“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.” Helen Keller
There’s no time to think, only to hold on for dear, dear life. It’s a crash, a full-out, head-over-heels, yard sale crash that leaves you scrambling to think, let alone feel, if anything is out of place. Anyone who has ever experienced it knows it’s an intense situation, but nothing near as intense as the rescuer’s.
Risk is a necessary part of life. It’s inevitable and thank goodness for that because it’s also what makes life worth living. Not knowing what experiences lies just around the river bend, atop the next climb, or beyond the turn in the trail is what makes living outdoors so exciting. Nature is unpredictable and all we can do is to hope to face that unpredictability well prepared.
Seeking that preparedness, seven students and the three Outdoor Pursuits teachers brought to campus Ms. Yukie Hayashi and her Slipstream Wilderness First Aid course. The goal: to gain the skills and potential to save both friends and strangers from unnecessary grief and the courage to venture into the great beyond to face whatever situations arise.
It was no small commitment; the fifty plus hours that we would spend learning first response spanned two weeks and covered coping with everything from minor wounds, fractures, and frostbite, to making neck collars, stopping deadly bleeds, performing CPR,  and corralling extruding intestines. We sawed logs to make stretchers with which we successfully carried a “patient with a protruding tibia to the waiting helicopter” and gained an understanding of the effort and time that it takes to complete an evacuation—a walk which would normally have taken ten minutes took eight of us forty-five, and that was a record.
After learning the skills to asses an injured patient, we got a feel for the pressures of a real situation and found ourselves lying in pools of corn-syrup “blood” as our partners scrambled to check for deadly bleeding. The course material was as copious as some of the simulated bleeds and, though it was exhausting and information heavy, every minute of it was amazing. Our instructor kept the experience entertaining and, while learning to work as a team in intense situations, we learned about each other and ourselves.
The course was in a word: wow. Each of us gained far more than just medical knowledge: the shared fun of the experience ensures that that knowledge will not soon be forgotten. Many, many thanks to Ms. Olszewski, Mr. Norman, Ms. MacFarlane, and Ms. Hayashi for making this amazing experience a possibility!