Out of Bounds

As a college student I'd already learned to rebel against my parents. But I still looked to my teachers for guidance.

OCTOBER 1976. I AM BEGINNING MY sophomore year at Dartmouth. I have signed up to live in the Outward Bound House for the fall term. Outward Bound teaches wilderness survival skills and self discovery through outdoor adventure. At Dartmouth the typical elements of an Outward Bound course are distributed throughout a 10-week school term and intertwined with regular academic coursework. This version of Outward Bound also comprises an intensive and sustained Group Experience. Our group consists of 11 students and two instructors. We are living cheek-to-jowl in a rambling frame house on the fringe of campus.

My peers and I are young, but we don't know it. We don't have much perspective, though we think we do. We may have learned to rebel against our parents, but we stfil look to our teachers for guidance. At the OB House, Rocky* and his girlfriend Mary are our teachers. Rocky is burly and bearded, 30 years old or so. If I'm right about his age, he was in college during the 1960s. He looks a bit Harley-Davidsonesque, and he has demonstrated, during our initial canoe trip, that he has the brute strength required to hump a canoe and a loaded food pack across a hilly portage without getting winded. Rocky trots out a mantra on a regular basis: "Be Here Now Present Reality." I think it safe to say that Rocky carries around a lot of bottled rage. Figure in a dose of 1960s undergraduate psychology courses, and you have a personality that makes for some special House Meetings, those mandatory weekly gatherings conducted in a circle on the living room floor.

still struggling, in my second year, to come to grips with Dartmouth's three-toone male-female student ratio as well as with the school's own brand of fraternityengendered male chauvinism. I am especially grappling with the stunning revelation that the girl across the hall from me is having sex with her jock boyfriend five times a day. But I'm only 19 and not yet prone to conscious psychological analysis. I am socially immature and sexually naive and

Mary provides gentle ballast for Rocky. She's a strong, self-defined, kind Canadian. While Rocky has little patience for our immaturity, Mary doesn't judge us. She lightens the tone of the house. She laughs with us. However, she must cope with Rocky s demands, so her attention is divided.

It is nearly November. Rocky and Mary have prepared us, sort of, for a weekend outing. Actually they have told us very little except that we are to keep this weekend open. All of us are expected to participate. Rocky and Mary plan to leave Hanover Friday night. Before going, they give us an envelope containing instructions to be read the next morning. They tell us to pack warm clothes, bandanas, bathing suits, life jackets and canoe paddles. The boating theme seems weird for this time of year in northern New England, but we do as we are told. Most of us do, most of the time.

We are packed and ready to go Saturday morning. It's a gray, cold day. Our instructions tell us to drive the OB van to a designated location on a road near Concord, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston. It's about a two-hour drive, and we find the spot by late morning. The road is narrow, deserted and flanked by woods. The sky is low with clouds, and the air is damp and chilly.

Bill, who has been driving, parks the van and then opens and reads aloud our next set of instructions. He is to vacate the driver's seat. Each of us is to gather our gear and tie our bandanas tightly around our eyes so that we absolutely cannot see. We are to wait quietly. I actually do this, and I presume everyone else does too. We are so damned trusting. After a bit, the drivers door opens and slams shut, the motor starts, and we are treated to a bizarre ride blatantly intended to disorient those of us who might have some idea of where we are. The van surges forward, screeches around curves, stops and then goes fast in reverse. The ride gets bumpy, as if we have left tar and are now driving on gravel.

The van stops, the motor dies, and the side door slides open. I hear some rustlings, and then I feel my hand being taken by a smaller one. Given my frame of mind right now, this could very well be the hand of an elf. Whoever it is guides me gently out of the van. From the hushed sounds around me, I have the impression that a tribe of these small creatures is leading us away.

I am drawn down a slight incline. My elf and I pass into what feels like an interior space. There is a distinct atmospheric change. The air feels cooler and damper than outside, and the pink light that has been seeping through the red bandana pressed against my eyeballs is suddenly gone.

A child's voice tells us to keep our eyes covered for five minutes. A heavy door closes. The sound has the steel heft of a bank vault or cellblock door. We hold hands. The sound of our breathing swoops around us like bats.

Understand this: I really cannot see. I don't know where we are, yet a distinct mental image coalesces, in the manner of a dream. I believe that we are standing on a platform in an underground chamber not unlike a subway station. Before us, just below the lip of the platform, there flows a silent, black river. Soon, a large, gondola-like boat will arrive. We will climb aboard and glide away.

We pull off our bandanas and are greeted by sheer darkness. This kind of dark bleeds into your retina and taunts your incapacitated rods. Your eyes never adjust. "Lets find the way out!" announces Bill. (One of the more zealous members of the group, Bill was scathingly chastised by Rocky during our first house meeting for having broken a shovel during our initial camping trip in his enthusiastic attempt to dig a latrine without proper supervision.)

