By Daniel Wirtheim, Features Editor

Published in print Apr. 15, 2015

When my brother was in college, he would take regular cross-country bicycle trips. He would take the bus from Ohio State University, where he was enrolled, and get off in North Carolina, where he would ride to Florida, stopping at campsites along the way.

On one such trip, my brother found himself at a hostel in the thick of the Georgia wetlands. “The Hostel in the Forest,” is what it was called. What was supposed to be one night became five and then seven, and by the time he was back at the university, all he could talk about was this forest hostel.

I was 16 at the time, and was sort of a jerk, like most 16-year-olds. It was spring break and my mother figured that I could benefit from some brother-to-brother bonding time, so she suggested I accompany my brother back to the forest hostel.

Riding in the car with my brother and his girlfriend was probably the first exposure I had to college radio. I remember a lot of Echo and the Bunnymen, Captain Beefhart and DJ Shadow. This was my first exposure to anything outside of my home life, which was living with my conservative parents and their protestant work ethic.

Living 16 years in that condition made it hard to relate to the people I would meet at the forest hostel. I had never been naked in front of anyone and I didn’t know what it meant to share in a communal setting.

It was somewhere near the Georgia coast that we pulled off of the interstate onto an old dirt road shrouded in palmettos that took us deep into the forest. We bumped along the road for at least two miles until we arrived at an open enclave of wooden huts. There was a platform extending between the biggest two—the library and the kitchen—and we could see even more huts high up in the trees.

A tour around the encampment exposed a man-made swimming hole with a rope swing, a glass yoga house that could be reached by a small raft and the clearest lake I had ever seen. I spent most of my week canoeing around that lake, or feeding chickens with another boy around my age named Sage. It was around the fifth day, if my memory is correct, that the Blackfeet Indians arrived.

To me, they looked like everyone else at the hostle—long haired and wearing very little. They came every full moon, or at least that’s how their story went. On such nights, they would build a temporary sweat lodge where they would expel all of their body’s antioxidants. I later learned, through Wikipedia, that in days of old these sweat lodges were used to rid the body of its scent, so as to be unnoticed during a hunt.

Of course, I wanted to be a part of the sweat lodge. There was some deliberation as to whether or not I could handle such a ceremony. Was it wise to allow a 16-year-old boy, who lives his life by television and sugary beverages to sweat every drop of water out of his tiny little body while surrounded by a dozen older naked dudes? It was decided that yes, I could join the Blackfeet in their Sweat Lodge Ceremony. So on the day of the full moon, I drank water until I could hardly stand it. So that at dawn, I met my brother, the Blackfeet and a few other travelers at large fire by the lake. It was the hottest fire I had ever seen. I remember it hurt to look at.

We were all given some tobacco to throw into the fire, some words were spoken and afterwards, the ceremony leaders pulled at least eight red-hot rocks out of the fire and placed them in a tee-pee which was covered in comforters.

We filed into the tee-pee and sat in a circle. The ceremony leaders then poured lavender water onto the rocks, letting the aromatic steam fill the tee-pee. I don’t remember much of what was said inside, I just remember feeling that I had to keep breathing, to hold my head close to the ground where the steam was not so intense so I could prove myself worthy of the Sweat Lodge Ceremony. There were those who left before me, but I knew I had to stay. It felt like a grueling hour or so until everyone decided that it was time to leave the tee-pee and run naked into the lake in the full moonlight.

It was years later, the spring break during my sophomore year at UNCG, that I convinced my friend Spencer to accompany me back to the hostel.

I wasn’t sure if it would be the same, as imagination often has a way of exaggerating and eschewing certain facts over others. This time, I knew many more college radio bands and was ready to fully appreciate the hostel.

Spencer and I rode that same dirty road back to the little enclave I had seen years before. Everything was the same as I recalled, and I was glad to find the fire pit by the lake, an artifact proving that the Sweat Lodge Ceremony was no delusion.

Now that I was older, I was taken more seriously, and while the younger kids fed the chickens, Spencer and I spent our spring break chopping wood, building huts and doing other helpful chores for the hostel people, while intermittently stopping for beer breaks. We felt that it was the manner in which spring breaks were meant to be enjoyed.

During our nights at the hostel, we would ride our canoe to the center of the lake with the other guests, to watch the fireflies and sip cold beer.

The mystery of the Blackfeet Sweat Lodge was resolved, only to be replaced by questions of whether or not we would be able to re-enter society with our newly founded spring break state of mind.