10 Chapter 10: A Conversation with Loren Wilkinson
Conversation with Loren Wilkinson
Professor of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies, Regent College, Vancouver, BC
What is your official title?
I’m a professor of interdisciplinary studies, but when I started, they threw in philosophy to make it a little more respectable. So, really I’m a professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies.
I started here [Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia] in 1981, and before that, I was at a program called the Oregon Extension through Houghton College. It’s associated with Dave Willis, who is an old friend, and he was there when I was there. About that time, I decided to locate at the Oregon Extension, so I’ve stayed in touch with him.
Then before that I did a study year at Calvin, working on the project that produced the Earthkeeping book. And before that, I was at Seattle Pacific for six years.
What are the boat trips that you teach? Are they part of a summer curriculum?
Well, Regent has a very diverse, far-ranging summer school. People come from all over the world both to teach and to take courses in it. More students come to each summer school than come to the regular term, in terms of actual individuals. Well over a thousand people come through each summer, which in a way doesn’t affect our course too much because it’s completely separate from the rest of the campus. It’s sort of freestanding, but it draws on this rather rich and unusual Regent network of people. And the Regent publicity goes out to thousands of people every year, so it draws from those. But the course itself, it’s just kind of by itself .
Here’s a very broad question. Why do you do that course?
Well, there are complicated answers to that. It probably goes back to when I first started teaching at Seattle Pacific back in the early 70s. I was in the English department— I have an interdisciplinary degree, but I was hired in the English department as my first full-time job after I got my doctorate. And I had always been concerned about environmental matters; this was back before the environment was invented, meaning the term began to be used commonly in the early 70s. But I grew up on a farm. I’ve always been aware of our connection to the natural world, I guess. I didn’t start thinking about it much until college and afterwards.
I loved teaching English, but I was always interested in connecting it to real life and to real questions. And Seattle Pacific had a campus, kind of a field study place— it was actually the support grounds for an old fort that was built on Whidbey Island, Fort Casey. Seattle Pacific had the old officers’ quarters and the barracks, and then the Fort itself is a State Park. It was an old building, big, big building, that became available, kind of a grand old house, 19th century mansion type thing, for officers, that became available for use, and so we took a class up there one weekend. And it’s quite a wonderful location, right on Whidbey Island, right on the water. And we were so impressed—first time we’d ever really done anything like this.
We were so impressed with just the experience of being under the same roof with the students that you were teaching for just a weekend that we put together an idea of an environmental studies program that we proposed to run up there. This was, again, the early 70s. And the school went for it, so the next year we started. We moved up to this house, lived in it— the students lived in it with us. Different people from the sciences and other disciplines came up and taught, and then I taught a course called Literature and Philosophy of Environmental Awareness, or something like that. And we did some outdoor recreation things, and then we took one fairly extensive field trip into Big Beaver Valley, which was a valley in the lower Skagit Cascades. It was under threat for flooding if they raised the dam, which provides Seattle City Light and Seattle with its power. And for many years, there’d been talk about raising the dam, which would provide more power, but it would have also flooded this valley. And so we would take trips into this valley, take every course up there—quite a spectacular, beautiful, remote place. And that, plus we tried to bring what we were eating together— we tried to look a lot at, just be aware of what we were eating— and so we were cooking and eating our meals together. And it was a program that had a big impact. We had about 16 students at a time, but over the years I would guess about 80 people went through it. It was very successful, too successful in a way because the students began to regard the place as home, and sometimes, even when the program wasn’t going on, we’d have 30 people coming back for Sunday dinner. {laughing} And our kids, our own kids were of an age where it just was too easy to neglect them in that circumstance. So we decided that as good as it was, we would need to end it or change it. About that time, we finally made that decision to do something different, to move back to town or have other people involved.
