Only the Strong Survive

Four Naked Men stood on a cliff and howled. One hundred yards to sea, a woman wearing a bathing suit tried to control a drifting pulling boat. She was laughing. She seemed very strong and she was working hard. The boat was 30 feet long, however, and so beamy that it was impossible for her to row effectively. She stood splay-legged and lunged at the oars. The boat continued to drift in the tidal rip. The naked men jumped into the sea and began to swim.

Each man continued to yell, to the extent that the water in his mouth permitted. Each, as he reached the boat and hoisted himself over the high gunwale, regarded on lookers on shore with one brown eye. The woman, still laughing and apparently not likely to stop, now took the tiller. "Stroke!" she yelled as each man seized an oar. "Stroke! Oh, stroke!"

Students of the absured will recognize immediately that the characters in this scene are (choose one):

1. Starkers

2. Bonkers

3. Actors in a Fellini film

4. Salty dogs

Fellini could be close. Here is what God's eye might have observed a few days later:

Eight women and five men (all clothed and including among them the participants in the previous masque) were climbing an oak tree. They carried with them 11 oars and the pulling boat's rudder and tiller, a small alcohol stove, food, 400 feet of rope and certain misgivings. These they expressed by aimless yelling and by reasoned analysis. The analysis sounded like this: "Ridiculous." "Insane." "It makes no sense." As night fell, the 13 people in the oak tree cooked fried thicken. Then each made himself comfortable. One man felt uneasy. He knotted hundreds of feet of rope around himself. When dawn came, he was seen to be immobile and helpless, like a fly caught by a spider. The ground beneath the oak tree was littered with chicken bones.

•

The subject is survival, the wistful ambition and hopeless lifework of every creature. But survival in one's skin, in a pulling boat? At night, in an oak tree?

Survival as a reflex, yes: the squirt of adrenaline that answers the roar in the night; the sense to bury the silver and flee to the woods when foraging troops sweep through; the ability to migrate or mutate or simply burrow deep into the mud till the cold weather passes.

But survival as what...a sport? A city man's fantasy of scavenging through broken suburbs after the terminal atomic war? A marketing opportunity for the manufacturers of light-alloy pack frames, goose-down camp booties and freeze-dried chicken tetrazzini?

Survival as a teaching technique?

"You must understand that we are not a survival school," Josh Miner had said. He is the founding trustee of the U. S. branch of Outward Bound, an organization that runs seven extraordinary schools, popularly thought to have something to do with survival, in the U. S., and 23 others throughout the world. The school at Hurricane Island, off the coast of Maine, ran the summer course during which the two one-act enigmas mentioned earlier were staged. The course lasted 26 days and all survived.

Skepticism is a survival technique, especially for journalists, and it may be worth murmuring that any school not actually engaged in training kamikaze pilots is a survival school. Also, that by any reasonable modern definition, there is a higher survival potential in knowing how to guide a business lunch from bloody mary to brandy, and by what degree to pad the expense account, than in knowing how to find sow thistle in a frozen swamp and turn the stuff into a steaming four-course dinner.

There is, to pursue skepticism a bit further, a faint silliness in the recent urban enthusiasm for woodsy survival lore and gear (nothing at the shopping center is more chic than the lore-and-gear boutique). Yet something more appears to be involved than the national fondness for complicating simple pastimes with overengineered recreational gadgets.

What is involved, perhaps, is a kind of peasant uneasiness. The mind of the marketing executive is at peace in his office on the 48th floor of the Pan Am Building, but his meat and bones know that he is much too high in the air. That may (and also may not) be a bit too delicate and literary. But it is true that technological society is far too clever and that its cleverest individual member is far too ignorant--true enough to wake a man with the four-A.M. sweats. The cardiovascular surgeon doing arterial-bypass operations in Los Angeles hasn't a clue about how the Southwest power grid operates, and the Illinois corn farmer working 5000 acres with one hired hand and $325,000 worth of equipment could no more make a pound of the nitrogen fertilizer that balances his books than the salesman who sold him the fertilizer could chop down a spruce tree and whittle himself a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter-inch exterior-grade plywood.

