Our third week of school brought us another intensive full week, this time a trip to the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. The reason for spending a total of two long travel days getting there and back was the unparalleled tracking opportunities to be found on miles and miles of pristine sand. If you can still call it pristine after having been traversed by gray fox, red fox, coyote, feral dog, porcupine, raccoon, bear, weasel, squirrel, snake, frog, beetle, and the occasional wind-blown twig. With a combination of short learning sessions in front of a whiteboard with our expert instructors and long hours spent traversing the dunes, we became detectives. I came to realize that animal tracking is so much more than just figuring out what animal has been there. We had to learn animal locomotion- how different animals tend to move through the world. We tried to get into the heads of these animals; we tried clumsily to move like them and to imagine what they were up to. We studied shapes, sizes, numbers of toes, spacing, patterns, orientation, etc. until our brains hurt. We squinted and wondered and postulated and followed and discussed and wondered some more, for the major part of each day, and just when it might have gotten tiring…
We played. Opportunities for play on the dunes included flinging ourselves off sandy hills into sandy valleys below, attempting to run in straight lines while blindfolded, crawling through incredibly dense forested “tree islands” just to get to more sand on the other side, hiking out the ocean and actually going in, singing, sharing stories through silly skits around the campfire, and some of the best stargazing anywhere.

Once again I was amazed at how open and supportive this community is, how easily we all spend time together and feed off of each other’s enthusiasm. It made me wonder if we all just happen to be people who love to explore, are full of wonder, who love to laugh and play and experience the world and all just happened to come together in this program, or has this school created a space where that part of everyone emerges? Probably a bit of both.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.