A program, which was a year-long study to do research on environmental matters, came up at Calvin, and so I went there on a leave of absence. And then, I wasn’t terribly happy about going back to just normal teaching in the city again, so I went to the Oregon Extension instead. (I had a former student that was involved there.) That program was very closely integrated and in a remote mountain village outside Ashland, Oregon. The students lived in their own quarters, but all the faculty were present in all of the classes, and there were week-long backpack trips as part of the curriculum. It was very good program. I would still be there probably if I hadn’t gotten invited to come to Regent.
And so I came to Regent. I took lots of hikes with students and tried to get people involved, being aware of the external world, and taught occasional courses that used the Young Life Beyond Malibu model. Young Life has a quite spectacular location up Jervis Inlet— it’s about 90 miles from here— from the end of one of the fjords, it goes into the Coast Range. It’s a very high class, kind of posh camp. But, some people who’ve been through this Malibu Club wanted to do more. It’s in a spectacular mountain area; it’s sort of the heart of some of the greatest mountains in North America. But it’s just sort of, like, a rich kids’ camp. You can’t really do much with the place, and so a few people started what’s called Beyond Malibu, which is kind of a Christian Outward Bound program, a lot like Sierra Treks in a lot of ways. I think there’s quite a bit of exchange between Dave Willis’ program and this program, as far as staff goes.
And for a few years, I did a wilderness course using their guide staff, and we’d just go up in the mountains and look at basic issues and how we relate to the created world. It was a week-long summer course, and it was a very good experience, and again, I might still be doing that, but then I also felt that there was a need for Regent students to have a place to get away outside of the city. We don’t have any residential facilities here— people live all over, and they live in town. So, we looked for such a place outside of the city. I lived in town there; I wasn’t really thinking of moving out myself. But I had a sabbatical on Galiano Island one year, about an hour ferry ride away. It was quite close, but also feels quite remote. And the experience of having people just come out for a visit, even for a short time, was so good I decided that I might try to rent a house, and just have people out for awhile and see how that would work.
But in the process, I discovered this 50-acre farm with about a half-mile waterfront that was for sale. It was too much for us to buy, but it was zoned and laid out in such a way that it lent itself very well to a group of people owning it. So, we got together a group of people and bought it. But in order to make it work, I had to move out there myself. So, we had a few courses out there. We just met at my house, and then they dealt with kind of creation-related issues. Some friends of ours are very fine boat builders, and they headed up a program in 1992 to reenact the Captain Vancouver Expedition— the exploration of the coast during the Captain Vancouver Expedition, which happened in 1792— the 200th Anniversary. And he built two long boats, and we actually bought a smaller boat, a jolly boat, the smallest of the ships boats, just for ourselves. It could take about 6 people. And these long boats, in 1992, they spent about 6 months retracing the route of the mapping of the island passage with people from the various communities along the way.
And actually, that was one of the years we did the course up at Malibu. And we went up there before the course, with a few of the students, to be with them on the maiden voyage of one of these boats. So we rowed and sailed across the straits and up an inlet that got way into the mountains. And that was such a good experience, we thought we would do the course with them, and try to go into the mountains, do a Malibu course, but also row and sail up there in these old boats. But after the year of doing it, after the 6 months of doing it, they decided they didn’t want to spend any more time in small boats; they’d had enough. He’s sort of a hermit at heart {chuckling}, and so they decided to sell the boats.
And we had the course all ready. People had actually paid for it and everything, and we had to cancel at the last minute because when they backed out, we didn’t feel like we had the skill to do it. And so we cancelled that course, but we bought one of the boats. We’d already been having groups out for weekends, Regent groups, just to spend time on the place, and so around 10 years ago we started these boat trips. First, they were just weekend trips during summer school. People would just come out, and we really didn’t have any agenda. We just took a trip out there, so an original experience. But then, maybe 1994 is the first year we did a full course. Because by that time, we’d had some experience in the boats and realized what a powerful learning experience it was, and realized that, well, what we’ve come to realize is that the experience of being in a boat together for a week is almost the equivalent of living in a house together for 10 weeks with those students back at Seattle Pacific. It was just such an intense community experience, and everything kind of gets intensified .
