Moab confab.
Just before dark, I pulled into the Sand Island campground along
the San Juan River near the tiny, dusty town of Bluff, Utah. Strayer
was serving fajitas out of fire-blackened pots. It was 36 degrees out,
and that afternoon the students had driven down through a foot of new
snow around Salt Lake City in what the radio was calling the Tax Day
Storm. Now a group of about thirty undergraduates and research
assistants packed in around the campfire, scooping up their hot food
with gusto. One student was pouring Sprite into the dessert pan for
peach cobbler, college style. It would taste like an explosion of sugar.
When the stars came out and the hot chocolate was poured, Strayer
announced it was time to start the nightly round of ten-minute
research presentations on topics like urban stressors on athletes and
teen cell-phone use (teacher’s pet!). I pulled on my gloves and settled
in. For the students, participating on this trip would encompass 30
percent of their grade. Strayer, who was, naturally, a Scoutmaster
when his boys were young, said he believed the campfire setting was
vastly superior to power points in classroom. “Here, they really raise
their game,” he told me. “By fire they come alive.”
He’s not the first to think so. The French philosopher Gaston
Bachelard wrote in 1938 that fire “begat philosophy.” In drawing us
together for meal preparation and warmth, fire drove evolution,
selecting those of us who could be sociable, communal and even
entertaining. We needed the warmth on this night, and I marveled
how unusual it was to see a group of young people looking at one
another or gazing into the lumens of the fire and not into the lumens
of their phones.
The next morning, after a thoroughly disreputable breakfast of
Pop-Tarts, muffins and strawberry yogurt from Costco, we drove off
to an unmarked trailhead along Comb Ridge. This eighty-mile-long
monocline rises from the desert floor, gouged along its east side by
deep gullies and canyons that were once home to the Anasazi people.