By Seine
I enrolled in NOLS’s Wilderness EMT course, like so many things I do, at the last minute. I picked an EMT course to get some medical training, and thought it was time I practiced using my brain again. I spent the first months of my gap year traveling, and worried I had forgotten how to study. The wilderness part just came along with it.
I had a friend who had persuaded me that January in Wyoming would be fine. That it, in fact, was the best month to spend more time outside than I had ever before. She signed up, so I did too. If this was hell, I thought, at least we’d be in hell together.
Too soon we had touched down in mountain country. In the smallest airport that I had ever seen, covered in taxidermied animals. The bear heads laughed at me in my Ugg slippers. What was I doing? This was far scarier than my bungee jumping two months before.
The first couple days went by quickly. A frenzy of moving in, meeting people, and studying. Studying between class, between meals, late at night and early in the morning. We were catapulted into a world of Patient Assessment Systems. Of scene size-ups, SAMPLE history, and vital signs. But that was the easy part.
I had never met cooler, more adventurous people in my life. My classmates spent years outside. They hiked from Mexico to Canada and back again. They talked of trails they had all done. Or states they had visited. Their similar experiences in the army or their jobs working in fire. I laughed along in conversations, but had little to add. What have I been doing? Surrounded by the most people I had been with all year, I felt alone.
When the four weeks were over, our EMT badges tucked safely in our bags, I wondered what I had learned here. I now knew how to backboard in less than five minutes, and do a rapid trauma assessment with my eyes closed. But I had also spent a month more outside than I had ever before, and still felt like the person who’d walked in wearing slippers instead of hiking boots. Four weeks in the Wyoming wilderness left me feeling like an outsider, and not in the way I had planned.
It wasn’t until after the course was over, when we had all gone our separate ways, when I realized what had truly connected my classmates. On the phone with my mom, I told their stories. A woman who had gotten married too young, worked a bank job she didn’t like and wanted to change her life. A man who once worked for a backpack company, and now designs all his own gear. A firefighter only a couple years older than me who trains for ultra marathons. What they had in common wasn’t just the time spent outdoors. It was the kind of person who goes there in the first place. The people who realized there’s more to life than being unhappy. That specific, reckless, full-force bravery.
And I realized I had that too. I had signed up for a wilderness EMT course having never spent time outdoors. I had booked a flight to Africa the moment I turned eighteen. And decided to take a gap year when everyone else went to college.
So that’s what I learned in Wyoming. Bravery doesn’t always look like climbing a mountain. It could just be showing up in the wrong shoes.
