Sometime before midnight in the absolute blackness of the Vermont forest, my fellow survival campers and I snuffed out the fire we had built (OK, they had built) to kill time and energy before the inevitable, and edged toward the survival shelters we had constructed earlier that day from broken branches and endless armfuls of leaves.
Before sending us a mile up the mountain to sleep the night in those debris huts, each of which can fit exactly one human and a potential infinitude of spiders on its bed of dead foliage, Brad Salon, the owner of Roots primitive survival skills school, urged us to imagine we had no other option.
“You survived the plane crash and must spend the night in the forest,” said Salon, a soft-spoken 32-year-old with a black beard and a camo-colored baseball cap. We might hear a porcupine padding about, or the rustling of a jumping mouse, but they are harmless if unprovoked — as are bears, he assured us. Earlier, we had seen the fresh scat of a black bear a few yards from where we’d built our leafy beds.
We, of course, had not just survived a plane crash. The nine of us enrolled in the six-day Core Skills I class at Roots School in Corinth were learning caveman-era survival techniques should we ever find ourselves stranded in the wild, but in reality the relative comfort of our tents, where we slept all but one night, was just a steep hike away.
One of dozens of survival schools in the country, Roots, which Salon founded with his wife in 2007 to encourage people to reconnect with the natural landscape, felt more like Scout camp than the intense deprivation adventures featured in popular reality TV shows like “Survivorman” and “Naked and Afraid.”
But that’s not to say it didn’t yank me out of my comfort zone, which can be the most important survival skill of all.
Shelter building, which comes first in the hierarchy of survival needs to guard against the wilderness’ greatest killer, hypothermia, was lesson No. 1, followed by acquisition of fire, water and food. And in my own hierarchy of things I’d rather not do again, it was the second-most unnerving experience of the week.
Alone with my debris shelter that night, my fellow campers invisible but within earshot of a scream if necessary, I sat down and scooted feet first onto the mound of leaves I had spent hours piling. My pants were tucked into my socks, a hoodie covering my head and its sleeves wrapped around my face to protect all orifices.
With the ceiling of sticks inches from my nose, I pulled closed the makeshift door of woven branches and turned off my headlamp. Outside, twigs snapped. Coyotes shrieked in the distance. So complete was the darkness inside the leafy coffin that I couldn’t see the moth that occasionally flicked against my face.
I didn’t sleep one minute. With temperatures in the upper 50s and having failed to seal the door properly with enough insulating leaves, I was freezing. (Other campers who had insulated properly said their huts were positively steamy.)
Upon rising the next morning, we were to go to our “sit spots,” a daily ritual of solitary and quiet observation meant to build awareness and oneness with the woods, which Salon emphasized as a key element of primitive survival. I spent it plotting how I might escape.
Disclosure: I am not a regular outdoorswoman. The first time I ever pitched a tent was the day I arrived at Roots School, which sits on 135 acres of lush forested woodland about an hour and a half east of Burlington and 20 minutes from my last cellphone signal.
Salon, with a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth, had pointed me to a campground of shoulder-high grass teeming with crickets, warning of the minefield of poison ivy on the perimeter. Tent-pitching skills were presumed. I found a flattened area beside a towering structure Roots School uses for ninjutsu training (a Japanese military art, part of another survival class), and followed the instruction booklet to erect a somewhat lopsided tent.
Most of my fellow campers, on the other hand, had closer relationships with nature. Conversations during meals — all-natural veggie- and quinoa-heavy affairs prepared by Roots School’s two interns — often revolved around camping gear recommendations or the sources of our food supply.
Many had signed up to become more self-sufficient, to feel more comfortable in the wilderness, to carry a lighter backpack when camping. The only other woman in the course, Stephanie Manosh, 29, wanted to be prepared in case of emergency during a 142-mile ultramarathon she might run through the Amazon jungle.
Will Jevne, 21, a bright Washington state native who had dropped out of college and most recently was living out of his car, went without shoes practically the entire trip, part of his effort to minimize material possessions. His feet, he said, had taken on a leathery texture, like the paw pads of a dog.
Not infrequently, you’d find Barefoot Will climbing through trees. One afternoon, he ate a cricket.
