to be molding a clay face onto an oak tree with a group of ex-felons
and addicts. The science-based concept is that three hours per week
for twelve weeks in a woodland program can reduce symptoms of
depression and increase sociability, physical exercise and self-esteem.
Sometimes you meet someone who so easily wears a career, who
seems so fulfilled, so unusually capable and perfectly matched to his
work that it’s clear it’s a higher calling. Two such men are Tom Gold
and Richard Bolton. Gold works for the Forestry Commission’s
recreation department, teaching skills like shelter-building to
Branching Out participants, and Bolton is a kind of local park ranger,
employed by a massive public-housing estate called Cassiltoun
outside Glasgow. On the drive to the Cassiltoun woods, Gold kept the
windows wide open on the freeway. “Sorry, can’t quite get my head
around air-conditioning,” he’d said as we bombed down the highway.
Tall and wide in a wood-chopping-champion way, Gold had to
hunch in the sedan. It was much easier to picture him lumbering
through the hills. “My big specialty is bushcraft, the sort of art of
making the outdoors a more comfortable place without compromising
the resource,” he said. “Food, fire, shelter, there are many ways you
can achieve or acquire those things, leaving the place exactly as you
found it. It’s different from survival training, with all the camouflage,
traps, gear, weapons and a generally less healthy attitude toward the
environment. That’s obviously not what we’d do with these guys
anyway,” he said, referring to the participants, many of whom had
recently emerged from institutions. Gold has spent much of his life in
the space that intersects mental health and the environment, first
working as a leader for a young offenders program in the Arizona
wilderness and later in a secure psychiatric facility in Scotland. They
were opposite ends of the containment spectrum. In Arizona, he tried
to convince the boys that making fire with flint and steel was more
reliable than their lighters. “To demonstrate, I inhaled a cigarette and
nearly fainted dead on the spot.” He saw remarkable changes in the