Three days without a shower, 55 blindfolds and 125 pounds of candy are all you need to turn 109 women into one female force of nature.
The "Becoming an Outdoors-Woman" weekend, sponsored by Maryland's Department of Natural Resources last week at Sandy Hill Park in Cecil County, is designed to help women become self-sufficient outdoors and inhale as much food as possible in a three-day period.
A mix of indoor seminars and hands-on classes in everything from fly fishing to small-motorboat handling, the weekend offered bonding, bloating and body odor.
Put your stereotypes on hold. Nobody whined about the lack of a mall (there was no need, what with all the "Becoming an Outdoors-Woman" merchandise for sale in the Bay Lodge meeting center). No, "ick, a mosquito," or, "yucky, a worm."
No stilettos and panty hose, either; just a bland bunch of baggy T's, shorts, jeans and boots, with the occasional J. Crew cover girl.
There was nothing that screamed "woman" about the event, though we were concerned that an underwire bra might throw off our compass bearings. And it's kind of hard to shoot a bow and arrow when you have breasts. The only things that belied our ruggedness were the cell phones and pagers.
OK, now take your stereotypes off hold. For this girlie, urban, walking cliche with a penchant for platform sneakers and a limited roughing-it resume, it was a little different.
I went to sixth-grade camp reluctantly. I also went to the desert in my grandpa's orange VW van many moons ago. That's it.
The only fishing I'd ever done was for compliments.
So I was in for a moderated "Deliverance." I didn't have to squeal like a pig, but I did learn to talk like a turkey, among other things.
Here's what the weekend taught me.
Be more prepared than the Boy Scouts:
If you're a smoker facing three days of estrogen exile, take more than one pack of cigarettes.
Especially if you encounter former smokers so giddy about hanging with the girls that they're inspired to smoke a few of yours.
"Here I am smoking, like in junior high," said Karen Lazar, 52, lighting up her, or, rather, my second consecutive Marlboro Light while sitting on a picnic table.
The striking Annapolis resident, multi-toned silver hair pulled into a thick ponytail, said she quit years ago but likes to sneak one every now and then. I was happy to be an enabler.
Also, read the information on what to take before you go. Fifteen minutes into the drive to the camp, I realized I was supposed to take bed linens. My driver graciously turned the car around. I ran up to my apartment and shoved what was on my bed into a trash bag.
L Don't take a plug-in alarm clock if there is no electricity.
Choosing a "late" cabin is a mistake. My cabin-mates giggled and tittered late into the night like schoolgirls, talking about everything from orgasms to the Starr report.
Scope the clean bathrooms:
Grown women were not meant to use bathrooms designed for outdoorsy 10-year-old boys. The stalls were so small that your knees hit the door when you sat on the toilet. One woman had to be informed that the urinal was, indeed, not a sink.
Some outdoorswomen looked at the bright side.
"If we had outhouses, that would be pretty gross," said Heather Creason, 23. The Littlestown, Pa., resident is the manager of Claire's Boutique in Towson.
Hello! Anyone notice the swank bathrooms in the Bay Lodge? They were clean, huge and air-conditioned. I had some of my best times of the entire weekend in those bathrooms.
But they had no showers. And what passed for showers was enough to make one resolve not to take one.
"The water was hot for approximately 25 seconds," said Diane Prince, 42, from Bethesda.
Shunning the shower became a badge of outdoorswoman honor.
Turkey hunting is a lot like dating:
"You're going to talk to this turkey," said camouflage-hat-clad Denny Price, the instructor for "Let's Talk Turkey." "You're going to be able to tell what he's saying to you."
The sit-down seminar gave a step-by-step approach to hunting turkey. We all got out our own manual turkey calls.
Tuned to sound like randy female turkeys, they are convenient for both turkey hunting and bar crawling. Basically, they think they're going to have sex, and then you kill them.
The tips for hunting sounded more like a motivational dating class than instruction on how to bag wild game, which is kind of the same thing anyway.
1. You don't want to be too far away from the turkey, because you don't want a hen coming in between him and you.
2. You may have to talk trash to a hen to send her away.
3. If he doesn't call -- I mean, gobble -- back every time, don't get angry.
The class was filled with seasoned deer hunters way into the subject matter. Nothing made them flinch. Not even when Denny informed us that the best way to kill a turkey with a bow and arrow is to shoot the arrow directly into its butt.
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was time for a raffle.
I won a deluxe turkey-hunting getaway. I was glad the other women didn't have their guns.
Learn to live without alcohol:
"When's happy hour?"
"I was going to bring a cooler."
"It's not too late."
