Only this time, little closer to home.
Sudan Wilderness
Sudan was a wilderness of sorts. Wild expanses of cracked brown soil, contourless, gaping plains with tall yellow grasses blowing in gusty, dusty winds. Extremes of temperature and wildlife. I suppose all these should fall under the category of wilderness, but to be honest, wilderness conjures for me images of rocky outcrops,
Oregon Wilderness
mountains upon mountains, rushing rivers, misty mornings, and evergreens as far as the eye can see. I suppose it would be an enormous understatement to say I prefer the latter. Still in the midst of the wilderness here, I do find myself aching a bit for there. And so it goes.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to teach a Wilderness Medicine Course in Paonia, Colorado. Sleepy mountain town, great group of students. Dreamy. This course was called a Wilderness Upgrade for Medical Professionals (WUMP), a course meant to prepare medical professionals like doctors, nurses, paramedics and EMT’s how to operate in remote settings far from their comofortable urban settings where we don’t have the tools we’re accustomed to using. We build splints, rescue folks in the dark and the snow and talk at lenght about leadership and decision making under pressure and in austere settings.
Wilderness Medicine has become a pretty sexy topic over the past 20 years or so. Expedition medicine and research on Everest keeps us in the news quite a bit. Disaster medicine continues to gain momentum we have gained capacity to respond on global scale. We gather at conferences and discuss the latest research on Search and Rescue techniques and lung physiology at altitude, and I’m not going to lie to you- all of that is alot of fun. It’s just that somewhere in the back of my head, the thing that keeps me humble at these gathering is remembering a small band of dedicated sudanese staff that manage a little clinic that rarely has all the supplies they need, that doesn’t have lights after the sun goes down, who work under incredible patient loads and in the face of constant instability, and I just can’t take my self too seriously. Most of our endeavors in wilderness medicine happen in the context of recreation, and theirs continues in the context of a constant battle for survival, and that my friends, if you ask me, is real wilderness medicine.
