Students in one Winter Term course learn some of the same outdoor skills used by characters in their readings on rites of passage.
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“Timmy,” they were told, was suffering from hypothermia after falling through the ice of a nearby pond, and working in pairs, the group of Elon University students now had 10 minutes to start campfires that would save his life.
Rushing to a nearby tree line, they gathered dry foliage still clinging to branches, since many of the leaves spread across the ground were damp and could impede their efforts. Others managed to secure dry dead or dying twigs and branches scattered across the forest floor to use as tinder.
Half the pairs soon succeeded in “rescuing” Timmy on a brisk Wednesday morning as gray smoke from their small fires spiraled into the air. It was exactly the outdoor exercise – and the outcome – their Elon instructor wanted them to have.
In an effort to engage his class with the characters in his assigned readings, Greg Hlavaty in the Department of English created a literature course this winter where students spent part of their mornings discussing novels before stepping outside to attempt the same activities they had just studied.
The penultimate experience for students in the “Wilderness and Rites of Passage” course was a midweek visit to Cedarock Park south of Burlington, N.C., to learn from a Virginia-based survival instructor such skills as starting and maintaining fires, signaling for help with modern and primitive equipment, building a leaf hut and water gathering for purification.
“Very few of these students had any outdoor experience. That didn’t surprise me,” Hlavaty said. “What did surprise me was that after doing this, they want to have even more of these experiences.”
The activities parallel the exploration of characters in the three novels the class read for the literature course: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, Deliverance by James Dickey, and Ceremony by Leslie Silko. In all three books, the first of which was a nonfiction account of a college graduate’s tragic journey, protagonists venture into the wilderness in search of a transformative experience – a “rite of passage.”
As Hlavaty defines them, rites of passage contain three distinct facets. They separate the individual from his world, to go through a challenging or difficult experience, to return to society with knowledge and insight to be shared. And few, if any, rites of passage collectively exist for Americans today, which Hlavaty believes is part of what attracted students to the course.
Elon freshman C.J. Moore said he enrolled in the class because it fulfilled the General Studies literature requirement for university students, but that it quickly became more than an item to cross off his degree audit.
“This class has given me a sense of how the wilderness has been perceived by different audiences,” Moore said. “Everyone has his own ambition, but as life progresses, there are different marks that you see and reach every day. I’ve had so much fun being able to read these different texts and then getting to do some of the things the characters did.”
Hlavaty divided his class in half, with one group traveling to the park Jan. 17 and the other the next day. In both instances, the class listened and followed activities demonstrated by Tim MacWelch, owner of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival. Shortly after their campfire activity on Jan. 18, MacWelch stood before the group to display methods for starting fires in the absence of lighters or matches.
MacWelch showed how a wad of steel wool connected to both ends of everyday batteries with more than three volts of power could serve as an ignition source. “Safety tip: Don’t store these near each other,” he cautioned as the wool caught fire.
Students said they appreciated MacWelch’s lessons.
“This helped you to relate to the characters, and you understand how hard it is to survive in the wild,” said Max Morgan, a sophomore engineering physics major from Atlanta. “And you can understand how grateful we should be for a warm place to stay and clean water.”
For Hlavaty, it’s difficult to immediately assess how students will incorporate lessons from his class into their lives moving forward. Still, there are definite indications of success. “When students are taking pictures of themselves doing coursework, that’s a pretty good sign,” he said.