Yet brownouts seem to occur more frequently than before, nitrogen fertilizer is said to be hard to buy and the economy is sick and may itself be a kind of disease. A stockbroker lying awake at four A.M. in an apartment in Manhattan's East 60s reflects that, should things fall apart and the center no longer hold, he would be a long way from an Idaho potato. If things stopped, really stopped, how would he walk out of New York? Up the East Side Highway to the Triborough Bridge, then up the Bruckner Interchange, and then, maybe at the beginning of the third day, up 1--95 toward New England? Probably not; the Boston Post Road might offer better foraging.

The stockbroker laughs sourly at himself, knowing that it is this sort of fantasy, slightly skewed, that makes the gun nuts cling so fearfully to their weapons. Light-alloy pack frames and steaming sow thistle seem to him better subjects to ponder than the sprung and sagging web of the industrial society's interdependence. As he drifts toward sleep, he decides that this would be a good summer to send his kid to the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.

•

My hands shook as I huddled on the dock at Rockland, Maine. I had given up a two-drink-a-night alcohol habit ten days before, to the horror of friends and loved ones, who feared for my stability and advised that I squirrel away a supply of vodka martinis in my five-cell flashlight. It wasn't booze that was giving me withdrawal trembles, however. It was Watergate. As the Nixon Administration had begun to weather, peel, crack and then fall in great soggy chunks onto Pennsylvania Avenue, I had acquired a habit not dulled by three newspapers and many hours of televised peculation, traduction and malfeasance every day. What I would have liked to carry as contraband into the wilderness was the next month's editions of The Boston Globe. Other souls about to begin the Hurricane Island course were worrying about whether they could run four miles or climb a rock face. I could do these things, but I was unsure that I could retain my composure not knowing what Haldeman and Ehrlichman would be saying in the next weeks.

(This admission and most of what follows are hopelessly personal, not really very useful to anyone else. Outward Bound experience seems to be that way. Two friends of mine--brothers, stalwart, openhearted fellows leathery of fiber and spirit--went through separate Outward Bound courses in their late 20s. One said afterward that the physical demands were nothing much and that although the social strains were intensely exasperating, they did not have in them the seeds of enlightenment. His brother said that his own 26-day canoeing, hiking and sailing expedition had been morally challenging and physically exhausting, a splendid turning point in his life. I have no idea which man would be more likely to survive if he were marooned in the Andes with nothing to eat but dead rugby players.)

The Hurricane Island Outward Bound School is a boot camp for humanists, and most of its recruits are of boot-camp age--16 and a half to 20 or so. An occasional adult up to the age of 60 or more will enroll and slog through a course with teenagers. Generally, males train with males, in groups of 12 or 13, and females with females, but there are also a few coed groups. My colleagues were atypical: 36 men and women, most of them in their 20s, most of them teachers. The vogue for humanistic boot camp is so great that no self-respecting prep school in the East could be without a serenity-through-agony program styled after Outward Bound. There are public high schools whose students think it more prestigious, or at any rate more satisfying, to learn to climb cliffs and eat sow thistle than to play football.

At the Outward Bound office near the Rockland docks, a lanky fellow appeared, looked at us with dismay, amusement, surprise and rue and said in an English drawl that he was Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Parker, the course director, at our service night and day. We could, he said, looking at our fine pack frames and high-quality survival equipment, take with us all the gear we wanted, provided it fit into a sea bag. Here were the wretched sea bags, here were the wretched plastic tarps that we would use to make our wretched tents and here were our wretched $14.98 cotton sleeping bags. We had five minutes, he said, before the bus left for Mount Desert Island, the nearest jumping-off point for Bartlett Island.

Only about half of our clutter fit into our sea bags, and from a few of the teachers came a buzzing sound that was to become familiar, the hum of well-reasoned complaint. They had been told to bring all this stuff and now there wasn't room.

