KATE TAYLOR
Never Stand Still
As a nature-loving child growing up in suburban Ohio, I first got into the outdoors through a primitive skills and bushcraft club in the sixth grade. In Adventure Club, we learned important skills like friction fire, shelter building, basics of tracking, and tool making. As I grew up, being outside helped center me and connect me to others. After my first year of college, I went on to intern at a bushcraft summer camp in Oregon.
That fall, I went through a traumatic experience at the hands of someone I had trusted, which changed my life for the next few years. Eventually, after struggling in school and in personal relationships, I decided I could no longer ignore what I had been through and began looking into a therapeutic wilderness program in Utah, which would fuse my love of nature with the help I needed.
Trying to explain wilderness therapy to someone who has never been is, well, difficult. I spent five days a week hiking off-trail in the backcountry with all my belongings in a pack. Once a week, I met with my therapist, who pushed me to dig deeper into my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. Each member of my 6-8 person group of other young adults was assigned soul-baring therapy groups, discussions, and assignments to be completed throughout the week on our treks. Even in the very first week, every member upon entering the group was asked to write and share their life story with these near strangers.
I have seen people break down (and broken down myself) reading letters from parents and siblings telling how scared, angry, and confused they felt witnessing our struggles. I have seen severe backcountry medical issues like fecal compaction and gastrointestinal infections. I've had amazing heart-to-hearts and faced my darkest experiences with people I lived with 24/7. I've seen friends try to run away rather than face the honesty of the group, I've cried knowing I unwittingly hurt others by being cruel to myself, I've worked at making fire by friction on nights when I'd already been hiking for seven miles uphill that day. I've huddled under a tarp that was sagging under 18 inches of snowfall and felt completely safe and warm. There is nothing that even comes close to summarizing living on the edge for that long, at the end of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual stamina and feeling like you just can't do it anymore... and finding a way to push on. It's how I came to learn that I was limitless.
I have no doubt that attending wilderness therapy changed my life. Where I was insecure, I found the confidence to pursue my dreams. Where I felt weak, I found the strength to get myself through any circumstance. In the wilderness, I connected to something greater than myself and felt awed and grateful to be alive.
Since leaving wilderness, I found my way to North Idaho, where I continued to live in a structured environment and attend school at North Idaho College. I graduated from the adult program in May 2014 as the success story I would never have seen for myself even a year and a half ago. This summer I got the amazing opportunity to teach school age children primitive skills like safe knife use, knots, shelter, wild edibles, archery, tool making, and fire building at a summer camp on the gorgeous Lake Coeur d'Alene (ID). Fall semester 2014, inspired by all I have experienced, I decided to enter the Outdoor Recreation Leadership program at the NIC so that I can bring to others the life-changing freedom that comes from immersion in the outdoors. Lately I have been learning how to guide a whitewater operation and how to give an interpretive talk, and I could not be more excited for the future. If I can bring to even one person the sort of clarity that I was led to in nature, then every difficulty will have been worth it.