Letters

Over time, we've accumulated a number of communications from people whose outdoor activity at Cornell had been steered into the existing industrial channels. Often there are regrets afterwards, but it is only necessary to keep people within the system for a few years -- and after they age out, their wisdom isn't available to those newly bright-eyed at the prospect of being paid to sell the outdoors to others, without full consideration of the incompatibilities with their own values.

Two threads are commonly found in these exchanges: they can be summarized by two syntheses, which recur in communications with ex-COE commercial guides:

• "I thought I could change things from within. I was wrong."
• "I thought that these very different approaches to the outdoors could coexist and be compatible, even friendly with each other, but they can't. I will never again be a part of a commercial outdoors organization."

Some people are willing to share their perspectives with their name attached. We hope to collect more with time.

Gerry Carter

We don't normally think it moral to pay people money to be our friends. Explicitly paying someone to be a lover is almost always culturally taboo and often illegal. So isn't it strange that people regularly pay someone to take them rock climbing, caving, or backpacking? Would you pay someone to take you hiking? How about a walk along the beach?

I used to work as a climbing instructor at Cornell Outdoor Education. Friends would sometimes ask me something like: "Hey, I want to learn to rock climb, which course should I sign up for?". My reply was always: "Oh, don't do that! We can just go climbing some weekend. It's no big deal."

That's the premise of any decent outing club. It's utterly simple. I didn't want someone I cared about to pay me or anyone else to go rock climbing: "No, let's just go and have a good time". For some reason, I never considered why I would treat anyone differently? Not only did I believe that a beginner learned more just going climbing with me than taking my class, but it was always more fun to climb with people who weren't just expecting you to fulfill whatever expectations they had after shoveling out a couple hundred dollars to go climbing. At gyms or at schools, many rock climbing classes never even go outside to climb on real rock! The goals of a beginner rock climbing class are to learn to belay, tie a figure-8, and use the basic equipment and techniques. That's ordinary. What's extraordinary is that they might charge you $200+ for those simple things, which you could easily learn in one afternoon. People take classes because they don't know of any other way to get introduced to these activities, or they aren't available. Or they have no idea of alternatives. Companies often sell us things we can get or do for free. You can see this everywhere. It's amazing what you can get people to pay for with enough marketing.

Outing clubs are cooperative ventures with mutual benefits for all. I'll teach you some climbing skills; you can teach me how to roll a kayak or identify a frog or find mars in the night sky. That's the way good-old fashioned friendship works. There's no need to pay someone, because we are not doing this for money. We do it because we are friends and we all love to have fun outside. Indeed, many of these activities we can only do with others.

Outing clubs are primarily about pursuing the outdoor activity itself. This means, if you are a beginner, it's hard to get "inside". In some cases, people end up not being interested in taking newbies climbing, hiking, or caving, especially strangers. And these are just typical, average people like me. As typical individuals in a typical outing club, we focus on getting to the crag or mountain or river. As such, we might end up not so much a cohesive club, but rather as a group of individuals all trying to pursue our own activity in the easiest possible way, which sometimes means together. But this is where a free outing club is different.

By explicitly stating its principals, the Ithaca Free Outing Club compels its members to consider why they are doing what they are doing. The goal is larger in scope than being just about getting your hands on free gear and rides. As the website suggests: "We expect that those who join us echo our core values and promotion of outdoors exploration by sharing, rather than commercial exploitation." It only takes a moment of reflection to realize that we've strayed off course, but "straying off course" also means that we have a coherent course in mind. In a free outing club, based on explicit principles, we can no longer be a member and state that we just don't care about others and we just want to get our hands on some group gear or put stuff on our resumes, because that's not what the club is about.

The free outing club is an experiment which might not work. Perhaps nobody is interested in a club based around the outdoors and social principles of community, sharing, and conservation. Perhaps this experiment will fail. But, at the least, it is an experiment well worth participating in; the results just might show us what a more thoughtful and socially conscious outdoors club would look like.

Finally, I feel it would be unclear or contrived of me to write about this without mentioning Don Barry. He is just a single person, and these issues are not about him. But he played a large part in stirring up much of the history of this supposed "tempest in a teacup", which started the Ithaca Free Outing Club. His opinions and stances on issues (often expressed in a blunt diatribe that is either refreshing or overly confrontational, depending on your view) are polemic and divisive, and many will surely consider them unreasonable. My only real sentiment on this issue was already expressed by George Bernard Shaw when he wrote:

Sincerely,
Gerry Carter
http://michellegerrypcthike.blogspot.com/