And the course that developed is called Wilderness, Technology, and Creation. And those three ideas hang together very well because you’re dealing with— if you think of wilderness on the one hand as sort of nature that isn’t shaped by human activity, and technology as all of the ways by which we shape the natural world for human purposes, then the two together kind of help us focus on the doctrine of creation, on what it means to be a creature. But technology is usually invisible to us. We’re just not usually very aware of it. So the kind of phenomenological bracketing, of using, of limiting yourself for a week to this older technology, transportation technology, which is very well developed in its own way and has its own very rich tradition that has left its impact on our culture and our language… It’s amazing how much of our language comes from small boating experiences; you start thinking about all kinds of expressions. Steer a firm course, firm hand on the tiller, don’t rock the boat, all in the same boat. A whole bunch of things are even less obvious. The phrase, “taken aback,” for example, is a sailing expression. There’s dozens and dozens of them. It’s because the English language is shaped by a seafaring people. But that’s all gone; it’s just a relic.
But to be in a boat for a week, you don’t have any choice but to pay attention to wind, and tide, and weather. At the same time, it’s not real wilderness—the Gulf Islands are not that remote, you get little pockets of wilderness—but, especially in the summer, there’s all kinds of pleasure boaters, boats all over the place, with power, and so the idea of not having power, but having to use whatever little bits of the sail you can and then row the rest of the time is quite an educational experience. {laughs} It makes one aware of both the good and the bad of hi-tech things. So, we do a pretty serious series of readings: stuff on the concept of wilderness, we use Leopold, Muir, Roderick Nash, and all these guys, but then we read stuff on technology, and we read Heidegger.
We’ve put together a book of readings, and we ask them to read them before, plus another book. We do a range of books, so each one is responsible for one book— they read and just kind of lead the talk for the rest of us. Yeah, fairly extensive classes. Some days we don’t have time, but other days we don’t do anything, except, well, we don’t meet all day, but we meet as much as a normal class would. But of course, the whole week is an educational experience too. We camp on different islands. Increasingly, we’ve shaped a kind of liturgy around the experience as well because we have morning prayer, evening prayer, and draw a lot on Celtic material, which comes from another Christian seafaring people. So, there’s a lot of very rich material to draw on. It’s had probably the same or almost as much of an impact as those 10-week courses. There are probably 10 or 15 people down there tonight who’ve gone through that course {laughing}, including almost all of the A Rocha Canada staff {laughing}. [We’re talking on an evening during an A Rocha Conference at Regent College— A Rocha is a growing international Christian ecological organization.]
So, it’s just a good way to educate. It’s enabled us to do in a very intense form things that we did in a longer form before that we couldn’t do it in anymore. It’s a lot of work. My wife and I do it together, we teach it jointly. We put a lot of emphasis on food. We eat well, but even when we have students out for the weekends, we try to use as much food from our own garden as we can, and make as many things from scratch as we can, and just make people aware of their food and where their food comes from. We tie that into the whole thing as well. Because of course food is one of the ways we relate to the created world. It seems to work in a fairly strong way.
Were there any other factors that might have contributed to your becoming involved in the environment?
I don’t know. I never know how to answer that question, because I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t. I grew up on a farm where we did a lot of logging as well. At the same time, well not a lot, but about once a year our family would take a backpack trip up in the mountains. Again, this was back before anybody did that, back in the 50s, or earlier, the 40s, is when my father and my brother first started doing wilderness things. My father was also a logger, a logger and farmer, and some of our summer jobs were helping survey. Some of my father’s relatives were surveyors of logging roads into the mountains, and so we were very much involved in the whole logging industry. And it was virgin forest on our farm that we gradually cut down and turned into a farm. And we sort of were some of the last of the pioneers.
