Click images for caption and to enlarg

Click to close Image by: B.Z. Kondracki

In the classic book, Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk relates a tale of his first buffalo hunt. Young men jonesing for the hunt were told by their elder male advisors that they could kill what they wanted to, but if they didn't bring the meat home to the widows and orphans and families who had no hunters in them, then they were less than dirt. Their testosterone, no matter how amazing an energy, would count for nothing.

Those Lakota boys were lucky, methinks, to have older men to initiate them so properly. When I read a lot of what passes for "adventure" or "nature" writing these days, I am struck by the thought that what the (overwhelmingly male) writers and subjects of these pieces seem to be really after is initiation. They didn't get it from their absent male elders, and so like middle-class versions of gang members, they go seeking it, via insane exploits, from their peers - or, in moments of true collusion with the Rugged Individualistic b.s. they grew up with, totally alone.

Yes, I am of the school that thinks Chris McCandless of Into the Wild fame was a selfish idiot. It's not that he shouldn't have gone out there. A vision quest can be a mighty good thing. But it only works if you have a culture to school you in it before you go, and to hold your visions for you, and help you manifest them in the world, once you return. Otherwise, I don't care how many peaks you have bagged, how many canyons you've slicked down while smoking dope - your exploits don't mean a thing.

I've been thinking of this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because I have a 9-year-old son. My most powerful image of him outdoors this month is on a battlefield. We toured the South for 10 days this winter, and visited Chickamauga National Battlefield just south of Chattanooga, in northern Georgia. A preserved bit of woods amidst suburban sprawl, deer grazed in fields left as they were in 1863. Two historic cabins, scenes of much fighting, remain as well, and at the edge of the woods monuments are erected where Union and Confederate lines formed and fell and reformed.

Casualties were abominably high, with over a third of many Union regiments either dead or wounded. I tromped around on fallen leaves and grass stubble and wondered how much blood fed the soil there. My son puppied up to cannons, imagined sharp-shooting from woods, and my husband read the plaques in a kind of fever. I glommed onto pictures of the cabins turned into medical disaster areas, with injured men foundering in the mud, no doubt screaming in agony. I came, of course, to that most feminine of conclusions about war - that it's a senseless waste.

But, sadly, war is still the only real chance for initiation young men get in our culture. Almost every vet I have talked to says that if it wasn't for Vietnam, or Desert Storm, or Iraq, they would have been in jail. They have other problems - "There is not a night I don't hear gunfire when I try to sleep," says one - and God knows how many lives have been ruined instead of ultimately made wiser by our nation's increasingly vapid warfare. But when I asked my husband, a non-warrior, why he was drawn to war, he said: "Because it's real."

No doubt organizations like Outward Bound and National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) have been trying to fix the initiation problem for years. NOLS did my husband, for one, a lot of good. But those programs are on the wane in popularity, alas, and I see instead a steady diet of what is really conquest literature still emanating from magazines like Outside and Men's Journal. Black Elk would be appalled.

My son does not want to go to war. He knows the difference between the fake guns he likes to shoot and the real war he might someday be asked to fight. Yet he does need to be initiated, and by male elders, not me. So I am scheming how to set this up, be it NOLS or a long and gritty service to a Third World village or a properly orchestrated hunting expedition. I want him to learn the beauty of his male strength in the context of understanding that it has to be brought home to serve the greater good. Otherwise, it's a waste of a powerful force. A damn waste.

Katharine Niles is the author of the award-winnning novel The Basket Maker.