Paranoia kept me calm. It hurt to leave behind my pack frame, my (continued on page 144) Only the Strong Survive (continued from page 132) fashionable rock-climbing knickers, my second pair of socks and my copy of Thomas Pynchon's magnificent 17-pound novel, Gravity's Rainbow. I had heard enough about Outward Bound to know that one of its techniques for leading postulants to new realizations is to isolate them from old securities--the security of having a full set of gear, everything packed just so; the security of knowing what will happen next. A friend of mine who runs a winter survival program patterned after Outward Bound at a New Hampshire prep school once had two or three dozen schoolboys dotted about the frozen outback, sitting out their three-day solo ordeals. When pickup time came, he visited each lean-to and gave its hungry, ice-rimmed occupant a chocolate bar and a horrifying note. The note said, "A true survival situation does not have time limits. Your solo will last at least one more day." I was deeply suspicious of Ralph and determined not to be surprised.

The jumping-off point: Mount Desert Island, from which we could see the long green shore line of Bartlett Island across half a mile of water. Below our car park was a dock with three huge pulling boats tethered to it, bobbing prettily, ready to be photographed by summer people. In front of us was Ralph, telling us off into three groups of 12--called watches, since Hurricane Island is a sea school--and introducing us to our watch officers. Ours was a woman, Dagny Soderberg. Chunky, delicate, direct, sunburned, very feminine. Other qualities not yet evident. Twenty-seven years old but weathered by 23 years of sailing; she looked older.

Dagny led us to one of the big boats. We climbed in. She said, "We have to go over there," pointing to Bartlett Island. After that, she said nothing.

A remarkable demographic coincidence now began to show itself. Of the 12 survivors in our watch, (1) there were 12 leaders, (2) there were no followers and (3) there was no one with any nautical genius, not counting Dagny, who refused to open her mouth except to giggle. After much leadership, we found ten oars and got five of them stuck into the water from each side of the ship. Several of the leaders yelled "Go!" and the oars began striking one another with resonant woody sounds. After no more than ten minutes of dispute, we discovered that everyone was shouting the same thing: Remove the numbers-two-and-four oars on each side, to give the others swinging room.

This worked. The pulling boat began to move toward supper, which seemed at least an hour overdue. Wonderful, said Dagny; now please boat all the oars and rig the rudder, masts and sails. The big boat was two-masted and fitted out after a fashion so primitive that no one had ever seen a lash-up resembling it. The mainmast, which was taller, was permanently stepped--no problem there--but the mizzenmast had to be stuck in its hole and tethered by dubious-looking sprits. Two ambiguous spars remained, to be used as booms, or gaffs, or perhaps barge poles, but it was not clear how they should be attached to the masts and sails.

I was the oldest (at 41), the largest and arguably the loudest of this crew of captains. I decided after some minutes of closely thought-out yelling that it was up to me to establish order. I would try silence for a while, until the others finished babbling, then jump in with the clinching burst of good sense. About half of the others hit on the same stratagem and our clinching bursts of good sense came at the same time. We sounded like a meeting of Common Market ministers. Roared syllogisms beat across the water.

•

In the next days, we throve or festered, according to our natures and the immutable laws of society. The three watches separated themselves instantly and without argument into a Smart watch, clever at sailing; a Strong watch, our own, good at rowing; and a Screw-up watch, miserably inept at both. Seamanship was the basis for sorting out our pecking order in this sea school. But it was clear before very long that our group personalities, which we had accepted as unquestioningly as if they were volleyball uniforms handed out in three different colors, also governed our behavior ashore.

The Smart watch seemed to be cleverer at building shelters, making drinkable coffee and exercising the survival skill referred to by group-therapy professionals as "problem solving." Our Strong watch did splendidly whenever an ill-concerted individual output of ergs could command a situation and rather poorly at group problem-solving exercises. The Screw-up watch spent a lot of time moodily sucking its thumbs. One rainy nightfall, for example, the Strongs and the Screw-ups rowed back to Bartlett Island after an exhausting day of training on Blue Hill Bay. The Smarts were off doing something else and there was no one in camp. As might have been expected, the Screw-ups crept off, cold and hungry, to huddle in their tents, and we Strongs began the dreary work of building a tarpaulin shelter, gathering wet wood and getting a fire started. I have never built a fire under worse conditions, but after about two hours, we managed to warm some food. Generally, each watch did its own cooking, but the only sensible plan under these soggy conditions was to eat together. Someone went to call the Screw-ups to supper. A few of them slunk back down to the beach, where we were cooking. They looked sulky and sheepish. One of them said, after being questioned rather sharply, that they had stayed in their tents, and away from the work of making supper, because they had thought they weren't wanted.