And so I lived that, sort of unreflectively as I was growing up. Not very often being critical— I wasn’t critical of it exactly, but then went away to college. I’d never left the state, actually, until I went away to college at the age of 18, to Wheaton, and so the transition from a farm along a wilderness river in Oregon to Chicago was fairly dramatic. And so two things happened somewhat simultaneously: I began to be consciously aware of what I’d been shaped by, what I’d been involved in and so forth as a child; at the same time, I began to be much more conscious about my Christian faith, to try to connect it to things, try to put things together. And so, I suppose in a way I just sort of started thinking about what I’d been living all along, which is just, kind of, we were just subsistence farmers. But the whole— it’s hard to describe, but I think the way I’ll say it— I don’t ever remember beginning to be interested in these things, I always have been, but that transition from kind of unreflective childhood and youth to beginning to think and to try to bring your Christian faith together with everything began to make it more conscious. So, I suppose by the time I was in college, I was, I mean obviously, I was interested in the romantic poets, who were trying to make sense out of our experience out of nature, I think that’s one of the transformative things. And philosophy, I don’t know, just sort of grew out of that. I mean, I never became interested in the environment, I just sort of—I’d always been breathing. Same thing I guess. {chuckles}
You started doing the boat trips in 1994; did it change a lot from then to now? Is it roughly the same as when you started doing it?
Pretty similar. Two things have happened. One is we don’t try to cover as much material academically, and actually we’ve covered just as much, but we’ve made them do more of the work, by assigning more books to them, and let them do some of the work. And we’ve built longer periods where we’re not going from place to place into the trip, so there’s more down time, more quiet time. We’ve added a day long, day and night, solo experience, so people are out overnight by themselves. Those are a few of the little changes. We’ve also been aware of how much the trip has taken on elements of something like pilgrimage for people. We just leave from in front of the beach in front of our house. And we’re on a journey together, and we’re going to come back because they know we’re going to come back there in a week. And so the daily journey is in some ways a much more intense, focused kind of thing than even a backpacking trip. Because backpacking, people will straggle, but here we’re rowing together. We are literally working together, have to work together. It’s quite different I think even from, say, things like a kayak or canoe trip, too. Because you’re working together, things happen. One of the interesting things is to see how after people get used to rowing, which takes a little while but not that long, it becomes sort of second nature, almost inevitably people want to sing. And singing just emerges from the rowing. And so you begin to discover some things about work songs and sort of the way in which we’ve been divorced from our bodies, and how much we’ve lost from that. And how good it is to get back into some communal things that used to be much more part of our lives.
Would you describe the trip, the whole experience. Is it a week in total?
It’s roughly a week. I think we keep people about eight days. A typical trip would be— I’ll just describe what we did last year. We introduced something a little different last year. People would come out on the evening ferry. Last year, we got there just at dusk, but we immediately got people into the boats, put lifejackets on— we’d warned them about this in advance— went out, and practiced “man overboard” drills. So, somebody would fall overboard and we’d circle around and pick them up. So, as soon as they got there, they had a little experience in the boats on the water. And the next day we would pack the boats, which is a considerable task. All the gear and all the food, though we resupply half way through the trip so they don’t take all the food. It’s a huge mountain of stuff that goes in the boats. People look at it on the beach and think, “there is absolutely no way that’s all going to go in there.” {laughing} It does, but it takes a good long time.
And then we go, usually a fairly short day, two or three hours on the first day, go somewhere and camp. This year we went to a place and stayed two nights. First night and evening were kind of a half day. We were solo the first day, we just spent some time by ourselves. We were on one end of the island— it’s a marine park, water access only, not very many people there— and every morning and evening we’d have prayer, liturgy, but it’s very carefully structured according to what we’re doing and reading that day. So, we usually draw from a book called Celtic Daily Prayer, and put together stuff that is relevant to what we’re doing, and we just assign that to different people to read.
And then we have fairly substantial class periods. We just find a place, either in the sun or in the shade, whichever we want, whichever is needed, have class based on the readings, and work through the readings. Some central stuff on technology, on wilderness, and on creation. We also had a separate book, which was a liturgy that had things for every day and also had what becomes a very important tool, the tide chart and a description of where we would go each day, and where we would plan on camping each day, and why we were doing it at that time, what the current was going to be in these passes, and that sort of thing. So, we had the tide chart in the liturgy book.
