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choosing the campsite, unpacking the supplies, setting up the tent, gathering firewood, preparing and cooking the food, and washing the dishes allow each person to demonstrate their strengths and encourage teamwork. At the end of the day, when the coals are dying and each member of the group is snuggled up in their warm sleeping bag under a starlit sky, they can congratulate each other on a job well done, feeling grateful that they were not alone to conquer the elements.
    “Keep looking,” Tom commanded as Nick scrambled around on his hands and knees. Before leaving them to fend for themselves for the night, Professor Rosen had split the group in two. The three girls in pink Dexter T-shirts were on one side of the river while Tom, Nick, Shipley, and Eliza were on the other. As soon as she’d dropped them off, Professor Rosen had disappeared into the woods with her sleeping bag, promising to come back for them at daybreak.

    Shipley and Eliza put themselves in charge of setting up camp and sent the boys to collect firewood. Tom was really jacked up about it. He snapped a thin twig in half with his hands and tossed it onto their measly pile. “Come on, man, before it gets dark.”
    Nick wasn’t at all sure he would survive the night, let alone a whole year, living with this brute. He sneezed four times in quick succession and wiped his nose and eyes on his shirt. “Any special wood we should be looking for?” He assumed Tom knew all sorts of manly stuff about which wood burns the longest and the cleanest.
    “Fuck if I know.” Tom peeled a skinny green branch off a nearby bush. “I’m from Westchester.”
    Nick pressed his lips together in a determined half smile and tried to maintain his usual sunny outlook. Life at boarding school often fosters a hunger for philosophical exploration. The Berkshire School in Massachusetts, from which Nick had graduated in June, went so far as to offer a course called Adventures in Eastern Philosophical Concepts. The Tao of Pooh and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were required reading. “Everything is an analogy.” “When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret: Life is Fun.” It was Nick’s favorite course.
    “I think we’ll need some big stuff if we’re going to use the fire to cook with.” Nick patted the trunk of a huge half-dead spruce, as if he just so happened to have in the pocket of his embroidered tunic the chainsaw they’d need to cut it down. They didn’t even have a hatchet. He looked up, examining the upper branches of the tree. He’d come to Maine for its natural beauty. Well, here was his first opportunity to commune with nature.

    Tom watched in awe as Nick let out a wild-boy yelp and hurtled himself through the air and into the arms of the tree, desperately straddling its wide, sturdy trunk.
    “Jackass,” Tom chuckled admiringly. “Jesus. Watch your balls, man.”
    Nick could feel his eyes water and his hands break out in a rash as he shimmied clumsily up the trunk toward the next set of branches. He turned his head to the side so as not to breathe in too much of the tree’s noxious, hive-inducing fumes.
    “Take it slow, monkey nuts,” Tom warned.
    The tree tolerated Nick’s scraping and kicking like an old horse that is used to abuse. How had he done this as a little kid without castrating himself? The rough bark tore up the skin on the insides of his knees and bruised his crotch. There were splinters beneath his fingernails and he’d already skinned both elbows. Ten feet off the ground was a thick branch around ten inches in diameter that had been stripped of its bark by a porcupine. If he hung on long enough, jiggling his weight up and down just a bit, maybe gravity would work its magic and the branch would snap. He released his grip on the tree’s trunk and swung, Tarzan-like, onto the branch.
    “Dude!” Tom