Ropes Course and a Meal

John Patrick Michael Joseph Springer: Operates a ropes course that teaches team building skills.
Barbi: wife, business partner, and Amazing Cook!
Kelsey: daughter
Lauren: Assistant

Today we finally got out of San Francisco, and headed north to Santa Rosa If it weren’t for the giant hand written Dinner With Marc sign at the edge of the road, I would have driven right by John And Barbi’s place. They lived on a dirt road that had plastic speedbumps. It looked like it was going to be a rough start when some neighbors across a field mooned me. They were hooting and hollering and waving beers. I was starting to wish for the safety of city streets.

It is good that John works in the great outdoors, because this is where his personality can fit. He reminded me of a happy sea captain. A big chest, trimmed beard, and instant smile, he invited me to spend an afternoon at his ropes course.

He has a place on the top of a beautiful hill in Occidental, which is a little lumber town with windy roads and old redwood sheds leaning this way and that. I parked the RV by the cow barn and John pulled his white diesel Mercedes next to me. From the trunk he took out a giant loop of Lycra, that stretchy synthetic fabric.
This was the first “team building experience”. Four people get inside the loop, making the four corners of a box. Looking at the person diagonally across from you, you run towards them, high-fiving so as not to crash into each other. When you hit the Lycra where they just were standing, it absorbs you, you spin yourself around as it shoots you back to where you started. The amazing thing is, while you are doing this, the other two people who were diagonally across from each other are doing this as well. It begins to look like a stripped down trailer park version of the giant round metal cage at the county fair where two motorcyclists ride bisecting paths, narrowly avoiding each other as they go faster and faster.

As far as learning a team-building lesson, perhaps it is the notion that energy can be transferred, not lost, and my flight is based on my partner’s spring. Working together, we can create a Midway attraction with just a few feet of man made fabric.

The next lesson was in tight rope walking a steel cable that stretched between two live oaks, about twenty feet apart. The wire was strung across a three hundred foot deep gorge, and John had a grease gun in a fitting, pumping lubricant across my path.

“Imagine this field is burning, and the only way to live is to make it across the wire. I will release the leopards in just a few minutes, so take a minute and decide how you will live to eat dinner tonight.”

These corporate team-building retreats are vicious! No wonder America is the only superpower standing…

In reality, the wire is a foot over solid ground. But John has a dream job. He spent his youth traveling the world, seeing how people made money. He has started businesses and invented things. Now he is married and settled, but it seems the world comes to him. All types of people visit his FourWinds adventure program: HIV + support groups, cancer survivor groups, troubled youth programs, CEO’s of major corporations, and family reunions.

Coming up from San Francisco and stepping into the forest instantly calms me down. Is it because I’m not looking at strangers, trying to digest the information their clothes are communicating? I’m looking at trees, and they all seem friendly. The sky is clear, the view includes the islands off the coast of S.F, rolling hills, forest, clouds, and not one car with a booming system, no panhandlers, no ads for watches, shoes, or weight-loss. In four hours I’ll be looking for a coffee shop, but until then, nature is perfect.

John has more stories than a really tall building.

Let’s look at the highlight reel:

Attempted to develop disposable kitty litter trays, one-use plastic liners that come pre-packed with litter. He wound up in the patent office in Virginia, and discovered hundreds of similar ideas, but the lack of recyclability changed his mind.

He and a friend built a raft out of telephone poles and loaded a couch on it, along with a freezer that worked as a refrigerator, and a tent. They set out down the Mississippi river, getting caught in whirlpools and shoreside bars. There were many adventures.

Quotes from John:

“I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt”

“I’m a raging extrovert.”

“The Universe is made of stories.”

After getting tied to a harness and climbing fifty feet up the side of a pine, Lauren hooked me onto the zip wire. Lauren volunteered to come up from Berkeley to help John lead me through the course, and she stayed for dinner. She was just back from Africa, where she had her hair wrapped in tight coils of fiber. She was so much more adventurous than me! I inched my way to the edge of the wooden platform, looking through pine branches, out to the field where the wire was attached to another pine. It looked to be about 250 feet I would be swinging through the air. But I don’t like heights, so it was actually hard to see, since I was wincing and feeling my stomach

It is tradition to stop at the bar on the way back from the woods. It is a small town affair, across from a gigantic hardware store that sells tractors and rocks, along with all the stuff a city hardware store may carry.

With that in mind, it was a learning experience. We needed more time with John. His wife and daughter were very shy because of the camera. So again I have to balance the dinner tour now with the ability to get the message to a large audience. I do not want to be an artist in my spare time. I have no spare time with a project this huge. So I need to think about exposure. It is such a strange dichotomy.

Here is what we learned.

Spend more time with people, so that those who are nervous around a camera will get used to it and forget it is there.
I am approaching these dinners with the intent of sharing them with a larger audience. It is an art project, not a personal one. Art needs audience. So I need to interact more with my hosts. John had such amazing stories, I sat and listened in awe. He is a powerful speaker, he is even a motivational speaker sometimes, so he has perfected his story telling.

We stayed late at the bar talking about so much stuff, a lot about the future of this project, about finding a meaning it someday, even if we couldn’t right now. We talked about the dinner last night with the burning man guy. Lauren is a part of that community. John made an interesting observation about both himself and Larry, who were both counterculture guys who now have a CEO position, if not the title. There is a burden of being in charge.
“Being from the sixties, we was two types of leadership. Lead from the front or from the back. You can stand up and tell people what to do, or you can be the guy from the back of the crowd that makes a comment that galvanizes everybody, solidifies the course. And then it flows under its own power.”
Larry and John are trying to allow for both methods, and it is a struggle.

Dinner
Barbi made our dinner plates into beautiful pictures. Is there a connection between palette and palate? A flat board to mix paints, and a refined sense of taste? It was thin noodles as the base, with giant prawns and scallops ringing the edge of the plate. In the center was perfectly grilled salmon topped with ricotta. Sun dried tomatoes floated along the top of a white sauce. And we screwed up opening night by coming in late and then taking some time to set up the camera, which is always a slow process. The thing is, it was still delicious. She had the fine Waterford Crystal out, and filled with wine and water. What a change from last night, eating cheap pasta in a crowded RV on plastic plates, drinking beer from a bottle.