Last year we went, we had two nights at the same place, and then we took a fairly long day’s row along the outside of Galiano Island. We lived there, in that cove, went up to the ravine park for the first days of the trip, then we went down, camped at another spot two days, sailed, then the wind dropped, then we rowed. {chuckling} And we went into where the boats were built, and the boat builder was in, so he talked to us about the boats. I think that was the first time he’d talked to anyone in weeks or months; he’s kind of a hermit. {laughs} And then when the tide changed we went through a pass, camped on one of the little islands there (there’s one island at low tide, and a whole bunch of islands at high tide), and then we went and rowed down to an old farm.
Usually we sleep in tents and cook on stoves. The Gulf Islands are very dry, so you can’t have fires. Staying at a farm is something we did differently this year. There’s a little bed and breakfast on an old farm, and we’d been camping three nights, sort of the middle part of the trip, and we resupplied there, and spent a night in the bed and breakfast, sat around a table and had wine and a nice meal. And then, this was something that was definitely a neat thing, there’s kind of a sister ship or a boat that was built of the same vintage by people on Saturna Island— it was started by the guy that built our boat, and then they finished it and launched it—and we came down for their launch. And then there was a race between the boats up in Montague Harbor a couple of years ago, and we won. So, I dropped the hint that maybe we could have a return match when we came down. So we piled in the boats, went over, and raced them. They were really up for us, and I was overconfident. I thought that certainly we’d beat them because it’s a bigger boat, it should go faster, but they won. Oh, ow. {laughing} It was great, and they all treated us to beer at the pub. And then we went on around to the old farm, and it’s become (sometime before this trip) a national park, so you can’t camp on it anymore, but for years we camped on this little point nearby. It’s a remarkable place because you can see Baker and the Cascades off here, you can see the Olympics here, you have a view across the San Juans. It’s an incredibly beautiful place. But the hills, or mountains, of Saturna are high enough— they feel like mountains, right there— it’s just all cliff along here. And that’s where we spend three days and three nights. And one of their nights is a solo, where they just go out alone in kind of a quiet section. And then we allowed two days to go back. We came around, and we were going to camp, but conditions weren’t real good, so we just came on home, came all the way back. I think it was about 3 a.m. when we got in…. So, that’s what we did last year, but there’s different combinations. The trips are different every year to some degree.
I ask them to write about the experience too. They can take the class for one or two credits. For one credit, each of them, as I said, chooses a book from the bibliography, and during the trip, they’re responsible for bringing the book physically— so they carry it, rather than us—and they’re responsible for knowing what’s in that book, and then when we get to that in the course of the discussion, they contribute material for that book for a session. At the end, I ask them to write up a review of the book in the light of the material of the course. And they also do a daily log and write a sort of digest or summary of that at the end. It’s not so much a “paper;” it’s just kind of a final reflective thing. This reflective paper is for one credit. For two credits, they do a research paper on one of the topics that’s been addressed in the course. And they have a month to turn in that research paper.
Here is an older book list: A Sand County Almanac (Aldo Leopold), Technopoly (Neil Postman), Romano Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como, quite a bit of Wendell Berry… W.H. Vanstone’s Love’s Endeavor, Love’s Expense… quite a remarkable book, I’ll be quoting from it tomorrow. It’s really theology. Alan Durning’s This Place on Earth, based on a very good bioregional study of this part of the world. Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce. Peter Harris’s Under the Bright Wings. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Kathleen Norris), that’s an interesting one because of some of the similarities between prairie and ocean. Jurgen Moltmann’s God in Creation, Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth, Robert Farrar Capon’s An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World. Hard to describe this thing, Living Between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality (Philip Sheldrake)… Susan Power Bratton’s Christianity, Wilderness and Wildlife – that sort of thing. There are brief excerpts from some of those things in the anthology that everybody reads. But we ask them to be responsible for some of those books.
The book list has changed quite a bit over the years. This list is actually 1996. So it was done 7 years ago. If I could find last year’s list, you will find some of the same things but also some different things.
