Fraud (16 page)

We stand over the Brighton Beach and Rockaways part of the diorama, Manhattan far behind us. And while it’s certainly the most crowded of the islands and its buildings are the tallest, it is also noticeably the smallest. Seeing it from here, from the equivalent of a few thousand feet up, Manhattan’s disproportionate influence, the power of its few over the millions in the outer boroughs, seems not just strange, it seems feudal.

All this time I have been wondering how the Austrians would deal, expecting them to crumple when actually faced with real New York, with the smug assurance that a boroughist Manhattanite like myself knows what real New York is. But more than almost anyone I know, these four teachers have been thrust into an environment where most everyone is from somewhere else. Even in my search for an authentic backdrop to this particular interview, I brought them to a large simulacrum, when probably the most authentically New York place is the block they live on.

Night descends upon the miniature city—their city. The sky darkens and black lights illuminate the buildings, whose windows seem lit up in millions of pinpoints. A few moments later it is morning again, and another day dawns on the greatest metropolis on earth. The orchestra on the video plays. It is all one can do not to stretch out one’s arms and turn around like some singing nun on a mountainside for the sheer joy and beauty and hugeness of it all.

Tiny planes on invisible wires come in for landings and take off from the diorama airports. And far higher than all of them, an airplane sails through the sky, tracing its path from across the Atlantic westward to somewhere else on the continent.

Nikki wonders aloud how any plane passing over New York could possibly resist landing here. Indeed, how
could
any aircraft ignore the very center of the universe? Spoken like a true New Yorker.

BACK TO THE GARDEN

It is difficult nigh on impossible to construct either my Figure-Four or my Paiute deadfall trap, to say nothing of having them work, in the dark, in the rain, at eleven
P.M.
, after a seventeen-hour day of lectures and demonstrations during which I have already been instructed in (among other things) the sacred order of survival—shelter, water, fire, food; how to make rope and cordage from plant and animal fibers; how to start a fire using a bow drill; finding suitable materials for tinder (making sure to avoid the very fluffy and flammable mouse nest, as it contains hantavirus); the signs of progressive dehydration; how to find water; how to make a crude filter out of a matted nest of grass; how to distinguish between the common, water-rich grapevine and the very similar yet very poisonous Canadian moonseed; how to make a solar still with a hole covered with a sheet of plastic (and how to continue the condensation process by peeing around the hole); and the Apache tradition of honoring those things one hunts, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral. All of this in the scarcely day and a half since arriving at the Standard class of Tom Brown’s Tracking, Nature, and Wilderness Survival School.

The Standard is the first of twenty-eight classes offered by the school. A Wilderness
101
of sorts: a week-long, lecture-heavy, intensive introduction to outdoor primitive skills and nature awareness. Skills and awareness at the very heart of the bildungsroman that is the oft told life story of Tom Brown Jr.

Briefly, it is as follows: Growing up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in the late
1950
s, a young Tom spends almost every waking moment from the ages of seven to eighteen in the woods under the tutelage of his best friend Rick’s grandfather Stalking Wolf, a Southern Lipan Apache. Brown’s apprenticeship ended in
1968
upon his graduation from high school. He spent the next ten years working odd jobs to make the money necessary to spend his summers testing his skills in unfamiliar environments across the country—the Grand Tetons, Dakota Badlands, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon—living in debris huts and scout pits of his own devising and subsisting on food he foraged or killed himself, often without even a knife. (Brown was
4
-F owing to a chip of obsidian that had lodged in his eye years before. Stalking Wolf had predicted years earlier that “the black rock” would keep him out of Vietnam.) After a decade Brown reemerged into society with the single-minded mission to teach others and lead them back to the woods and a love of nature.

All of this is told in
The Tracker,
Brown’s first book. It is a tale of an adventurous boyhood of limitless self-reliance, in an unfathomably Arcadian wilderness. It makes for compelling, if not always entirely credible, reading: part Richard Haliburton, part Carlos Castaneda, part
Kung Fu.
Grandfather, already an octogenarian in
1957
when Tom first meets him, is a man of almost Buddha-like wisdom with a penchant for posing oblique, seemingly insoluble riddles with premises along the lines of “Do you know how to live as the squirrels do?” and laughing discreetly behind his hand as the boys fumble for answers. The Pine Barrens themselves are portrayed as an idyll under constant threat from encroaching industry, suburban sprawl, and an advancing world with decreasing patience for the nonlinear philosophizing of an old man.