This childishness was typical of the Screw-ups. Tribal animosity takes a firm and early hold, and although some of my best friends were Screw-ups, I can feel contempt for their tribe even now, months later. There was no denying, however, that as individuals the Screw-ups were at least as admirable, intelligent and capable as the rest of us. My attempts to analyze their tribal lowliness were not very illuminating. The Screw-ups, it was true, had among them four or five worthy but uncommitted people who seemed to have wandered into Outward Bound by mistake, unprepared philosophically to get up at 5:30 A.M. and run four miles, then perhaps row from ten in the morning till dusk, and then climb a tree and stay there till morning. But the Smarts had about the same number of uncommitted souls and we ourselves had one or two.

I began to suspect that although it was necessary to have an outcast group--a Martian would grasp that principle of human social organization within two hours after parking his spaceship--the Smarts or the Strongs would have served equally well. In fact, the selection of our pariah group had turned on a rather narrow point. The Smarts, who had two good sailors among them, allowed that pair to run their boat through most of the course. We Strongs, having no sailors, immediately set about learning how to make our boat go, and succeeded more or less. The Screw-ups (who had not yet assumed their role) had one excellent sailor, but they decided correctly that if he were allowed to run things, no one else would learn much. He was relegated to passenger status. The rest eventually learned to sail, but perhaps because of the artificiality of the situation, they learned more slowly than we did. Once, while learning, they missed a rendezvous at a nun buoy in Blue Hill Bay by two and a half hours, forcing all of us to reach an unfamiliar landfall and set up camp long after dark. Our social order fell angrily into place as we stumbled over the weed-slicked tidal boulders that night. We had found our outcasts.

Morale was good among the Smarts, as might be expected, and we Strongs thought well of ourselves. The Screw-ups were gloomy for ten days or so, and then the survival value of chauvinism ("Why do the others hate us so?") became evident. The Screw-ups decided (wrongly) that they were as good as anyone else, maybe better, hell, yes, better, and their members finished the Outward Bound course with the glossiest and most verdant self-esteem on Bartlett Island.

Sleeping arrangements among the Strongs resolved themselves without difficulty. We had seven women, five men (continued on page 216) Only the Strong Survive (continued from page 144) and three tents. Each of the tents was a close fit for four souls and their attendant bodies, dirty laundry, flashlights and toothbrushes. If sexual segregation had been our aim, we could have divided ourselves at best into a female tent, a male tent and one tent with three women and one man. If integration had been our aim, we could have decreed two tents with two men and two women in each, and one with one man and three women. Two women, in fact, said that they anticipated enough trouble hacking the physical requirements of an Outward Bound course and didn't want the additional hassle of sleeping in the same tent with men. Two other women said, hell, they didn't give a shit, but that in the interest of sisterly solidarity, they would sleep with the separatists. The rest of us split into a tent with two men and two women, and one with three men and one woman.

Everyone, as far as I know, was pleased. In my own tent were one small, square woman; one small, slim one; one medium-large man who looked like Clark Kent with his shirt on and the Hulk with it off--and myself. I resemble half a cord of firewood, in or out of clothes, and I take up a lot of tent space. But we liked one another, feet in face, graying underwear and all. No squabbles, resentments or spasms of sexual deprivation became obvious. Three of our 12 survivors made sexual arrangements within or without the group, and the rest of us either did not or were exceptionally discreet. All was groovy.

