life in rural Vermont, and it showed. I was untraveled, unworldly, and clueless. I’d never eaten sushi and believed 1980s movies to be the zenith of civilization. I wandered aimlessly among the massive gleaming terminals, looking for the lead trainers who were supposed to pick me up. It was late in the evening, and the hordes of tourists had already passed through on their way to The Happiest Place on Earth. The only thing that would’ve completed the image of the yokel out of his depths would’ve been if I was barefoot with straw clamped between my teeth, a burlap sack flung over my shoulder.
A man ran toward me. A shock of curly terrier hair haloed his high forehead, a giant grin showcasing his diastema. Good omen. A gap-toothed smile was indicative of puckish intelligence and mischievous goodwill—see Eddie Murphy, Madonna, Woody Harrelson, and Samuel L. Jackson.
“You must be Erik!” he said, panting. “Finally found you. I’m Pete.”
Pete was one of the other trainees. I’d later learn he’d been in the army. He’d also worked in Antarctica, driving a forklift and doing odd jobs for researchers. He had the personality of a poodle, all bounce and goofy exuberance. Pete was just past thirty, but we bonded despite more than a decade separating us. We both, by circuitous routes involving shared peripatetic employment habits, had signed up to be trained as Outward Bound instructors and had arrived in Florida for a few weeks of orientation.
Outward Bound was started in England in 1941 by educator Kurt Hahn, a German Jew who spoke out against Hitler during the 1930s, got imprisoned, then fled to England where he zealously threw himself into education and created a number of different schools. The inception of Outward Bound—an organization taking students on rigorous outdoor adventures with the aim of building confidence and teamwork skills—resulted from Hahn noticing that older sailors fared better than young whippersnappers when faced with dire survival circumstances. Hahn saw the need for a school that taught outdoor skills, but also attempted to engender the kind of patient resilience he saw as essential to coping with extreme outdoor challenges. “To serve, to strive, and not to yield,” became the Outward Bound motto. Now, outdoor programs and wilderness schools have proliferated across the world, with giants like the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) sharing a piece of the Outward Bound pie. But Hahn created one of the first of its kind. If various historical records are to be taken at face value, Hahn was a complicated individual; his accomplishments were numerous but contrasted sharply with other personality attributes, including a propensity for discipline involving a stout cane and an overbearing personality. You can take the man out of Germany, but you can’t take Germany out of the man, I guess.
Instructor orientation was a few weeks long, during which we’d learn to paddle canoes on the rivers and lakes of Florida in preparation to become Outward Bound instructors in its Youth at Risk program. Incarcerated kids would join us for thirty-day river trips once we were all trained up.
I helped Pete gather up a few other straggling trainees and we all jumped in a van driven by Jon, one of the lead instructors, and headed to basecamp in Scottsmoor.
It was dark by the time we got to camp. There were maybe a dozen other trainees, all in their twenties. I was the youngest, Pete the oldest. The Scottsmoor basecamp was just a simple double-wide ranch house with a bunkhouse behind it, surrounded by palmettos and scrubby copses giving way to agricultural fields.
Like most teenagers, I was susceptible to a soul-crushing amount of insecurity for which I overcompensated with false bravado and embarrassingly obvious posturing. I keenly felt my age and lack of experience after spending a few minutes with the other trainees—most had graduated college—and noted a deficit in both outdoor and more elementary life skills: no bank account, stumped by the logic of filing taxes, understood female anatomy about as clearly as quantum theory. Thus, I was eager to overcompensate and prove that I was a capable outdoorsperson, ready to face whatever challenges the outback of Florida could offer. It was late, and as bunks were chosen, I volunteered to pitch a tent out in the yard. Jon and Heather, the instructors who’d be training us, looked puzzled but shrugged. I grabbed one of the tents we’d be using during the course and blundered out into the yard.
It was dark. I had a cheap headlamp that I strapped on and began trying to assemble the tent. After a few frustrated attempts I finally began to make headway, threading recalcitrant aluminum poles through little nylon sleeves. It was at that point I began to make the acquaintance of the RIFA ants and endured a long, sleepless, miserable night.
As soon as the sun streaked the sky I left the tent, taking care to step over the now-obvious anthill right on my doorstep, covered in my sneaker prints. I quietly made my way to the bathroom, and stared in horror at my shirtless reflection in the mirror.
It looked like I’d been slammed by atomic-force puberty. Fire ant bites turn into little pus-filled whiteheads. I was covered in what looked like zits. Hideously disfigured, I waited in a shame spiral until I heard others waking and shuffling over to the kitchen. Mortified, I made my appearance.
I was teased and given some advice. Don’t pop the stings; it risks infection. Avoid ant hills (duh). As I awkwardly stood with everyone else drinking bad coffee, the stories began. My own humiliation had acted as a prompt, and stories of stings, bites, and poor decisions began to flow. I gradually began to feel a bit less like an idiot. As Kyle, a bearded Georgian, related a story about a wasp nest in an old car, I murmured to Pete that it was nice to hear others had made mistakes like mine.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Yours was pretty dumb.”
