Wilderness First Responder – Nantahala
I had been wanting to take this particular Wilderness First Responder course for a while and now the timing and location were perfect. The WFR is a perfect supplement to the wilderness and medical training I'd already had, as well as a logical inclusion into my repertoire because of my life style of bumbling action-adventure. The training is not for someone to deploy you into the shit after it's gone down and somebody calls; the training is for when you are already in the field and shit goes down. The location of the course was the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina, a gorgeous landscape of mountains, rivers and forests. North Carolina was perfect because I could rendezvous with several people I had business with who happened to be there. One of them was a girl who spent significant time in South America and who I was planning to meet up with back in South America in half a year's time. She was to be a valuable asset, so meeting up with her would be a good planning opportunity. Another girl was Dutch/German who I had met in Morocco and may have convinced to bail on a lot of school and be a traveling adventurer. She had a summer gig teaching scuba diving in an ocean-side town in North Carolina. We had been trying to get together for some time, but just kept missing each other. This was finally our chance. The third person was an old friend of mine, an Olympic hopeful swimmer who now had his own coaching business and who motivated me with the occasional training challenge. I Thought I'd pop by and see how he was doing. So, with a plan in mind I set off for North Carolina.
Leaving from the mid-west USA I borrowed the same run down 20 something year old truck I usually did, but this time I also borrowed a 10 year old flip style burner phone as I was pretty sure the jalopy wasn't going to make the journey … and if it did, I doubted if it would make the return. I was right to be concerned about the truck: no airbags, no horn, broken power steering, no working gas meter, no air conditioning, faulty headlight knob, and everything else was one bad moment away from being destroyed. Somehow, I made the 10 hour drive without incident and arrived. Naturally, I had no place to stay.
The reservations for the course were handled on-line via email, and I was only checking mine once per week. I had increased the frequency because the WFR was important to me, but apparently a one week delayed extended game of email tag is not efficient enough. I was informed that although they had a cabin I could share with several other people, it was booked the night before the training started. I didn't want to try sneaking in, as I didn't have enough intel. I was advised there was a camp ground a mile away I could stay at, and after some investigating I found out it was the same price as the cabin. Pay to camp? No madam, the world is my campground, thank you.
The WFR was through the SOLO wilderness medicine group, and the regional headquarters where the training was held is situated in the campus of the Nantahala Outdoor Center. When I finally arrived that first night after a death defying drive through the mountains in a dying truck condemned to 1st gear to the N.O.C. Was quite a site. From seemingly out of nowhere sprung up a tourist style hippie commune. A place were people come to raft, climb, and hike, and then chill out by the river drinking and listening to live music with Christmas lights strung around. It was dusk when I arrived, and that was my first impression of the place: hippie/hiker commune. I hid the truck on campus and got a couple drinks, relaxed by the river, and listened to music while marveling at the fact that everyone there looked like the stereotype of a nature loving backpacker/hiker/climber/hippie. It was enjoyable. Once I'd had my fill I hiked back tot he truck stashed it in a better place, and slept inside.
Day two, the first day of the course, saw the first of many mountain monsoons. After I was almost run over by one of the other participants, we all got on with our first order of business: checking into our cabin. The Check-in process was not smooth. The time and check in procedure kept changing, but eventually we got checked in. The cabin itself was … technically a cabin. Other than some walls and a roof it wasn't much of an asset. High up and out of the way the cabin was on the outskirts of the campus. It took effort to get to, and the trail leading to it that cut through the woods and went straight up the mountain wasn't much help; it had loos log-steps that gave out and rolled away when you stepped on them, falling and fallen tress, and an incline that was too steep to reliably climb or descend. It was a real treat. The cabin itself had a dividing wall in the middle for a “girl’s side” and a”boy's side”. There were four people in each side, all from the WFR course. The cabin was on the side of a mountain, supported and suspended with little wooden posts to keep it where it was. They were doing their job, but just barely and no one knew for how much longer. Anytime anyone would roll over the whole place would shake. One day, that thing will go sliding down the mountain.
After coming to terms that we practically had to ruck to the moon and back to get anything from our room we all headed off to training. The course was 15 students and an instructor. The group was an extremely eclectic lot, with everything from ex-military to hippies to a doctor in training. Everyone interesting and funny, I hit the jackpot when it came to people you've gotta spend almost every moment with in the mountains for a couple of weeks. During that first day the instructor tried to illustrate a point about how difficult lifting a full grown completely unconscious person is. There was a metal boned mannequin weighing at least 200lbs and nobody but 2 people in the history of the entire course had been able to lift it from the ground to their shoulders, by themselves. Challenge Accepted! On that day, a third person completed the challenge. It was me, on my first awkward try. Nobody illustrates a point to me! My completing the challenge coupled with my normal activities started the group calling me not human, which continued and got more ridiculous as the courses went on.