So went the dialogue of two antsy outdoorswomen sitting in the back row at orientation. And they weren't the only ones with booze on the brain during this alcohol-free weekend.
There were those who took matters into their own hands. A mother and daughter, Lee Ellen Brown and Vickie Smith, ventured into the nearby town of North East to get liquored up both nights. They drank margaritas, beer and a variety of mixed drinks named for Lewinsky-esque sexual activities.
"There wasn't much else going on," Smith said. "I get outdoors, and I have to find a bar."
Smith, who stumbled into her cabin at 3 on Saturday morning, added that her alcohol adventures took away from her experience a little. She had to sneak out of her fly-fishing class to take a shower.
Pointing to Brown, Smith added, "She's the crazy one who was singing with the band."
Please, show some discretion, ladies! When I went out Saturday night, I only got slightly buzzed.
See no evil and SHUT UP:
We had been told there would be a night hike the first evening.
Harmless enough. We all could have benefited from a little activity after gorging on goose and deer sausage. But this wouldn't be your everyday night hike. This one involved blindfolds.
"I can't force you, though I may try," joked our guide, Eric Savage, a naturalist with the DNR.
It put the "bound" in Outward Bound.
It was meant to be some type of sensory stimulation/group trust/ undeniably surreal exercise. We formed a single-file line of co-dependency, grasping backpacks, bra straps, shoulders, etc., and ventured into the obscured wild, into a potentially transcendental "Carlos Castaneda moment," as one camper put it, referring to the New Age guru.
Unfortunately, the women in the back of the line wouldn't shut up and let the chirping katydids and crackling leaves flood our ears. Instead, they sang the title song from "Hair."
Maybe they were nervous. Maybe they were scared.
After all, we were 55 blindfolded women in the wilderness being led by a man who clearly enjoyed bondage jokes.
After baby-stepping through the woods for about 15 minutes, we were told to stand still.
Eric ruined our night vision by making us put a hand over one eye while we focused the other on a candle. He did impressive owl calls. He passed around tins of unidentified spices and such and made us smell them.
He passed out Wintergreen Lifesavers. When you crunch them in the dark, they make a spark. We made breath-freshener fireworks. I was facing a weekend without showers, but at least my mouth would smell good.
Don't smoke and fish:
This doesn't mean you can't smoke fish.
Once you've caught one, you can do whatever you want with it. Fry it. Bake it. Smoke it.
This is assuming you do catch one. I didn't. And I think it was because I was smoking.
That's all that set me apart from Debby Bean of Nokesville, W.Va., who caught two little yellow perch and a white one within 10 minutes.
Well, that and the fact that the 44-year-old beauty salon manager has been fishing since she was a child and had managed to hook her worm without going into convulsions.
We were on a pier. It was sunny and pretty and the water was really blue.
The class proved you didn't have to be a seasoned fisherwoman to excel. One after another, most of the basic anglers reeled 'em in.
However, some participants were in denial.
"If I catch a fish, I think I'll be upset about it, so I'm going to stop fishing," said Susan Koch, 26, a free-lance graphic designer from Baltimore. "I'm just afraid of catching fish."
But she apparently wasn't afraid of Starburst, as she dipped into the open bag for the umpteenth time before declaring: "I'm ready for lunch."
Eat like a hog:
The open bag of Starburst represents one of the weekend's many randomly available snacks.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, wild game tastings, S'Mores and 125 pounds of Goetze's candy made for one stomach-distending trip.
The madness came to a head in the outdoor cooking class.
"If you leave here hungry, it's your fault," said our instructor, a lanky, aproned cowboy named Dave Manning.
We ate about 10 outdoor entrees and about four desserts before noon. Five straight hours of noshing.
We were outside, surrounded by pine trees, and there were lots of bugs with wings flying about as we baked chocolate chip cookies and pineapple-upside-down cake in cardboard-box ,X ovens lined with tin foil.
"I'm glad I saved outdoor cooking for the last day," said Nydia Aviles. "I don't have to eat anything for the rest of the day."
Make that the rest of my life.
We waddled to lunch.
Then we packed up and said goodbye.
Now that I've done my time in the outdoors, I'm proud to say I'm no longer just a girlie, urban, walking cliche. I'm a girlie, urban, walking cliche who can no longer fit into her clothes and really needs to shower.
Call of the wild
What: "Becoming an Outdoors-Woman" weekend
Next session: April 16-18 at Broad Creek Scout Reservation, Harford County
Cost: $175
Call: 301-478-2146 or 410-260-8919
On the Web: http: //www1.uwsp.edu/gen- eral/commun/bow/index.htm
Pub Date: 9/21/98