Back from boot camp

I had been looking forward to this week for months - a one-week journalism fellowship that promised training on topics that I want to cover and great field trips. I hoped for a mini vacation - Tai Chi in the morning, some lectures, nice meals and maybe a few drinks in the evening with the other journalists.

What I got was boot camp.

It was an intense five days running 12-14 hours each day, with so many speakers and PowerPoint presentations that my mind was saturated. Plus, we hiked, rain or shine, took a 3-hour canoe trip and made a last trudge through a wall of mosquitoes.

We stayed in dorms, and I had a vivid flashback to the cinder-block halls of my alma mater. I originally named this blog post "Back to School." That was before everything started.

7 a.m. breakfast. 8 a.m. speaker. 9 a.m. speaker. 10 a.m. speaker. 11 a.m. speaker. 12 noon lunch with speaker. 1 p.m. speaker. 2 p.m. bus ride to a three-hour hike. 6 p.m. dinner with two speakers who droned on and on.
There were no breaks so a trip to the bathroom meant missing part of the PowerPoint. Climatology, biology
coral reef, exotic leaf
litigation, adaptation, mitigation
construction, destruction, nutrient absorption
Learning by immersion, but drowning in information.
And suffering an acute case of PowerPoint fatigue.

Luckily, most of the speakers were worthwhile and the information was great.

And most of the people were marvelous.

As we became acquainted, we would find common interests, and conversational threads would emerge. Jokes would circulate. Soon, there was a sarcastic banter that we all fed into and gorged upon. The women, and my roommates and I especially, bonded. The group dynamic was developing.

We'd go from the sublime to the ridiculous. One afternoon was devoted to the main farming industry blamed for the environmental woes. Their propaganda was in full force and we challenged the spin. Then one of the farmers dragged us to his fields, shouting for an hour his stream of consciousness that threaded together obscure farming facts, his experience, his reasoning, his passion, and even more spin. He gave us more hyperbole than we could ever imagine, starting out:
"If I was God, I would plant sugar cane in the Everglades agricultural area."

One of my friends later joked that she sent her significant other a text message:
"We've been hijacked. Send reinforcements."

But, mostly, we got to revel in the great outdoors - the reason why most of us are environmental journalists in the first place. The marvelous canoe trip, the exploration of a wildlife refuge.

Nature got in the way. The night we wanted to find a nesting Loggerhead sea turtle, Tropical Storm Barry passed through Florida. We stood in the driving wind and rain, shouting to each other to keep up the conversation, watching the bizarre blue-green light flashes (lightning or a transformer fire?), before finally giving up at midnight. We trudged back to the bus, but we weren't disappointed. The storm kicked up our adrenaline and we laughed all the way home.

A few trips had to get changed around, but no matter. We tried to make the best of it that we could. At least most of us did. You can never have a large group with at least one curmudgeon, and in a herd of journalists, there were more than a few.

Our last trip, to me, offered the most irony. After a week of hearing all the terrible consequences of what happened when they drained Florida's river of grass, we hiked through the most vicious wall of mosquitoes. For a moment, I thought about why they may have been so desperate, back in the day, to drain the damn swamp.

But we survived the torture together and in the end, it made us better journalists, with newfound knowledge about the environment.

And it made us friends.