Professor Hardcore's Learning Curve Volume 3: Back to the Wild from 2525 (Professor Hardcore's Learning Curve: Back to the Wild from 2525)

Professor Hardcore's Learning Curve Volume 3: Back to the Wild from 2525 (Professor Hardcore's Learning Curve: Back to the Wild from 2525)

Professor Hardcore’s Learning Curve: Back to the Wild from 2025 (4 vols.) is more than an Appalachian Trail hiking story. It is about the subject’s whole life and why it took him sixty-three years to complete the trail. How does a naive, spoiled, nerdy, pretentious Lutheran minister’s son come to be Professor Hardcore? Worsening post-polio scoliosis (up to 110 degrees) and the manifold responsibilities of an English professor/outdoor educator married with two children are the physical challenges. But these are nothing compared to the slow learning curve of this escapist dreamer. For reasons to be revealed, his story has a meta-dystopian framing with three narrators, each with his own font color. His chief editor, Overton, is an android with learning capabilities. His AI learning curve mirrors the subject’s and addresses the threat of climate change, of nuclear holocaust, of reoccurring pandemics, of out-of-control artificial intelligence, and the value of wilderness. Volume 3 has two parts: Part VII. NOLS and After (1985-1990) Part VIII. AT, Auyuittuq, Alaska (1990 -1996). Part VII opens with his first deep wilderness experience in a twenty-four-day Outdoor Educators course with National Outdoor Leadership School in the Beartooths in Montana. Hiking on the AT continues with Joe and the ODC in NC and VA and the challenging Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine. Following Joe’s lead again, he transitions from hiking to road cycling, does a century and many other rides with Joe and his new cycling contingent. Deserted by Joe as a hiking guide, he returns to the AT with a new mentor, Dave Ganoe, ex-USAF Lt. and MP, and the new director of the Algonquin Orientation. He does Algonquin again every August, and every January there are ODC ski trips to the MOC House In the Laurentians (QC), rock climbing in the fall, and caving in the early spring. Linking up with a Salisbury group of professionals and their families (the “Eastern Shore Mountain Goats”), he begins hiking hut-to-hut in the Presidentials and serving as Hut Naturalist. In 1987 he is promoted to full professor. With all the sitting he is doing reading for class, marking papers, and doing research projects, a pinched nerve in my lower back begins to affect his right quad; tingling and numbness occur with more frequency. Part VIII. His book on Restoration and eighteenth-century marriage poetry, under progress for many years, is published by University of Georgia Press (1993); he begins a new project on literature of the Arctic. Despte increasing scoliosis and quad issues, he does increasingly more AT hiking in GA, NC and ME with Dave Ganoe, and ODC students, especially NOLS alumni, Jeff and Tina. He picks up a new hiking partner: Harry Womack, a near genius, slightly autistic Biology professor masquerading as a good ol’ boy. MOC winter break ski trips continue with increasingly ambitious forays into the backcountry. In 1992, with three others, he does an epic three-day retracing of the 64 km. Loppet route from Camp Mercier to Parc du Mont Ste Anne in Quebec in minus 30-degree C. weather. That summer he does an eleven-day intensive OB Course in the Collegiate Peaks of the Sawatch Range, hiking some of the highest peaks in Colorado. Following his new research interest to the arctic, he takes on Blackfeather Outfitters Auyuittuq Traverse across Baffin Island. The total distance of the trek is supposed to be sixty miles, but 25 treacherous miles through glacier-filled passes gets added. Two years later, to research for his book on Arctic narratives and motivated by his opposition to the plan to drill oil in the 1002 area in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he undertakes a month-long Alaska trip. He visits Fairbanks, Denali NP, the village of Kaktovic on the North Slope (Inupiat), Arctic Village (Gwich’in), and canoes down the Noatak River north of the Brooks Range.