Tell me more about the solo and how that works. How much processing do you do?
We don’t do much processing after the solo. It’s not a course in being in the boat—we don’t talk much about technique or anything, we just sort of let that happen. And we’re not really spending a lot of time studying the natural history of the place; that just sort of happens. Some people are very involved, some aren’t. We don’t do a lot of processing of what happened. We ask them to come back in silence, and we have a communion service when they come back. And then we have— we give them food, it’s not a fasting thing. There’s plenty of food. We often have, on that day or the evening that they come back, sometimes later at the end of the course, we have somewhat more reflective time when we encourage them to talk a little bit about themselves, and give them a chance to, maybe, talk about what the course has meant. We try to keep that from being too forced. No, actually, we don’t focus on what we’re doing very much. The focus is on the material we’re studying, and then the trip itself has to be done, and we let a lot of the connections just happen. It seems to happen pretty well without talking about it much.
Do you follow a sequence of lessons of things that might be happening at certain points?
Well, a little bit. We’ve tinkered with that, as to which kinds of things to read first. And I think this last year we rearranged things so that we did them in the order of the title of the course: Technology, Wilderness, and Creation. The first readings were on technology, and then readings on wilderness, and then, well, we’ve always ended it with the much more theological stuff at the end, after the questions have already been raised by looking at the state of the planet. For one thing, we do a lot of this sort of thing that Ian did tonight [an overview of the global environmental situation], and some ways that technology contributes to that. And that raises lots of questions, so we at least try to answer or attend to those.
Over the course of doing these boat trips, what have been the biggest surprises?
I think the biggest surprise is how much the trip itself, apart from what we study, how much of the trip itself, just the day-to-day experience of being on the boat together, has taken on a kind of shape and life of its own. Shortly after we did this, when we were on sabbatical at St. Andrews in Scotland, we stumbled on a week-long pilgrimage the week before Easter. We joined a small group of people carrying a cross across the highlands of the border country of Scotland, ending up at Lindisfarne on Good Friday—walking on the sands across Lindisfarne and spending Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Lindisfarne. And that daily experience, about the same number of people as on the boat course, walking together…the thing that held us together— we weren’t in a boat together but we were carrying a full size cross, and about three people at a time carried that, just traded off. That was quite a profound experience. It sounds kind of hokey at first, but it wasn’t, it was really quite wonderful. And they had a daily— that’s where we got the idea of a daily liturgy— the morning and evening prayer shaped what we were doing that day. And when we came back from that, that was in ’96, we put together the daily liturgy. Then last year, out of that Lindisfarne thing, grew another group that’s doing it to Iona. We walked through much, much more rugged mountain country in Scotland, and ended up at Iona at Easter, this last year.
And there is a pilgrimage element in that boat course, and we’ve encouraged that. We’ve talked a little bit about pilgrimage, about the tension between being at home and being a pilgrim. And we put a lot of scripture together that reinforces different themes. We’ve put together a book for the course. This is an old prayer from Hebrides which we start with; we use it at the beginning of the course. Sometimes the helmsman says, “Blessed be the boat,” and the crew answers, and we go through this. But this is ancient; it goes way back, but it’s a wonderful thing to do at the beginning of the course, or the beginning of the trip. There are more prayers in the book, then a middle section—the tide chart, which is very important, and they get to know that—and then some orders for rowing, for rowing together, and quite a few songs. And then people can just choose from these songs that we’ve put together— a collection of songs that seem appropriate. And they lead some of the worship, we just trade that around.
What is the typical participant/student?
Well, sort of the typical Regent student, but that’s not very typical. Alums coming back to take the course, actually. Some people have had to wait three years to get into the course because we can only take about 14 at a time, and it’s very popular. So there are people who want to take the course, and who intend to some time, and just do it when they can. There are people of different ages. We had Lucy Shaw, a Christian poet, she took the course the first time we did it. She was already 65 then. We’ve had many people in their 50s take it, and a number, several, who are Regent students, and some who come just for the course; the only Regent course they ever take is this course. They all take it for credit. We don’t let anyone audit it. If they take it, they have to do all the work.
