Back in 1996, every week brought a new dream of escape from the routine drudgery of work: a Ph.D. program in literature at a university in the Pacific Northwest; a tour in the Peace Corps. It was for the latter that I was determined to rack up valuable skills when I enrolled in a weekend Wilderness First Aid course.

Up to that point, my wilderness experience consisted of family camping trips in our Viking pop-up trailer: storing food in the car, taking tame nature walks with rangers, and walking to the bathhouse with my toothbrush and flashlight before bed.

But that didn't stop me from signing up from this hardcore class. Here's what I learned:

• An Epi-pen is a really useful thing.
  
• I can set a broken femur with a stick, a bandana, and a tin coffee cup.
  
• Never remove the foreign object from an impaled person. It will probably do more harm than good, and often the victim is doing just fine, like the boy who walked into the first aid cabin with his icepick going in one side of his abdomen and out the other.
  
• just remembered -- this is a good one: To correct a dislocated patella (that's a kneecap, for you laypeople), soothe the dislocatee; tell him you will count to 10 and shove it back in place and it won't hurt a bit. Then count to 3 and give it a good whack. It's going to hurt like hell.
  

So enchanted was I with our teachers' stories -- one was a street EMT-turned-wilderness EMT, and one a returned Doctors Without Borders volunteer -- that I

• for weeks afterward, fell asleep at night reading the class textbook, Medicine for the Backcountry, in bed. Lacerations . . . hypothermia . . . concussion . . . ah, sweet dreams.
  
• signed up for first aid and CPR at the Red Cross, so I could start working my way to being an EMT. My certifications expired after a year and I've still never renewed them.
  
• studied Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival, so I could learn even higher level skills, like how to survive in an igloo, or make insulating layers of clothes from leaves, or heat rocks in a fire and bury them in the dirt under my shelter for warmth.