Man dies of thirst in desert 'survival' experience

As a clumsy, incompetent athlete in my childhood, I was alarmed the first time I ever read about the program Outward Bound. It must have been about 1967; the article may have been in the Reader's Digest or the Saturday Evening Post, both of which were delivered regularly to our house in small-town Illinois. According to the piece, pubescent enrollees in Outward Bound were awakened every morning at 6:00, set on a three-mile run before breakfast, and to top it all off, had to throw themselves off a cliff into the Atlantic Ocean. Those who failed to accomplish any part of this daily regimen not only went without food, but their whole cabin or patrol or whatever also went without food. Thus combining the scourges of my childhood -- sports, macho posturing, bullying and guilt -- Outward Bound sounded to me like hell on earth. I tore up the magazine and hid the pieces deep in the trash, lest my parents get any ideas about shipping me off to become a real boy.

Such crypto-fascist exercises have always frightened me. Today on SF Gate there is a story about a man who died of thirst in a desert "survival" program after hiking all day in blistering heat. Program staffers, who wanted him to push "past those false limits your mind has set for your body," saw he was disoriented, hallucinating, and cramping up -- all symptoms of dehydration -- but failed to give him the water they were carrying.

The course is intended to push people "past those false limits your mind has set for your body."

"Somewhere along the many miles of sagebrush flats, red rock canyons, and mesa tops of Southern Utah — somewhere between the thirst, the hunger and the sweat — you'll discover the real destination: yourself," BOSS says on its Web site. ...

"He said he could not go on," staff member Shawn O'Neal wrote two days later in a statement ordered by the Garfield County Sheriff's Office. "I felt that he could make it this short distance [a pool of water in a cave 200 feet away] and told him he could do it as I have seen many students sore, dehydrated and saying 'can't' do something only to find that they have strength beyond their conceived limits."

O'Neal didn't inform Buschow about his emergency water.

"I wanted him to accomplish getting to the water and the cave for rest," he wrote. "He asked me to go get the water for him. I said I was not going to leave him. ... Shortly thereafter I had a bad feeling and turned to Dave and found no sign of breathing."

So it used to be just macho peer pressure; evidently the 21st century version of this sort of self-hazing has acquired a faux-mystical tinge. "Your mind has set false limits for your body... The real destination is yourself." It's like the worst combination of positive business-speak, sports psychobabble and ninth-rate mysticism. For the purveyors of this stupidity, I wish the worst punishment possible: women laughing at them.