It might not be Thoreau, but it is the key to the legend that Tom Brown may very well one day become and certainly already is here at the Tracker School. At the very least, Brown is a cult figure of international stature: the best-selling author of sixteen books, Brown has trained navy SEALs in high-speed invisible survival and has helped national and state law enforcement in tracking persons, both missing and criminal (with the perplexing exception of the prosecution in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, who declined his offer of help). He solved his six hundredth case on his twenty-seventh birthday. Nowadays the bulk of Brown’s tracking of humans is of the armchair variety. Having trained thousands of people who have passed through the school, Brown now has an international network of former and current students to call upon when he gets requests to track.

Many of us here for the Standard—some ninety people from the United States and Canada, four from Italy, and a young woman all the way from Japan—are aspirants, yearning to join those ranks of expert trackers. Certainly everyone is an acolyte of one sort or another. There is no one unacquainted with Stalking Wolf. Most have read at least part of Brown’s oeuvre, be it one of the meat-and-potatoes field guides to wilderness survival, wild edible and medicinal plants, and so on, or perhaps one of the more spiritually oriented titles such as
The Vision, The Quest, The Journey,
and
Grandfather.

As a group, we are almost equally divided between the sexes, and we run the gamut from the ethereal to the pragmatic—from the unbelievably sweet eighteen-year-old vegan boy from Portland to the gun enthusiast who greets me throughout the week by saying, “Hey, New York!” He brought his own food, hermetically sealed decommissioned military MREs (“Bought ’em on eBay for ten cents on the dollar after the whole Y
2
K thing didn’t pan out. Best au gratin potatoes I ever ate”). There is the congenial soi-disant “hillbilly from West Virginia” in his fifties, and the twentysomething physics major looking to drop out for a while. For the most part, the people are friendly, intelligent, and environmentally and socially committed. I meet more than a few involved in education, in particular working with troubled teens in the wilderness. And, I am relieved to see, in keeping with the Tracker philosophy of forging an unmediated relationship with nature, they are refreshingly immune to the pornography of gear. They radiate good health as they unpack bags of gorp, apples, whole-wheat pitas, and huge water bottles. I have also come prepared with a deli-size Poland Spring, assorted candy bars, and four packs of Marlboro Lights purchased in nearby Easton, Pennsylvania, at Puff Discount Wholesale Cigarettes. (While smoking is permitted, the school is dry, with a no-drugs policy.)

I arrive on April
30
, a beautifully sunny, albeit very windy, Sunday afternoon. We spend the first few hours battling the strong breeze to pitch our tents, the placement of which is overseen by Indigo, one of the eight or so volunteers, alumni of previous Standard classes, who help out for the week. Indigo hovers anywhere between fifty and seventy years old. With her sun-burnished face, craggy features, and rather extreme take-charge demeanor, she is straight out of
My Ántonia.
But she is not unfriendly, even as she tells one of the Italians, his tent staked down and ready, “Uh-uh, mister. You gotta move it about four inches that way. We’re making a lane right here.” She gesticulates like an urban planner dreaming of a freeway. Indigo is the Robert Moses of Tent City.

We are not actually in the Pine Barrens, sacrosanct locus of Brown’s childhood. The Standard class is held on the Tracker farm in Asbury, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border (not to be confused with Asbury Park, sacrosanct locus of that other South Jersey legend—and Tom Brown contemporary—Bruce Springsteen). The Barrens, while apparently magnificent, also very much live up to their name. The farm at Asbury is better for teaching novices owing to its rich biodiversity. Its landscape of fields, meadows, light forest, and the Musconetcong River, which flows a few hundred yards away, offers ample flora and fauna for this week of instruction. Aside from the barn where the (hours upon hours of) lectures take place, the farm consists of little more than Tom Brown’s house, a dozen or so Porta-Johns, a few wooden stalls serving as showers, and a toolshed with an awning under which sits a row of chuck wagon gas rings—our cafeteria. All activity is centered around the central yard, a scant acre-size area of patchy lawn that lies between our nylon sleeping quarters and the barn. In the center of this is the all-important fire, which burns day and night, heating a large square iron tank with a tap, where we get hot water for our bucket showers.

