Rescuers on the Range

My boys don't sport the tidy uniforms I see some other students wear. They wear frayed t-shirts over mud-splashed jeans, the uniform of the most non-uniform, like all their peers at the Rio Gallinas School. They don't spend every hour with butt in desk seat, every hour calculating minutes to the end of the day. They let the outdoors grant them knowledge, let the things they touch relay information, experience.

Rio Gallinas School keeps sentry over the west side of town. The bell-tower of a forgotten church beckons students to drop their expectations at the door. Rio Gallinas follows the expeditionary learning principles first unleashed by an educator named Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound. Hahn felt his calling in life was to help people realize that each of us has more courage, more strength and more compassion than we would ever have fathomed. Rio Gallinas follows these principles, serves a curriculum that fosters teamwork, the deep kind of knowing that only interconnected studies can bring. My boys understand. I can see this when they discuss environmental and societal issues with a sophistication well beyond their years.

The first three weeks of school, Rio Gallinas students visited the Wind River Ranch north of Las Vegas as part of their Wilderness Doctoring unit. My older son, 11 years old, practiced wrapping wounds and testing for hypothermia with the assistance of his younger brother. My arm, my leg, a stuffed animal, our aging dog, all of us became patients, the silent suffering of endless maladies. Evaluating an injury means a mental calcuation of probability of survival, a measurement of lifeforce, the careful application of just the right treatment, blanket, heat pack. Math. Science. Engineering. Medicine. Any lesson a child should learn packaged in one ranch bandage.

Rio Gallinas celebrated the beginning of school, the delicate cohesion of three weeks' teamwork, this past Friday at an exercise called "Master Disaster." I followed the instructions copied on a crinkled paper my older son handed to me the previous night and drove twenty minutes outside of town, along a high plains road framed with wilting sunflowers. I turned at the ranch entrance and drove under a white metal arch accented with a modern black petrogplph. My car groaned as I shifted to handle the steep grade, heavy rock under my tires, and I met my sons in the lush valley.

I'm not sure what I expected. A ragtag medley of new wilderness doctors sitting in a circle, perhaps, their fearless leader lecturing them, lecturing us, about forest medicine. But it wasn't like that, wasn't a staunch authority figure spitting hypocratic platitudes to the masses. Instead I saw a teacher hand a scenario to the parents while the children played in an empty field many yards away. A mountain lion attack. Four adults injured - a sliced leg, a broken arm, a body cold and shivering from the river, an arm caked with blood.

The parents sat in the grass and groaned, their pretend injuries causing great pain. At their teacher's signal, the students ran to our clearing by the river, asked careful questions, opened sterile package after package and applied gauze and elastic tape to our fake wounds. Their presence astounded me, the way they asked important questions about our level of pain, our ability to move and understand. One by one, these small people gently prodded and nodded, took mental note, covered us with blankets and showered us with the mantra that everything would be okay, help was on the way. Fourth grade to eighth, students worked together, didn't try to grab the title of hero.

An hour later, the adults stood, cured. We looked at each other, amazed at the display of confidence and rugged experience we encountered. Our children ran through the field, unaware of our reverence for what we witnessed. One boy stood alone, covered in a fresh case of poison ivy. His blonde hair stuck out this way and that from his red hood. I smiled at him, at the way he helped clear the area of stray bandages.

"So, what did you learn?"

He looked at me through puffed eyes.

"I learned how to builder a shelter out of sticks."

He ran from me, met his friends under a pinon. The sun continued to fall, and I realized I would trust that young boy, his shelter, and his tiny hands to catch me if I fall.