Training for discomfort, danger, and the unexpected.
Nathan Roark has been gathering bits of leaves and grasses the entirety of our walk along the creek and then steeply uphill, his two dogs trailing him through the tangle. He seems to be fidgeting, storing each piece in his pocket.
When we return to where we began, he hands me my own bundle of fiber—for whenever I might need it. He pulls out some of his own. He’d been making a tinder pile as he wandered through his familiar woods. He showed us how to use it.
He takes a few sticks and begins processing them, shaving notches down their length so the flame can find the driest edge. He stacks them just so. It takes him a few minutes to get a flash of fire going.
He’s calm. He has trained his nerves. This is the first rule.
“Within three to four seconds, what do you have to do after a crisis happens? You have to avert panic. You have to get your mind in control because your mind is your number one survival tool.”
“If you’re in panic mode, your mind’s not working, you’re not able to logic and think your way out. And human beings are really good at logicking—if we give ourselves credit and time.”
A Life of Preparation
It’s taken him decades of daily practice and discomfort to do this.
“We have to train our brains and train our bodies that it’s okay to be uncomfortable. It is okay for things to get hard. It is okay to be a little cold. It’s okay to be wet—as long as we know how to remedy those situations.
“One of the biggest things that I like to encourage students to do is to give themselves a multitude of mini-tests… small tests all the time so that you’re building that resilience to difficulty.”
Nathan moved from Atlanta to the mountains decades ago to attend Appalachian State University. Then he found a reason to stay.
The mountains became his home and his classroom.
“You have to build a skill set and a knowledge set,” he says, “and practice those skills and knowledge so that you have confidence in your ability to act when it comes time to act.”
Hurricane Helene
Hurricane Helene tested his trained skills as culverts clogged in the valley where his homestead and farm are. He spent hours running up and down the road in the pouring rain, clearing blockages with a shovel, tossing limbs aside, dodging falling trees.
“If those culverts go, the whole road goes,” he recalls thinking.
At one point, with water rising over the tracks, he climbed into his mini excavator and used it to claw out the debris mid-flood. The goal wasn’t to stop the storm—it was to stay ahead of it.
Then he began clearing the route and helping his neighbors. Elderly folks without access, people cut off from the main road, those who couldn’t run chainsaws or move trees—he checked in with the fire department and followed their direction to find where he was needed most.
“If I can take care of myself, then I’m not a burden. I can be an asset. And I can help the people who really need it. There’s a void in our confidence in our skill set to manage our own,” he says. “You don’t wait to learn when you need a skill. If you’re in the middle of a crisis, the time for learning is gone.”
Lessons at Buffalo Cove
Self-reliance as a gift to your family and community. This is what he teaches at Buffalo Cove Camp during the summers. Kids from the cities and suburbs—from Winston Salem, Raleigh, and Charlotte—are a familiar crowd to him. The Buckhead area of Atlanta wasn’t the kind of place he could easily learn the skills.
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He teaches fire-building, water purification, shelter-making, and plant ID, but it’s never just about the skill. He wants to wire the mind for action. Build judgment, confidence, and the habit of doing what matters under duress.
“One of the biggest things I like to encourage students to do is give themselves a multitude of mini-tests,” he says. “Small tests all the time—so that you’re building that resilience to difficulty.”
At Buffalo Cove, getting cold, getting wet, getting it wrong—it’s all part of the lesson plan.
Against Sterility
We live in a world, he says, “that’s striving for sterility.”
Everything is engineered to minimize risk, flatten difficulty, and keep us comfortable. But in doing so, we become afraid of the unknown—and unpracticed in facing it.
Rites of passage used to give young people a clear threshold to cross.
“Whatever the challenge is,” he says, “it needs to have an element of difficulty. It needs to have a little bit of danger.”
“You gain confidence through doing something hard,” he says. “Through struggling through something hard and coming out on the other side successful. And success doesn’t mean it looked good. It just means you got through it—and you learned something.”
“Throughout life, the box around you gets smaller—unless you’re intentionally stretching it through challenge and struggle. Most people let it close in. By the time they’re old, they’re afraid to do anything different or difficult.”
Kids come to camp unable to light a match. Afraid of bees. Unsure what to do without cell service. But after a few cold nights, a few blisters, a few botched fires—they begin to grow.
“The process is where the magic is,” Nathan says.
The Illusion of Knowing
What Nathan describes is the Dunning-Kruger effect produced in young people through access to endless amounts of knowledge. But they have none of the discomfort that teaches the skill, none of the failures. Their hands are clean.
“I literally have kids tell me, ‘I’m an expert at building fire. I build them all the time in Minecraft.’ That’s their answer. ‘I know how to make flint and steel fires. I do it all the time in Minecraft.’ ‘Oh, I know how to do that.’ I ask, ‘Oh yeah? How do you know?’ ‘I’ve watched it on YouTube a bunch of times.’ It’s like, cool—then do it. And they can’t.
They can’t even begin to do it. Because you’ve watched something doesn’t mean you know something. You have to connect the learning of information with the doing of the skill to own the knowledge. They won’t put themselves into the dirt and do it because that’s too uncomfortable. Video games and screens have taught us this sense of immediacy that takes away our desire and ability to work through something that’s hard.”
The Wake-Up Call
These mountains are a vacation land to a lot of people. They come here to breathe some fresh air, snap a photo of the view, and then head back down the Parkway by sunset. But Hurricane Helene was a reminder: these mountains can be unforgiving. Roads buckled. Trees crashed down. Power lines twisted into the creeks. It wasn’t the retreat people imagined—it was a reckoning.
For Nathan, it wasn’t a surprise. It was a test. And for those willing to learn, it was a wake-up call.
“Waking up,” he says, “is making that switch in your brain where you’re no longer afraid of doing hard things. You’re willing to try. You’re willing to struggle. You’re willing to learn. The mountains are a good place to learn.”