It is to our credit that our immediate response in this situation is one of team-like spirit and determination. Our task must be to find the way out of here. Shouldering our gear, we inch together along what I envision to be a corridor with uneven walls. I am near the rear of the caravan, giggling nervously. From up ahead, Bill calls, "There's a ladder!" Great, we'll be out in no time. The rest of us crowd around the base of the ladder as Bill climbs. "There's a trap door up here," he announces. We cheer. Bill pushes the door up an inch or two, and bright light slices down. We hear muffled sounds and then, more clearly, Rocky's voice, coming from above. "You can't come out," he says. "You're supposed to stay in."

You can't come out. The rules have suddenly changed. Our instincts and ingenuity have been thwarted. We are imprisoned. Rocky has planned it that way.

in the dark. We reconnoiter. All right, we decide, let's explore. We fan out, feeling our way. The entire space can't be all that large, because our voices stay close as we announce our discoveries. The trap door closes, and we are back

"I think I've found a pile of sleeping bags over here."

"Here are some plastic jugs—probably water."

"There are a couple of buckets over here. Maybe we're supposed to pee in them."

Oh God. If there is one thing I cannot do, it is pee in public. I don't care if it's pitch-black in here Just the thought of being exposed spatially and audibly to 10 other people is more than enough to paralyze my bladder. is resign myself to forthcoming prolonged discomfort.

I bravely venture off alone. My foot bumps against something on the floor. Reaching down, I touch an inert human body. A scream charges from my throat. I am usually rather soft-spoken and have only once before emitted this kind of involuntary and stereotypically female scream. That was the time I rushed into my grandmothers bathroom and slammed the door behind me, seeking refuge from the bat careening around her bedroom, only to discover the gigantic, lunging creature trapped inside the open toilet bowl beside me.

My friends converge around me. Exclaiming, we all touch the body. We quickly ascertain it to be Toby (we can tell by the glasses). Toby is a tall OB staff member who occasionally accompanies us on outings and sometimes drops by the house for meals. He is not talking. We eagerly arrive at the consensus that Toby is part of the challenge: We are supposed to take care of him, since he is acting helpless. Okay then.

We unfurl the sleeping bags and put on whatever extra clothes we've brought in our daypacks. Needless to say, the place isn't heated. We put an extra coat on Toby, who is as floppy as a 6-foot, 6-inch ragdoll. The uninhibited have peed in the buckets. We cluster on the sleeping bags to wait this out.

Eventually, we hear the door opening. A shaft of light falls across the floor. "Here are some matches. We'll be back for you in the morning." Rocky's disembodied voice comes to us like the voice of the Lord speaking to his servants. Toby's body springs to life and he dashes through the door, crouching, just before it slams shut. A couple of guys grope around and find the book of matches. They light a couple. Our bizarre night world is exposed.

We are in a square room with a concrete floor, concrete walls and a low concrete ceiling. I am surprised to see flat walls and right-angled corners, since I have perceived the contours of this space to be as irregular as cave walls. There is a concrete partition along one side. The now smelly buckets are in the alcove behind it. A short corridor at one end of the room leads to the, yes, steel door. An opening in another wall leads to a second, smaller room, where the ladder that Bill climbed stands in a corner, below a trap door. The book of matches turns out to be mostly empty, and the light doesn't last long. As soon as we get our bearings in this bomb shelter, we are again cast into darkness.

It's probably early evening by now. We crawl into sleeping bags and huddle. The saving grace of this escapade, for me, is the fact that I have recently become romantically involved with one of the boys in the group. Being in the dark together gives us license to make out for as long as we want. This helps to pass the time. It is a long evening and a longer night. I am coping with an aching bladder and premenstrual cramps.

I must sleep a little, because I wake up. We pack our stuff and wait, chilled and hungry. It has been almost 24 hours since we last ate, 36 for those of us who skipped breakfast yesterday. (Rocky and Mary are great fans of fasting. At the House, they fast one day a week and strongly encourage us to follow suit.) The door opens fully and morning light floods in. We walk stiffly toward the smiles and congratulations of our teachers. Trees with bare branches surround us. Beyond the tumult of voices, I can hear a bird singing and a distant chainsaw. I head into the woods, alone, to find a private place to pee.

I recall only vaguely the remainder of that Sunday. We ate. Rocky and Mary escorted us to a river. We competed in a canoe race (thus the boating gear). We drove home to Hanover in time to resume our daily routines on Monday morning. I have no memory of discussing the experience. My friends and I must have done so, but I suspect the group never formally processed the adventure. Fall term ended, and we all moved on.

The next few years of my life were like a roller coaster powered by my ambivalence toward Dartmouth. I dropped out in the spring, returned the following winter, and left for a second time after a miserable couple of terms. A year and a half later, I came back to Dartmouth, older and enough removed to finish my work there.

As a senior in prep school, I had longed to go to Dartmouth with all my heart. I knew full well that Dartmouth was a male school, and still I wanted badly to be there. I naively looked forward to living in the midst of the same genteel masculinity that I loved and admired in my father. My disillusionment sprang from the paralyzing realization that the common Dartmouth Man was like no one I knew or wanted to know. Yet there I was, for the long haul.

As for my feelings about the bombshelter episode, I did what seemed right at the time: I buried them. I hid them in the dark heart of New England, deep inside an underground chamber built with concrete walls and a locking steel door.

Sarah Lang Sponheim lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three sons.

All names have been changed for this story.