•

Bathing suits disappeared from general use after about four days, in the following manner: As we returned, wind-burned, lightheaded and hollow with hunger, from a three-day training voyage in our pulling boat, Dagny handed a note around the boat. It said that we were to be marooned for an indefinite period on a knob of rock off Bartlett Island. We could take two sea bags of the 12 we had brought, the two gallons or so of water we had in our jerry cans, five matches, two plastic tarps and the six mackerel that our staff fisherman had caught while trolling. We landed on our rock, took the bits and pieces we were allowed and cast Dagny off with the pulling boat. She disappeared.

All proved to be sufficient--the tarps, which made a shelter; the matches, which started a fire on the first try; the mackerel, which made a fine fish stew when mixed with the several quarts of clams and mussels we found; a couple of kinds of beach weeds, which made a salad; and some huckleberries, which made dessert. The rock was bountiful, except in bathing-suit material, and, after a starry night, the day was fine. Salad hunting, trying to match living shrubbery with enigmatic line drawings in our Euell Gibbons pamphlets, led to clam digging in the shallows, and clam digging led to private peeling and splashing at spots a dignified distance apart along the shore. Then, with almost everyone bobbing and jouncing in the morning air, there seemed no need for distance. The group converged, rather proudly, it seemed to me. There was a good deal of entering the water and emerging from it and of walking about purposefully on the shore rocks. No body contact, of course, but a fair amount of eye-to-eye contact and even some eye-to-body contact. The 11 faces I could see wore a single expression, that of a prospective borrower facing a loan officer and trying to look trustworthy.

•

After we returned to the permanent camp on Bartlett Island (following the Fellini incident, in which three other men and I swam naked to the pulling boat, which Dagny was trying to land, and rowed her ashore), we found that nudity had flowered among the two other watches. Thereafter most, though not all, of the 36 survivors and six staff members swam naked and took no excessive pains to hide when changing clothes. People stopped trying to look trustworthy. Giddiness passed. Bodies remained intensely interesting, in more or less the way that faces are interesting.

There were a few lumpy people among us. A couple of lumpy women hung back for a day or so and then found the courage to go naked like the rest. I felt relieved. I had not known what to expect, never having been in the presence of a naked lumpy woman nor seen a picture of one. Their bodies looked like bodies.

•

A four-mile run at 5:30 in the morning hurts for the first, ten minutes, which at our sedate pace meant for the first mile. Then clammy shorts, clammy T-shirt and clammy sneakers become warm with fresh sweat, breathing begins to work and legs stop feeling like splintered furniture. If the runner is used to running, his mind floats free, almost as if he were staring out of a train window and dreaming.

It felt good to move through the chill air. Each morning, we ran up a twisting path to a logging road that followed the spine of the island to a cluster of abandoned houses. Those of us who felt lithe and powerful ran an extra mile, down to an old barn and hayfield at the edge of the bay and back to the houses. Then back along the spine and down past our tents to the water. I outlined the plots of novels as I ran the outward leg and witty acceptances of the Nobel Prize for Literature on the return trip. Submersion in Blue Hill Bay, whose temperature was about 50 degrees, cleared my skull of bosh and I ate breakfast warm and mindless as porridge.

The running was easy for me, because I run three or four times a week in the real world. Most of the men had done some running. Most of the women had not, and for them survival was a matter of getting through the morning run. One or two wept. Several walked. One hid in her tent. Most of them simply ran; they sweat, felt sick, saw visions, went on running, and finally got used to it.

It may be that women are better suited to some kinds of physical exertion--distance running, for instance--than men are. But until girl children are raised with the assumption that this is true, it will always be relatively easy for men and relatively hard for women to go through severe physical training together. One night early in the course, I shared anchor watch with a sad, smudged woman in her early 30s. She had signed up for Outward Bound because she admired the fierce femme lib sisters who said that women should have tough bodies. She couldn't run, she said. She had tried. It made her feel like throwing up. She had had two children and a divorce. Not being able to run made her feel like a failure. A couple of days later, someone ferried her to the mainland and drove her to the bus station at Rockland.