If there is some grand creator out there conjuring worlds, then surely Florida is their attempt at a joke. Equatorially hot, it contains stagger-ingly beautiful natural areas: the Everglades, the Crystal River, white sand beaches, the Keys. Yet it’s also the tackiest place on earth. Disney, wizard theme parks, SeaWorld, and Universal Studios conjure images of hungover parents, red-faced and sweaty, herding their offspring through endless lines of bloated vacationers all eager to throw away a year of savings on reckless purchases of inflatable rodents and overpriced gastrointestinally dangerous food. One imagines them home after a week or so in Mickey and Minnie country, surrounded by suitcases exploded with dirty tank tops and grimy flip-flops, collapsed in a heap on the couch staring vacantly at the wall, murmuring, “Wha … what happened?”
There are creatures crawling around the swamps and backcountry of Florida that are Jurassic in stature and temperament. Invasive Burmese pythons have made a home for themselves—and they’re from an Asian jungle. But they’re perfectly content to hang in Florida, as it checks all the python boxes. Hot? Yep. Wet? Yep. Filled with lots of things to eat? Yep. How do Floridians respond? By creating a therapeutic support group for former soldiers with PTSD. The vets hunt down and kill Burmese pythons in an attempt to work through the violence of warfare. That could only happen in Florida In fact, if the internet is to be believed, one of the pythons actually tried to eat an alligator. When a snake is so carelessly predatory it tries to eat another large reptile that’s a cross between a Buick and Godzilla, you know it means business.
The history of Florida is a chaotic one. Syphilis-ridden conquistadors and slavers landed there throughout the 1500s, usually on a stereotypical trip of plunder, resource theft, enslavement, and Indigenous genocide. The usual colonial menu. Juan Ponce de León is often credited with being the first white person to land in Florida, though this is disputed. He had a notorious career in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, joining Christopher Columbus on his second voyage, running slaving businesses on Puerto Rico and elsewhere. In fact, it’s estimated that a significant percentage of people in Puerto Rico can trace their ancestry to Ponce de León, which must be like having the last name “Manson” or “Kaczynski” on your Tinder profile. It bears noting that Ponce de León wasn’t merely an accessory to the violence of early colonialism in the Caribbean; he was a murderous military commander. In Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic) he put down an uprising known as the Higuey massacre in which members of the Taíno people—men, women, and children—were disemboweled and had their hands and feet hacked off by the Spanish. He traveled to Florida twice, and like many Spanish was seeking slaves and basically whatever he could grab. Inexplicably, there are statues of Juan Ponce de León to this day in both Puerto Rico and Ponte Vedra Beach in Florida, which is sort of like having a monument to the world’s biggest hemorrhoid.
But, Florida being Florida, it’s the locale for at least one exception to the rule of violent European colonial dispossession of native culture and lives. It’s home to the Seminole people, the only tribe that never officially surrendered in the face of the US pogroms of the nineteenth century that attempted to wipe out native populations. Eventually, the US military just gave up hunting down the Indigenous peoples of Florida, who’d taken refuge in the impenetrable swamps. If there is a geographical equivalent to giving the middle finger, it’s Florida.
But during my brief time there I’d come to love it. It was a love like the mom has for her homicidal son in that movie We Need to Talk About Kevin I know Florida is dangerous, filled with both creatures and people out of nightmares. But for the most part, I still feel tenderly toward her. Exploring the rivers and lakes of Florida changed the way I saw the state. I got to spend weeks at a time drifting on slow currents of water the color of weak tea that snaked through dense palm and hardwood forests. Paddling quietly, I’d watch pterodactyl-like herons flapping overhead. Cottonmouth snakes would be sunning themselves on half-submerged logs. Once, paddling in ocean waters just off the coast, I saw a small shark dart from the shadows and watched it glide underneath me through the water. Late at night, camped on the shores of brackish lakes, I’d shine my headlamp out over the water and see the dull red eyes of alligators looking back.
While much of the state was chockablock strip malls and concrete, getting outside and on the rivers gave a glimpse of just how rugged, jungly, and wild Florida could be. But it wasn’t just the place; what I was doing—working with kids outdoors—was something I loved. I threw myself into it wholeheartedly.
A fair question to ask would be: Why? What’s the point of outdoor education? After all, most of us end up flipping burgers or answering emails or selling Mitsubishis for a living. The ability to safely ford a river or construct a shelter out of leaves and logs hardly seems necessary. For example, despite my deep-seated antipathy for long department meetings, I’ve never had to rig an emergency rappel rope to escape out the window (yet).
If it’s not about hard skills like building a snow cave or orienteering in the bush, then it’s about what it shifts for us internally. How it changes—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—the very landscape of our souls. This isn’t to say that everyone who takes an Outward Bound or NOLS course experiences a transcendental moment as they traverse scree-covered ridges at 12,000 feet with a forty-pound pack wobbling on their back. But moments like that broaden our perspective of who we are. Rigorous outdoor adventures deepen who we are. I’m not sure you can say the same thing about learning to calculate compound interest or how to code in C++.