As Solid as Bedrock: Piloting a Rite of Passage Expedition
Past expedition to Crooked Lake, ON
How do you know when you’ve become a man?
Next Gen Men is a young Canadian nonprofit engaging boys and men on topics like mental health, healthy relationships and gender equality. Since I started coordinating its youth programming five years ago, we’ve delivered countless after-school programs, keynote presentations, national summits and professional development workshops. Our vision is a future in which boys and men experience less pain and cause less harm.
Over the years, the work we’ve done with young people has almost entirely been through the school system. That changed, however, when when the COVID-19 pandemic started: schools closed indefinitely, and we hit the drawing board.
As my work went virtual, I tried hard to remain grounded to my passion for outdoor adventure. In 2020, I relocated to southwestern British Columbia and spent another three seasons in the southern Rockies. In 2021, I spent multiple weeks in the backcountry of Ontario’s provincial parks.
All the while, I watched the younger generation grapple with an unprecedented crisis. It was hard. Young people faced the uncertainty and stress of a global pandemic like a rite of passage to growing up; and in the exhaustion of online learning and the isolation of social distancing, they had something taken away from them.
I found myself determined to give it back.
My colleagues and I started calling our idea the Rite of Passage Expeditions Project. We had an inchoate vision for a pair of backcountry expeditions with young adolescent boys—an opportunity to develop resilience and self-confidence by forming meaningful relationships and taking on new challenges.
The trips took place in mid-July and early August. Both were filled by seventh- and eighth-grade boys from the online youth community Next Gen Men had built on the social media platform Discord, whose parents we had developed relationships with as we weathered the pandemic together.
We spent the weeks before the first trip developing a safety plan and logistics documents, COVID precautions, communication contingencies, grocery lists and activity outlines. Then the real challenge began.
We met the youth on the outskirts of Toronto, and then headed north.
Our first night was at a basecamp west of the river near Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands Provincial Park. We spent the afternoon getting to know each other, learning how to paddle and stay safe in the backcountry.
The boys each got an expedition log, a hand-printed journal that they would use for reflection opportunities over the coming days. As we sat around the fire on the first night, I asked them to write down all the things people had ever said to bring them down.
“Over the next week, we’re going to spend time thinking and talking about the kinds of young men we want to be,” I told them. “But in order to do that, we need to let go of all of the bullshit that we’ve been told by others.
“Those are their limitations. Not ours.”
Once they finished writing, I had each of the boys rip out those pages, crumple them into their fists and drop them one-by-one into the fire. As I watched, a piece of paper with the word failure on it glowed brightly, and then was gone.
Our highest priority, as I explained to everyone involved in the trip, was safety. The next priority was an enjoyable time in the outdoors, and our third priority was the opportunity for a transformative experience.
As with all of Next Gen Men’s youth programming, the through line of each of these priorities was relationship. The friendships the boys developed with each other, with me and my co-leaders, were everything. Our connections with each other sheltered us and kept us afloat, they propelled us forward and let us breathe. They were as important to our work as the tents and paddles, and they were as ever-present as the wind in the trees.
Most of the boys had never camped before. As the first couple days of paddling wound down, they puzzled their way through open-air campfires and backcountry cooking. We played together and went swimming. I facilitated activities on positive masculinity and we traded stories as the sun sank towards the horizon.
At some point in the trip, it became clear that we were experiencing something magic.
Real growth, the kind of growth that changes you from a boy to a man, doesn’t happen in isolation from others—it happens primarily through and within our relationships with those who know us best. The question, then, is less about when you become a man, but with whom you become a man.
That transition happens over the span of months and years, not a single week. But it became clear that this trip was creating a rare focal point for these boys to be known—because rather than filtering themselves through a social media feed, a video game console or a school environment, they were just wholly and simply themselves.
And that brought this new and unfamiliar group together.
Something happens when you paddle together day after day, muscle through portages as a team, and spend each twilight laughing about something you can’t even remember the next day. It’s hard to put a word to what it is exactly. But when the mystery of that relational depth is paired with opportunities for quiet reflection and thoughtful discussion about the meaning of manhood, that something gains purpose.
Purpose matters more than perfection. It always has. So it was within the trip’s imperfections that we really found its magic. The boys used the bug repellant so much they lost the bottle. They flipped canoes and yelled and beat themselves at their own games, they ate two-and-a-half helpings as often as they could and convinced themselves that there were bears just around each bend in the river.
We stayed awake until the summer stars were spinning overhead, and we awoke with sunlight breaking through the trees. We weathered the most torrential thunderstorm I had seen in years. We talked. We sat quietly at the water’s edge. We listened. We opened ourselves up to each other, and to the wide horizon of possibility that lay before us as young men growing up.
On the final night, we gathered together one more time and went through a set of affirmation cards, working together to choose a triad of cards that represented what each member of the trip meant to us.
“What are the qualities you’ve seen in each other?” I asked the boys. “What do each of the people in this circle most deserve to recognize within themselves?”
They chose cards carefully and with unselfconscious love, spending time in thoughtful discussion about each boy and the very best of who he had been—in times of challenge, in laughter, in moments of closeness or vulnerability. I won’t give away the boys’ affirmations, but I wrote down the ones they chose for me: Loving, they said immediately. Supportive, they added. And gentle. That’s who I was to them.
We emerged from the backcountry sweaty, mud-streaked—and victorious.
As I write this, I’m conscious of how effortless and romantic I’ve made it all sound, and I know a gritty backcountry trip with innumerable obstacles and untested teenage boys can’t really have been like that. Everything looks easier when you look at it three months later.
But I’ve honed an ability to find the meaning of the time I spend in the backcountry, and I’ve grown attuned to seeing the depth within boys’ lives. So I know that when all is said and done, it was exactly like that—and more.