And it was a mess, all right. Half a dozen people lay around in various tortured or unconscious attitudes on the grass. Two others were running in circles, screaming hysterically. We paired off to help them, as we'd been trained to do. Trouble was, almost all the others were decades younger than I, so I got there last, and the only unattended victim left was one of the running screamers. She was pretty speedy and obviously frightened out of her wits, so I couldn't catch her. Luckily, one other of our group was like me unengaged and could run like a deer. So she caught her, and between us we got her to lie down and take her hands off her ears, which she said were ringing and hurting horribly. They were bloody. Ruptured eardrums, most likely.

My partner took her pulse, which was all right. Her breathing was normal. Skin pink; no shock. I took off her shoes and socks to check for burns. None. She was still trembling, and couldn't tell us her name or the year or where she was; she just stared blankly up at us when we asked her. So I played my trump card. "Who's the President of the United States?" I asked her.

"Oh! That's not fair!" she cried. It was the quickest I'd ever seen anyone recover from such a painful and disorienting experience. Then she told us that we had done just the right things for somebody in her situation – vital signs, inspection for injuries, communication, reassurance, and keeping her from hurting herself further.

It was one of a series of scenarios staged during a two-day Wilderness First Aid course (WFA; first aid people and first responders use more acronyms and initials than government and the military put together) taught by an organization called SOLO (Stonehearth Open Learning Opportunities; see what I mean?). Most of the 24 students were recent college graduates. We were all were taking it for personal reasons, to get recertified – necessary every two years – or to get certification in order to work for outdoor-oriented recreation or education programs. In my case, I occasionally accompany Elderhostelers on hikes in the woods, and in this litigious age, sponsors need to assure participants that their leaders are up to date in first aid. My last course was during my Outward Bound days, back in the 60s. The human body hasn't changed much in the last forty years, but the practice of first aid definitely has. Daniel Boone couldn't get a job as a trip leader unless he'd passed a CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) session with an inflatable manikin.

Our instructor was a first responder from downstate New York, clearly up on the latest information and techniques and full of horror stories of mishap and intervention. (Much older than he and similarly experienced, I thought my stories much better and grislier than his, so if the course had been a day or two longer, we'd have been bound to tangle.) He took us through the SOLO course book, which is probably one of the best ever done, with plenty of photos and graphics. Because of his professional status, with its greater exposure to malpractice lawsuits, he was strong on protocol: keeping regular written notes of a patient's complaints, progress, or regress; attempts to treat or secure further help; and suggestions as to what might be wrong. Most of us amateurs, realistically, wouldn't be quite as punctilious about writing it down, unless we were forced to leave a patient in order to go for help, but the discipline was valuable in focusing our treatment.

I was fascinated, during our after-supper CPR class, to see how radically that practice has changed since the last time I was involved in it, less than three years ago. Instead of three chest compressions and a breath – the old one-two-three-breathe technique – it's now considered more important to keep the heart compressions going. So it's now thirty straight compressions at the rate of 100 per minute, using the old Bee Gees' song "Stayin' Alive" to keep the rhythm going. Then it's two breaths and thirty more compressions, keeping it up for thirty minutes before quitting – except in cases of drowning, lightning injury, or inhaled chemicals. There probably aren't many of us who can keep up that regimen for thirty solid minutes. After five or ten, we'd be looking hard for somebody else to help out. (I changed the tune, too, every few minutes, to increase my longevity; I preferred Harry Belafonte's "Matilda, she take me money and run Venezuela," and wondered how the effect on the patient might differ from reviving to one tune or the other.

A great weekend, well spent. We splinted each other's fractures with the stuff we normally would carry in our day packs, wrestled with decisions about staying with the patient or going for help, and rehearsed how to guess intelligently at unseen injuries. It wasn't all dead serious. During a discussion of hypothermia, we heard about people whose core temperatures had dropped far below normal and who yet had survived. I interjected that occasionally intoxicated people, their blood alcohol level actually helping to prevent freezing, were found extremely cold and still alive in snowbanks. "Oh, yeah," said one recent college graduate. "UVM."

For me the big message was that, although we may have a lifetime's worth of knowledge in wilderness first aid, the techniques and base assumptions change so regularly that today's best practice may not be tomorrow's. So I'll have to take it again in two years for recertification. I wonder if by then I'll be able to catch the screaming runner with her hands cupped over her ears.