•

One day, as we were sailing near Bartlett Island, Dagny threw out of the boat the wooden cover of the compass case and yelled, "Man overboard!" We had been drilled; someone threw the life ring. I had the tiller. The wind was light and the heavy pulling boat was sailing sluggishly, but in a little over two minutes I had given the correct orders and we had come about. We drifted toward the ten-inch square of mahogany, yelling encouragement, urging it not to lose heart.

I missed. We ghosted by just out of boat-hook range. I tried to come about again, without enough momentum, and failed. The boat lost way altogether. The cheerful yelling stopped. After the sails had flapped and filled again, we were 250 yards from the life ring, and by the time we had circled slowly back toward it and located the compass cover, some 20 minutes had gone by.

This was rotten performance and it might have mattered. We had seen alarming proof of what exposure can do. A couple of days before, the male watch officer of the Screw-ups (in what seemed to me a brave and stupid display of stoicism) had staged a man-overboard drill by jumping out of his boat. Like our compass cover, he had spent 20 minutes in Blue Hill Bay. When the Screw-ups fished him out, he was so thoroughly chilled on that August day that he had to spend an hour in a sleeping bag before his body temperature rose enough so that he could talk.

•

We put in at Bar Harbor one afternoon. One of the men had a dollar or two and he bought each of us an ice-cream cone. Mine tasted good, but I had been away from civilization for about ten days, which turned out to be precisely the incubation period of a lively contempt for the world of mercantile survival and three-tiered bellies. I was in a hurry to get out of the harbor. I think the others were, too. Our allegiance in that boat of 13 people now was to our journeying.

•

The course was split at mid-point by a three-and-a-half-day solo, during which each survivor lived alone, ate what he could forage and made whatever interior journeys seemed good. We took a few matches, a fishhook and line, a couple of tin cans to cook with, a sleeping bag and a plastic tarp. Dagny kept our wrist watches. Ralph dropped us off, one by one, at isolated spits and coves on Bartlett's far shore. The noise of his outboard faded away.

Solo notes, day two: An ant makes a fantastic free climb up the metal earpiece of my specs, which lie beside my sleeping bag on the pine floor of the land spit where I am camping. He finds nothing there and bustles off. Another ant lugs a pine needle in some direction he seems sure of. I wonder if he knows his business. There are several billion pine needles here, all the same. Why lug one home when home is full of them? Or are they all the same? Do I know my business?

Later, after sleep, I watch the sun set into a fog bank and listen to the chuff of someone's lobster boat on the long line home.

Day three: A sparse collection of raspberries for breakfast, with the usual glass-wort and sea blite, and a clump of sheep sorrel. The seals across the cove are barking, or belching, and at the distance of 150 yards, their commotion sounds exactly like my stomach rumbling. It is foggy and moisture drips off the trees.

Day four: I face a breakfast of mussels and don't really want it. But clams and mussels, gathered at low tide and steamed in a number-ten tomato can, are the only sustaining foods I have found large amounts of. Foraging takes time and enforces a humble perspective: A cow must keep its head down. In my days alone, I have eaten:

• two meals of mussels

• two meals of clams

• glasswort (in some quantity)

• sea blite (in quantity)

• sheep sorrel (very little--good but scarce)

• goosetongue and sow thistle (good, bitter greens when boiled)

• spruce gum

• about five blueberries (a bad, late crop here)

• about five gooseberries (blighted)

• about 25 huckleberries

• about one half pint of raspberries (good crop but mostly unripe)

My energy level has been low, maybe because of too much sea blite. I've slept a good deal. I wrote a poem, carved an idol to leave in the clearing and generally had a pleasant time. But Outward Bound is designed for teenagers, and at 41 I have learned that a three-and-a-half-day solo isn't long enough to shake my rigidities. Six weeks would be a good solo squat for adults.

•

The Boston Whaler chugged around the headland with Ralph in it and one of the pulling boats lashed alongside. My fellow tribesmen were jumping up and down in the boat, happy to see me. I don't much like tribal solidarity--it is what keeps the plastic bombs detonating in Palestine and Northern Ireland--but I felt it, just the same.