The instructors, whom we meet the first evening, are possibly the most organically appealing group of people I’ve ever encountered. They are all affable, all pedagogically gifted—there isn’t a dud public speaker in the bunch—and all chasteningly competent at the endless variety of primitive skills we will learn. Like some crack team of movie commandos, they can almost be differentiated by their specific areas of expertise: Kevin Reeve, forty-four, director of the school, a John Goodman type who opted for early retirement from Apple nine years ago after taking his Standard class, paterfamilias; Joe Lau, thirty-one, resident flint knapper—his stone tools are things of beauty—ranked second in
ninjutsu
in the state of New Jersey; Mark Tollefson, thirty-two, plant expert, wild edible savant, also in charge of food; Tom McElroy as the Kid—at twenty-three years old, youth personified, a thatch-haired Tom Sawyer, possessed of a sniper’s aim with the throwing stick; and Ruth Ann Colby Martin, twenty-six, resident beauty, who, it seems, can do literally everything. Polymathically dexterous, capable, strong, and funny. Joni Mitchell as Valkyrie. Even though she has earlier that day run the twenty-six-mile Sandy Hook marathon, she fairly glows. As an avowed homosexual, I generally make it a practice to seek out the amorous embraces of men over those of women, yet my heart belongs to Ruth Ann Colby Martin.

That first evening, the entire class gathers in the barn for our initial orientation session, where we are advised of the school’s general guidelines and given our first taste of the ethos of the place, summed up by Kevin pointing to a sign above the stage. It reads “No Sniveling.” “This is a survival school, not a pampering school,” he tells us. As if on cue to prove the rustic authenticity of the place, the bat that lives in the barn swoops around our heads. We are reminded to hydrate regularly and properly, to be vigilant about the poison ivy that grows rampant on the farm. “And if you are taking any sort of medication to regulate your moods,” Joe tells us, “we request that you
stay on that medication while you’re here.
”

All of the instructors chime in, in unison, their voices weary with hard-won experience, “We wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t important.”

Finally we are warned about ticks and their dreaded Lyme disease. We are to check for the small black dots twice a day all over our bodies, particularly in those dark, warm, hairy places ticks apparently so love. A proper self-scrutiny is demonstrated by one of the (clothed) volunteers, who takes to the stage holding a small hand mirror from the shower stalls. He moves it over and around his torso and limbs like a hoochy-koochy dancer with a fan, looking into the glass all the while. As the coup de grâce, he shows us how to check our least accessible, most potential Tick Central. Turning his back to us, he bends over, bringing the mirror up between his legs. “Ta-da!” he says as he holds his triumphantly abject position. We applaud.

We meet the man himself the following morning. Tom Brown is handsome and, at age fifty, in great shape. With his silvering hair parted neatly on the side, trimmed mustache, and penetrating blue eyes, there’s a little bit of Christopher Street circa
1982
about him, but he resembles nothing so much as the scary gym teachers of my youth, men who said casually hostile and emasculating things like “You look like a bunch of girls out there.”

I’m only half-right. Brown, while blessed with deadpan comic timing and a Chautauqua preacher’s instinct for the performative flourish, also exhibits a disquieting and ever-present thrumming bass note of dwindling patience. This weird duality is an acknowledged fact. Kevin has warned us that Brown is “part mother hen, part drill sergeant.” For the uninitiated, it can make for a fairly bizarre, emotionally dizzying ride, sometimes in the same sentence. He begins with a little flattery, praising our very presence.

“The terms
family
and
brother and sisterhood
do not fall flippantly from our lips.” (That’s nice, we think, prematurely and mistakenly warmed to our cores.) He continues. “Even my parents when they call, the calls are screened. I talk to them when I want to. But you—” He indicates us, snapping back to sweetness. “You speak my language. When I say to one of you, ‘Hey, I heard a tree call your name,’ you’ll know what I mean. You’re more than eight to five. I’m an alien out there,” he says, meaning society. “But not with you. You’re the warriors.”

The only kind of warrior I feel like is perhaps one of Washington’s consumptive, freezing soldiers at Valley Forge. My first night in my small rented green nylon dwelling in Tent City was an extremely frigid one, making me wonder how I will survive a whole week on one hour of sleep a night. I am not the only one having doubts about this venture. “I didn’t come for boot camp,” one woman says to me. “If it continues too freezing, I’m just getting in the car and going home.” Morning ablutions are completely out of the question. I point out as how the chill also militates against our checking for ticks in the shower. “And the size of the mirror is this big!” she says, holding her fingers five inches apart. “How the hell am I going to see my ass in a mirror that size?”