The next morning I found a spot for my morning exercises and a course mate joined me and started doing yoga. Everyone in the course had at least something in common, aside from being in the same course. That night began several of our group traditions. After our 8-5 training we went down by the river, got some drinks, and drank and debriefed the day. We reviewed what we'd learned and also got to know each other. This became a nightly occurrence. The group also discovered “Story Time With Nash”, which also became a staple of our social time. Through these stories, and the daily interaction with me, the group learned I was both the best person to have on a team, and the worst. As the girl on Nash-Duty put it “How did you survive all that shit!? You make terrible decisions!” I have no idea, no one does; The devil's luck, I guess. I was also told by many people, for the thousandth time in my life, that I sound like Seth McFarland.
One night, one of the girls in the group decided to stay at the “nice” motel on the campus. I'm sure it couldn't have been that nice given where we were, but I heard it had things like a TV and it's own shower, so comparatively nice. The girl invited me up that evening, and I had every intention of scoping it out, but I had consumed more than 2 beers and was therefore too drunk to find the place. Turns out it was for the best, as in the morning I saw the girl back in the cabin instead of in her fancy room. She explained that she opted to bail on the room when she discovered … it was full of bees! I'm certain they were lying in wait for me. She got stung a few times and left. BEES!!
Most nights we all got together and hung out. We would sometimes go to a local eatery or discuss future plans, one night I spent teaching a fellow student various hitches and knots, often times we would tell stories, and usually it was all while drinking by the river. One evening after several drinks, I decided I would be fancy and get a bottle of wine for the group to share. No one was really drinking it though, and I wound up drinking the entire bottle. I got extremely drunk, and then some one came up with some pizza. Usually my friends know I can't have garlic, so if there is pizza it's garlic free. This was not the case and I was too drunk to consider that this may be the case. I ate the pizza, and coupled with the booze, I fell out. Fast. Thankfully one of my course mates was on Nash-Duty. A blonde-haired angel-eyed girl who joined the ranks of the many ladies before her who had to literally carry and drag me somewhere. Out of all the ladies who've done it, she may have been the best. She carry/dragged me all the way up to the mountain back to our cabin. By the time she dropped me off it was quite late; She went to bed, and I went to … go projectile vomit off of the mountain balcony for several hours. I passed out on the balcony and was awoken when someone kicked me in the head on accident because they didn't know I was there. This woke me up, and set me right back to my tear and booger filled vomiting. I got about two and a half hours of sleep that night, but I was still fine to get up and do my morning exercises. It may have been that same night that while part of the group was on Nash-Duty, a different part of the group got busted for smoking weeks and needed to scatter and hide. We were a group of scamps.
Though we spent our nights as full grown children, the way nature intended, we spent our days in training. Part of the day was spent in a classroom style instruction, while the rest of the day was spent in scenario training to implement what we had learned up until that point. At first the scenarios were run on each other with the instructor taking half the class and telling them what had happened, and the other half had to figure it out and deduce a solution. As the days went on, the scenarios became more elaborate with the use of make up , props, and confounding variables, while utilizing everything we had learned up until that point. Eventually the scenarios became quite elaborate with people we didn't know brought in to fill the roles of the scenario victims. We also covered basic survival skills, such as building shelter. One time we went out to build a lean-to shelter out of sticks and leaves for heat, but while gathering leaves discovered that somebody had taken a fat shit at that spot and didn't bury it. The leaves of our shelter were covered in human poop. We decided not to continue with that shelter...
One day was spent rafting, practicing scenarios on the river. Some highlights included finding a hypothermic person with possible head injuries and someone in our raft having a seizure. The real highlight though was the fact that every time I was ordered to paddle the raft would spin around. There were 6 people in the raft counting myself. If we were all told to paddle, my side of the raft would over power the other side and we would spin around. I decided to only paddle once for every three strokes everyone else did. The plan worked great until it was time for my one stroke; the raft would spin around. We tried an experiment and put all five people on one side and me on the other … Still no match! I effortlessly overpowered them and we spun around. This caused the girl who carried me to laugh so hard she peed the raft …. and spent the rest of the ride laughing and peeing. Due to the strength imbalance I was shifted from a rower to the rudder … the rest of the trip was spent making jokes about how I wasn't human; I took them as a compliment.
After our rafting scenarios we all washed up and got to drinking and revels extra hard that night because our next day didn't start until 1 in the afternoon. That night a group of us wrote a kick ass song about our instructor.
The next day was our second to last and the most hard core of our training. The day was tentatively scheduled from 1pm until midnight for multiple causality incident search and rescue scenarios. They were stressful and strenuous, lasting hours a piece. The first was a search and rescue along a river that took forever to even find anyone. The patients were an old diabetic lady who'd been out lost all night, and the second was a woman half in the river screaming her guts out with her femur sticking out of her leg. We broke into teams to take care of the two and I built a femur traction splint out of a stick to pull her bone back into her body. Then we built a lift out of logs and carried her for an hour out of the hot, humid, poison ivy riddled forest. That was the beginning of our day.