My closest kindred spirit was Kevin, a 44-year-old high school history teacher from Boston with a self-professed dislike of the outdoors, what with all its bugs and sun. He had proposed the trip to his friend Scott, a 37-year-old Vermont attorney, for the sake of personal development, though he didn’t know what the week would entail. (Both men asked that their last names not be printed).
What it entailed was intensive back-to-back classes, taught through a combination of lectures on a white board and hands-on trials. We made fire with friction, purified water with hot rocks, built hunting traps with stone slabs, smashed rocks together to make sharp tools, tracked animal footprints, tasted wild edible plants, practiced throwing sticks in hopes of knocking out a squirrel.
The last night, we skinned and gutted freshly killed rabbits, and Salon’s wife, Sarah Corrigan, 30, whom he met at the renowned Tom Brown Jr. Tracker School, cooked an impressively precise meal over an open fire.
I had to sit down during the rabbit gutting. To my surprise, I burst into tears. But it was no match for the surprise challenge that followed.
After night fell, we were led up the steep mountain for the “blindfolded drum stalk.” Each of us was left at different points along the trail, facing into the dense woods, blindfolded.
Somewhere in the forest, there was a drum. On occasion, it would beat — boom, boom, boom — and we had to make our way toward it. The point, Salon said, was to learn to move without sight, heightening our other senses.
Crouched like a ninja, arms stretched out to protect my head, I skulked toward the faraway sound of the drum. But every time it beat again, it seemed as if it came from a different direction. (Two reasons: the sound bounces off the hilly terrain, and you inadvertently don’t walk in a straight line when navigating woodland).
Groping in the blackness, it didn’t take long before I got stuck in a thorny tree. When I finally extracted myself from that, my foot plunged into a marsh. For an hour, I crawled over tree trunks, ducked under branches, stumbled into ditches, always thinking I was walking toward the drum and then hearing it behind me.
It was utterly disorienting and panic-inducing. When Salon finally blew a conch shell indicating the exercise was over, I peeled off my blindfold and, in the moonlight, found myself alone in a field surrounded by fallen trees.
I couldn’t tell, at first, what was the benefit of that harrowing experience. But I felt changed.
“I’m less afraid of everything,” is how my fellow camper Dave Porter, 23, who works in a pizza restaurant, articulated it. “I’m a much more capable person than I thought I was.”
To be sure, if emergency strikes don’t count on me to craft a stone knife or to differentiate an edible plant from a poisonous one, despite my notebook full of diagrams. The idea of the survey class is that students keep practicing the primitive skills, which are hard and humbling. Even Salon, a highly skilled woodsman, said he doesn’t go anywhere without a lighter and paracord.
But survival skills weren’t the only takeaway.
Jim O’Leary, 48, an engineer from Boston, took the course with his son Jimmy, 17, in part to “get him away from his cellphone.” Jimmy was skeptical of the idea at first, but by the end, Jim said, his son was opening up to him in ways he hadn’t before.
“This is the kind of stuff I’ll be telling my kids — this is what I did with your grandfather,” said Jimmy, who enjoyed how the course pushed his mental and physical limits.
In the hours before we were to return to civilization, Kevin and I found ourselves in what we jokingly called remedial bow-drill class. Despite long and sweaty attempts, we were the only ones in our group who hadn’t yet managed to make fire with a bow drill, which entails spinning a wooden spindle on a piece of wood by means of a bow.
Under the watchful eye of Salon, who insisted everyone leave having made fire, I sawed my exhausted arm back and forth. I failed a dozen times. But then I saw wisps of smoke.
As it thickened, Salon told me to saw faster. Just as my arm was about to fall off, there appeared a coal. I slid it into a bundle of tinder and fed the ember with slow deep breaths. With a subtle whoosh, a flame opened, growing hotter in my hands.
Go Cavewoman.
I went the week without showering, looking in a mirror or checking my email.
Eventually, I stopped plotting my escape and started listening to the birds.
If you go
Getting there: The closest airports are in Burlington, Vt. (1.5-hour drive), Manchester, N.H. (two-hour drive) and Boston (three-hour drive). You have to rent a car.
Staying there: You pitch your own tent in a field. Bring all your own camping gear.
Eating there: Three hearty meals a day, cooked in a regular kitchen, are provided. You bring your own plate and utensils. Chores are shared.
Pricing: The Core Skills I class cost $700. Roots School offers many other programs for varying levels and interests. Visit rootsvt.com.