And so we grubbed and grumbled through the exercises in Outward Bound's bag of tricks, skillfully produced by Ralph and Dagny and the rest of our whimsical captors as if they were random astonishments and not a careful orchestration of challenge and response. We barged about the island with compasses during a humbling day of orienting. We pondered and solved after a fashion the old riddle of how to get 12 people over a 14-foot wall, and in the enjoyable heaving and grunting came to the old realization that it is satisfying to touch other adults in a nonsexual way and that in the real world, where we climb our walls by ourselves, we seldom do so.

But the 14-foot wall did not really stand between us and rescue, and the oak tree in which we spent a night was not (as Dagny wanted us to pretend) rooted in earth awash after a monstrous tidal wave. This was a pity, because we needed commitment. "Shape up, or weaken, die and be eaten" was the choice offered by circumstance to those rugby players place-wrecked in the Andes, but it wasn't something Dagny could have said with any chance of being believed. One of our troopers, wiry and wrong-headed, spent the oak-tree night climbing down out of the tree, because he was damned if he would roost in an oak on anyone's whim, and then back up again, because he was loyal, then down, then up. He ended up up, arm-weary and loyal, but the seed of rebellion had sprouted.

Ralph had told me that prep school kids have no trouble making a strong commitment to Outward Bound. Their older brothers and cousins have done the Hurricane Island course. An Outward Bound pin, in the preppies' world, entitles the owner to a certain respect, the way having fought with the Tenth Mountain Division confers barroom clout on old skiers. Ghetto kids, on the other hand, often haven't heard a word about Outward Bound until some recruiter lays his pitch on them or until some judge says it's either reformatory or 26 days in the pulling boats. Some ghetto kids see the point and some don't. Climb a fuckin' tree, mah fuckin' ass.

Perhaps deliberately, Ralph and the rest had not been very specific about goals. We were outward bound, but in what direction? With what degree of determination? We never agreed. Argument was frequent, lengthy and finally incessant. It got nowhere, and in the end, we did not get far, either.

Debate got a good start one morning when Ralph said that Outward Bound people usually gave one day of each course to some kind of public service. He thought we might help out at the other end of the island, where a caretaker was cleaning out one of several dilapidated farmhouses that had stood empty for years. Muttering began immediately, gained force through breakfast, then broke in a drizzle of complaint: About half of the survivors refused to help with the farmhouse, because it belonged to the Rockefellers, notorious oppressors who didn't need or deserve any help.

Ralph was startled, I think. Outward Bound is to some extent an establishment pet, and its staffers aren't accustomed to thinking in Maoist terms about the wealthy work-ethic types who serve on the board of directors, raise the quantities of money necessary and occasionally dock at Hurricane Island, wearing denims and deck shoes, to share a meal in the mess hall. What Ralph said, however, was simply that cleaning out the farmhouse would be a way to help the caretaker, who had done a number of favors for us, and to say thank you to the Rockefellers for letting us use their island.

In the days that followed, nothing more was heard of the class war. It vanished utterly, as if we had all been Rockefellers. But debate continued, voluminous, well phrased, intense and fruitless. The rumble of compound-complex sentences went on all day, interrupted by shorter and shorter periods of surviving. The new dispute was about our five-day expedition, a sort of final exam and last adventure with which Hurricane Island courses customarily end.

We were supposed to agree on a destination, then go there. We would sail in a convoy of four boats--the Screw-up boat, the Smart boat, the Strong boat (which we had named Fat City) and a boat manned by staff members tagging along to baby-sit. The only condition was that we reach Hurricane Island, about 40 miles distant, on the fifth day. But the staff was careful to tell of mighty voyages made in those pulling boats, of expeditions that fell just short of reaching Greenland or the Canary Islands, of fair winds out and no wind home, of blisters and back spasms, of 72 hours straight at the oars. It was pointed out that the Outward Bound motto, taken from Tennyson, is "To serve, to strive and not to yield." Greatness was expected of us.