Our next scenario was a climbing incident. One person fallen and unconscious, another with second or third degree burns on her hands from trying to hold onto a wild rope. The two were actually a decoy for the real training lesson, which was what to do when you're in the middle of rescuing and one of your own gets hurt? My partner, a sleeper agent, faked a fall over a log and “broke” his foot along with hitting his head on the way down. This brought in a whole new dynamic, because now we were minus one rescuer AND plus one patient. We didn't know that we were also potential patients, so we became suspicious of one another. After the scenario was over, during the debrief, one of the girls had a hypoglycemic seizure. It was too well timed; I assumed she was another plant for a secret scenario. Nope. She really was prone to such things. It was real! She made it out fine though.
Our final scenario of the day was a doozie. A night-time ruck up a mountain, looking for who knows what. All we knew was that there was “trouble”. We hiked for a long time up that mountain. I was sure we'd gone too far. We pressed on. The ridge became narrower and covered in thorny brambles. There was almost no way some actors for a scenario would have gone through that! Then we found someone. A giant autistic man who had trouble communicating. Some of the group stayed and the rest of us pressed on. Next we found a broken woman who told us her grandmother was higher up the mountain. Half the group that was still with us stayed, myself and the rest went up. There, at the top, was a 75 year old unconscious woman with a significant head wound. Over the course of an hour we patched her up, strapped her to a back board, and began the arduous task of carrying her down the mountain. It was dangerous. She was a real woman in her 70's with fake injuries that we were really carrying down a mountain on a narrow path. She was at real danger of really being dropped off of this mountain and really dying, and we were in constant danger of slipping off ourselves, all the while getting stabbed and cut by brambles as our dirty sweat and headlamps blinded us. Surprisingly hardcore for training, but I wouldn't have it any other way. By the time the scenario was over and the debrief was finished it was creeping onto 1 in the morning. We received accolades for a job well done,and went to go wash up and get what sleep we could; our final exams were at 8 in the morning.
Some of the exam was intentionally obtuse, but we all passed. Afterwords we serenaded our instructor with the song we had written for him. He loved it. The course was officially over. Everyone heading out that day donated their old food to me, which I gladly took. Everyone decided to buy a shirt from the organization for 15$ a piece, but I didn't have change and neither did the instructor so we struck a secret bargain and he sold me one for $2.57.
With the course over, we all made plans to see each other again and disbanded. Five of us decided to go hp a ride to Ashville, North Carolina which is supposedly famous for it's micro breweries. We spent the rest of the day and night on a victory pub crawl. It was great, and late that night 3 of us went back to the N.O.C. Since that's where we had stashed our vehicles. We got back around 1 in the morning and slept in our respective vehicles. When we woke up we said our respective “bye”s and parted ways … or we would have, but I had a massive flat tire. Another guy's car wouldn't start because the battery was dead. Our third man happened to have a tire pump and a working battery, so we spent the morning getting vehicles road worthy and THEN we parted way.
After I got he tire good I used the burner pone to contact the people I was to meet after the course. The Dutch/German girl had her schedule changed and she wasn’t' even free for a lunch. She was out. She did want me to go to Columbia with her for a couple weeks, but I couldn’t swing that at the time, so we continued barely missing each other. Speaking of Columbia, the girl I was supposed to meet with regarding my South American expedition was actually on a plane from Michigan to NC and was then to spend days at work. She was a no go. She offered to let me crash at her place, but with everyone unavailable it was all moot. I wondered if she would really join me in South America or if I would once again be left unprepared and all by me onsies? My swimming fitness buddy was available for a breakfast so I drove a few hundred miles to Charlotte and met his lovely family and we caught up over breakfast. “Did you really just drive 300 miles for breakfast?” Yes. I love breakfast. I had originally planed to be in NC for another week, but with everyone busy I had nothing left in the state to do.
After breakfast I began my treacherous 10 hour drive back to the Midwest. The mountains plunged and zig zagged, with no shoulder to pull over to while rain battered the hull of the truck. If anything went wrong, I would be screwed. Somehow, nothing did. Maybe I had been too critical of the old piece of junk? I had landed a job to finance my next 3 big adventures, and set off to do the terrible act upon my return. Three days in and the tire drive arm broke off the truck while I was driving, causing me to lose control of the vehicle and it to jump, shake, and spin like it was having a seizure. I almost crashed into several vehicles. If that had happened while I was in the mountains I would be dead! Dead in the worst ways. But I didn't die, and I'd got my Wilderness First Responder certification. Now I just needed to find a way to quit hemorrhaging money, and get more money to fund the huge projects I had in mind.
-NASH