Are there any things you’ve done that just didn’t work?
The hardest things have been when we’ve tried to squeeze too much in. It’s also, {chuckles} my wife and I do it together, and the first couple of times we did it, we did it in one boat, just the Nina, the larger boat, which takes 11 or 12 people. And then we started doing it with the jolly boat as well, which adds another five or six. The first time or two we did it, we had our son do the boat— he’s actually an instructor at a Hong Kong Outward Bound school and has a lot of boat experience, he spent about six months at sea in a sailing boat. And he helped for a year or two and then we decided that Mary Ruth would be the captain of the smaller boat, the jolly boat, and I would be the captain of the bigger boat, the Nina. And actually that’s worked better. Because it’s very hard; we really try not, deliberately, for one of us to be the boss, and that’s very hard in a boat. I mean, it’s not even very good, probably; you need somebody who’s clearly, really in charge. And we didn’t want to, we just didn’t want to do that. There are inevitably disagreements as to what we should do {laughs} and it’s very hard to have a whispered discussion on a boat with eleven people listening. {laughing} I think one of the hardest experiences was once when we—it’s the one year when we did two courses in a year; we’ll never do that again, that was hard—we were kind of worn out anyway, and there were two or three people, there was one person in particular, who was determined to treat me as the captain and Mary Ruth sort of as the helper, and we didn’t want that. That was hard. It’s so exhausting. And Mary Ruth’s in charge of the food, and it’s a very, very demanding thing to do teaching, to be captain of the boat, to be responsible for everybody’s well-being, and then to be in charge of the food. Having all that in mind, we really enjoy it, but it’s also very, very exhausting. And those tensions are hard, and we’ve actually found it easier to be in separate boats. {chuckles}
If someone else was going to try to run, maybe not a boating course but something similar along these lines, or maybe even a boating course, what advice would you give them?
{pause} I don’t know. Know what you’re doing, first of all. I think, don’t try to do it unless you’re pretty comfortable with what you’re doing. Don’t do it for the first time; you need to know what you’re encountering. I think it’s important, especially in this circumstance where some people are kind of scared. I’m sure it’s the same in all kinds of wilderness things. But they need to have confidence in you. So that’s one thing.
I think one of the things we’ve learned— we’ve worked very hard to allow time— is don’t fill up every minute. You need time for people to just be. And that’s hard, because the pressure is to have a class, or to keep going. Giving time is very important. We don’t see it as a— it’s not a prove yourself kind of program, not an Outward Bound type of thing, pitting yourself against the elements or against each other. That happens sometimes, and there are moments when you really have to work together, and there are moments— this last trip, we had a moment, on the second day of travel after we’d spent two nights at the north end of the island, I hadn’t gone through there much before, around the island with the boats, and although I knew there was a reef off shore, quite a ways off shore, I thought the tide was high enough. There are about 15 feet of tides around there, so everything’s changing all the time. I thought the tide was high enough to cover it, but in fact, there was about two or three feet, and a stiff north wind, and we left early and were planning on sailing down, and there were probably two-foot waves, and both boats went aground, in a very, very dangerous situation. They capsized, both of them, very quickly. In both cases somebody got out of the boat, jumped out of the boats, and pulled us off, and then jumped back in. It was very sobering. Matter of fact, that happened fairly early in the trip, and it didn’t increase people’s confidence in their captain… but they made it through… {chuckles}
There have been other things like that. Once we— this was sheer stupidity— went under a bridge. There’s a bridge between north and south Pender islands, there’s a little narrow channel and a bridge connecting the two. And we thought it would be a good idea—we’d actually seen a picture of one of the boats, before we bought it, somebody took our picture from up on the bridge. So we thought we’d let someone out on shore to go up on top and take a picture as we came under. But we didn’t realize how much the current would pick up as the channel narrowed, and so it was obvious that the current was taking us way too fast for us to go ashore. I mean, it wasn’t going to work, but we’d already started to go ashore, and it was obvious we weren’t going to do it. We pulled back into the middle of the channel, but we couldn’t come all the way out to the middle pier in time, the middle, the highest… and {laughing wincingly} I forgot about the mast. {laughs} And so we were taken by the current underneath and the mast hit. There was only one pier; there were three places to go under the bridge, and they looked fine if you weren’t taking account of the mast, but the mast hit and, I don’t know how fast we were going, maybe two or three knots. The mast bent with a creaking noise, and then we were just held there. And so we, all of us just gradually had to pull the boat back, pushed back, but finally we got through. It’s interesting because we were reading aloud that time the C.S. Lewis book, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is a great thing to do; we haven’t done it again because it took too much time. But there is a scene where they’re caught by the sea serpent, and they have to kind of ‘push themselves past’ the sea serpent, gradually {laughing} and I think it almost breaks the mast off. It’s very, very similar, so that was, that was another one of these crisis things. The art of stupidity, but a good experience afterwards.