Our own motto was also taken from Tennyson. We reasoned why. There was, indeed, a greatness faction. About half of the 36 apprentice survivors--very roughly, those who had helped clean up the Rockefellers' farmhouse--wanted to reach Greenland, at least. The other half--roughly, the former Maoists--said that busting a gut was infantile. They wanted to sail when the sun was shining and the wind propitious; they wanted to dock and explore whaling villages; and they wanted to quit at quitting time each afternoon. What they did not want to do was row, under any circumstances, or attempt mighty voyages.

Late in the afternoon of the expedition's first day, at the southeast end of Eggemoggin Reach, we sighted the Victory Chimes, one of the last three-masted schooners on the Coast. Everyone thought the old ship looked grand. It was our journey's single moment of consensus.

The watch captains--I was one of them--were of the onward-to-Greenland persuasion, and we decreed that there would be no landfall the first night. The way we phrased the announcement, as I recall, was that we would do a "night sail" of Eggemoggin Reach. The likelihood hidden behind this lyricism was that the light winds of the day would the by evening and we would have to row for eight hours, since there was no place to bivouac in the narrow, 12-mile passage from Blue Hill Bay to East Penobscot Bay.

The wind died on schedule. Muttering rose to mutinous on Beaufort's scale. We rowed through thickening fog. The effort was rather pleasant, I thought; warmer and slightly less difficult than curling up under a tarpaulin in the bilge and trying to sleep while off duty. By five in the morning, we had traversed Eggemoggin Reach and landed at Pond Island to cook breakfast and consider the future.

We Greenlanders now spoke expansively of rounding Monhegan Island, fully 60 sea miles away and 30 miles from Hurricane Island, our destination. If necessary, we said, we could row. At two knots an hour, we could make 24 miles in 12 hours; four days, 96 miles. But the quit-at-quitting-time caucus had no intention of helping us act out our sweaty fantasies. Monhegan was out. We decided, unwisely, to postpone decisions and for the day set a moderate goal: the Seal Trap on Isle an Haut, about six hours away on a favoring breeze.

We set sail, but almost immediately the Screw-ups blew a rendezvous signal and our boats, spread across 500 yards of the Atlantic, clumsily drew together and lashed up. What if the winds failed or turned against us? was the question put to the assembled and drifting flotilla. At worse, it could take 12 hours to row to the Seal Trap. Was there an alternate landfall en route? If not, why not?

It took about an hour, during which we bobbed perhaps half a mile off course, to decide to keep going, with an eye out for the wind. During the day, two more rendezvous were called. I calculated that we had used about two and a half hours for these water-borne legislative sessions and about seven hours for actual sailing, a ratio that was to hold constant for the remainder of the expedition. We reached an emergency landing--on an island about halfway to the Seal Trap--at eight P.M., just before dark.

It was another 24 rhetoric-sodden hours before we sailed into the pretty cove on Isle au Haut. Everyone was tired and very cross. Ralph suggested that we thrash out our differences, and at the meeting I made a proposal that I thought brilliant. Since our two factions were irreconcilable, why not shake hands and form two expeditions? One could dawdle happily and the other could set a course for the Azores.

I explained my schismatic brain storm so persuasively that it failed to attract any vote other than my own. In the morning, though we lacked a Columbus, we sailed on. Before noon, two more mid-ocean therapy sessions had been convened. The weather was beautiful, but the scene was bad, and I made another try at revolution. My pitch was that the crew of our own boat, the Fat City, would pick a course and follow it, leaving the three other boats to follow or fester.

Our crew favored secession by ten to two, but I had asked for unanimity. We stayed and festered with the rest. That night we slept on Brimstone Island, on a beach paved with strange smooth rocks, the shape and color of buzzards' eggs. In the early morning, the wind rose and the boats got loose. We reached Hurricane Island the next day, after a short haul, without debate. Everyone chewed quietly on failure.

The next day, I stood in the parking lot behind the police station in Rock-land, waiting for the bad air to ooze out of my Volkswagen. There was a stale Boston Globe on the front seat, and the first print I had read in a month was a column that said that the world faced famine, amounting to a "protein war." I wondered whether my month at humanistic boot camp had taught me anything useful about what might happen during a protein war. As, I drove home, I wasn't sure, but I was afraid that it had.