By Wilderness studies instructor Bill Webb has gotten to know his students as more than just faces staring blankly back at him in the bowels of a lecture hall. After a 32-year run as a teacher of backpacking, kayaking, mountaineering and other outdoor activities, Webb will be retiring from Cal State Long Beach at the end of the semester.
During his years of class trips, he’s seen students at their best – at moments of significant self-growth and achieving goals once thought impossible. He’s seen them at their worst, too – feeling cranky without sleep and access to modern-day amenities in a cell phone-less land.
He even has the pictures to prove it; outside the wilderness studies laboratory are dozens of pictures of students exploring the desert, camping in the snow, climbing the rocks of Joshua Tree and kayaking through Utah’s Lake Powell.
Despite Webb’s love for the outdoors and its activities, he said what’s been the most rewarding aspect of his career are the people.
“You have to love people first, not the skill, not the activity,” Webb said. “Because you’re leading people … [I set up] the circumstances by which people can learn about themselves, learn about the environment, learn about outdoor skills, and then seeing those things happen, seeing people grow.”
Webb’s facilitation of people in the outdoors during in his classes has even led to, he said, some 72 marriages.
“I think it’s because when they get out in the wilderness, that little candy-coated, social, sweet veneer we all have is struck away. And the person is as they are,” Webb said. “It’s no wonder to me that people have gotten together, because they get to see the whole thing, what they can live with and what they can’t live with.”
Under Webb’s tenure, the wilderness studies program has grown from humble beginnings. What were once a few extension courses eventually became a full certificate program and series of atypical college electives.
“In the beginning we didn’t have a laboratory or a classroom like we do now,” Webb said. “We had a little storage shed … that we tried to keep everything [in]. We didn’t have any kayaks. We just had six canoes, just several ropes. It was pretty much bare.”
Gradually, though, he said the program’s supplies got bigger.
“We just had to start acquiring things, little by little. Some of it I purchased from my own funds so I could make things work. The university, little by little, was able to help support us a little more. So now we’ve got a fair amount of equipment to support all the classes. It’s not everything I’d like to have, but it’s a lot compared to where we were.”
Webb’s career, however, might have been very different had he decided to stick with some of his initial plans: going to law school.
“But then I got to thinking that I sure didn’t want to be cooped up in some law library or law office somewhere and having to deal with people’s problems, as opposed to helping people in a more positive way, helping them grow,” Webb said.
While helping teach backpacking classes and getting his bachelor’s in history and physical anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, Webb had a life-changing “what if.”
“At the time when I was getting started, the outdoor field was growing in terms of people’s interests of going out and being involved with nature,” he said. “I just thought that, gosh, it was a real possibility that it could happen in the colleges … if I could make it work, I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
To expand from his already comprehensive outdoor knowledge, Webb began enrolling in various outdoor studies programs, including National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyo. It was there that Webb got to work with and teach for one of his great mentors: founder of American mountaineering Paul Petzoldt. Webb later got his master’s in recreation administration from CSULB.
When asked what his favorite memories were throughout the years, Webb became hard-pressed to pick just one.
“I can think back from every one of the class trips and point out things that have been amazing, sometimes just little things: getting up in the morning on a winter trip and looking out the tent and the snow on the trees glistening and it being maybe brutally cold but incredibly beautiful at the same time – kind of those juxtaposed things.”
Webb said the students today and 20 years ago still have one thing that hasn’t changed.
“There’s still that awe and interest of what happens beyond the edge of the city, particularly for those students that are urban-born, urban-raised and have not had that much opportunity,” Webb said. “I guess what reflects that is really that the classes always fill up, and students are always amazed when they get out there at the beauty and what’s it like.”
Webb said he was also proud his safety record.
“We’ve brought everybody back from every trip,” Webb said. “There’s been very few injuries, [and] very few people have been sick for one reason or another.”
Webb’s pending retirement has already been felt throughout the department and university.
“We’re going to miss him greatly,” said kinesiology department Chair Sharon Guthrie. “He’s been able to take students of all different ability groupings … and through that process not only do they learn the skills associated through that activity, but it helps them improve their self-esteem as well.”
Stacia Ticer, the kinesiology department administrative coordinator, said of Webb, “What really impressed me about Bill, especially in these last months, has been the way he’s conveyed his passion about wilderness studies, especially about the students, just making sure they are equipped with the things they need in life – not just wilderness.”