What do you most hope the students take away from the experience, from the trip, the course?
Well, I think, a sense of their well-rounded environmental education, the whole thing: a sense of the beauty and the complexity and the bigness of creation, the sense that creation is a gift, a sense at the same time of the fragility of creation, the importance of our learning to care for creation, seeing that that’s a part of the gospel, it’s not sort of an optional extra. I hope they’re becoming more critical of the way in which they live, the way in which they use tools, the way in which they use, just anything…what they buy, and what they eat, and how they drive, and so forth. All those things. I hope that they come through the experience closer to God. And I have a sense that the trip is remarkably successful in doing those things.
How does its success compare to other courses that you teach?
Well I think it’s the most, even more than, say, mountain backpack trips, wilderness backpack trips, or even wilderness canoe trips, it’s the most effective thing like that I’ve ever done.
And why do you think that is?
I think there is a kind of integrity in the three foci of the course, and that isn’t really achieved in any other way that I can think of. One of the things that is so striking, and I haven’t really mentioned before, is the boats themselves are works of art, they are beautiful things, they are wonderfully made. It’s a pleasure to be in them. Whenever a boat comes past, a sailing boat, there’s people on deck taking pictures, because it’s so different from anything else on the water, and it’s so beautiful. There’s a sense that, people have a sense of stepping back in time, but also stepping back into something of very high quality. And we try to kind of reproduce that in the way we do things, in every way. The food is very good, and Mary Ruth makes individual napkins for everybody, out of cloth, and they use them, and then we give them to people at the end. We have seat pads that we take from our sheep, wool pads— we don’t give those to them , we’d be too busy spinning wool. But just little things like that. I don’t know, it’s just, the whole package seems to work very well. They also have the sense of being able to leave, come to our house, be at our house for a day, and then leave from the front of our house, and then come back to the house, for another part of a day. I don’t know, there’s just something organic and whole about the whole thing.
What about the connection between the liturgy and all the rest?
Well, that’s important, too – it just kind of connects it with scripture, connects it with the whole biblical story. So, it will be a hard thing to stop doing because it’s really wonderful. It’s hard work physically, and we’re getting older, so how much longer… we can’t do it forever, you have to be able to shove the boats around. It’s a week-long course but it takes a good three or four weeks out of our life because there is a lot of preparation and a lot of recovery from it. But it’s something we want to keep doing as long as we can.
Postscript
“We have succeeded in passing the course on to younger faculty. Shortly after your interview, my wife and I created another course which met for two weeks in our home, based on food, agriculture, and eating. It seems to have had the same sort of good impact on people. That course has been passed on as well (though in a thoroughly modified form) to other faculty.”
Loren to add some postscript commentary.
To learn more about the transformational work done by Wilkinson at Regent College, and the course that went along with it, in the Making Peace with Creation documentary by Iwan Russell-Jones. Trailers for the film can be found here: https://vimeo.com/190181269 ; https://vimeo.com/192065190 (Imago Mundi); https://vimeo.com/190181268 (Gardener)