Tuesday - June 3

First day with Outward Bound, everyone is quiet and pensive, some more than a little hung over. Nervous chatter, a group of profound type-A's out of our element. Lot's of touchy-feely "be the pinecone" stuff in the beginning. Bunch of exercises, most harder than they sounded. Webbing strung between trees, we had to walk on it from tree to tree like tight-wire walkers. Then creating two overlapping squares from ropes while blindfolded. My exercise to lead, run from a starting point to a roped-in area with numbers 1-30 randomly scattered, we had to touch all numbers and run back, no talking, in 30 seconds. Then we were a herd of blindfolded sheep with a wordless, paralyzed shepherd, trying to herd us into an imaginary pen, my favoriate, releasing myself behind my blindfold, laughing hysterically, learning later than everyone was in the same state. Finally, we went to the beach, where we found lumber, rope, deflated pontoons, our tools for building a raft that 5 of us would paddle into Lake Tahoe, picking up three bouys, return to shore, dissassemble the raft, our downfall. With two guys on the team tipping the scale at about 240, we lashed the hell out of that thing, took us a long freaking time to take it apart. Dinner with the team, wth next day's activities set up for us while we ate. We planned late into the night, the pressure to perform continuous, pushing my resentment to the surface.