There are many kinds of Mainers. There are the artsy types, the sporty types, the down-home, back-to-the-land types. I am of the metropolitan variety, a relatively new breed here. I buy discount designer clothing online, I love honking my car horn, and, yes, I enjoy large crowds - preferably yelling unintelligibly at each other over neon-colored cocktails and a thunderous bass beat. My Maine exists within the confines of Portland's city streets. So what if I never learned to ski? I tried snowboarding once, and it was cold and scary and dangerous.At age twenty-eight, I've grown used to my comfy Portland life.

Which is why, when Down East asked me to write an article about a city girl learning to get rugged, my first thought was, "Gosh, I don't want to get hurt." But I was tired of having to explain to my out-of-state friends that this lifelong Mainer has about as many outdoor skills as the late, great Eva Gabor. And all it would take was little more than a week.

Since 2000, L.L. Bean has offered a series of one-hit-wonder workshops called Walk-On Adventures through their Outdoor Discovery School. These daily lessons run throughout Maine's warmer months and cover the bare basics of some of the area's staple rugged activities in two and a half hours or less. They depart directly from the flagship store in Freeport, cost fifteen dollars a pop, and take everyone who walks in off the street, on a first-come, first-serve basis. Bean offers four walk-ons from late May to early October - kayaking, clay shooting, archery, and fly-casting. They also run a couple during the winter, for those who are keen to interrupt their shopping to go on a sub-zero snowshoeing jaunt or cross-country skiing trip.

I drove up to Bean on a Friday afternoon and signed up for the kayaking trip at a little kiosk next to L.L. Bean's shoe department. A few minutes later, a large green van pulled up to the door. Harry, the grandfatherly bus driver, gathered me and my fellow participants - twelve of us in all - and drove us away from Bean and down a quiet stretch of road dotted with reclusive country homes to Wolfe's Neck Farm, about ten minutes outside of town. Along the way Harry, though a man of few words, made sure none of us missed the major landmarks.

"Horses," he announced. And: "There's some cows."

Our two instructors gave us our gear and a quick safety speech and marched us through cow pastures to L.L. Bean's kayak dock on an inlet of Casco Bay. After a brief paddling lecture, we climbed into our boats and made our clumsy way downstream. As we paddled along the tree-clogged shore, instructor Stephen gave a short talk about the colonial mast trade that flourished around Freeport during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then he pointed at an osprey nest in one of the shoreline trees.

"See it?" he said, motioning toward a barely discernible clump at the top of a birch.

After some discussion, everyone managed to find the nest except for one guy who kept saying "Where?" and paddling his kayak back and forth. His girlfriend pointed for a while at the nest and then gave up.

Monday morning's archery instructor could probably shoot an arrow through another arrow like Kevin Costner did in the 1991 blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Sadly, no arrows were sliced in two during the archery walk-on, but our instructor, Dana Cyr, is a state champion archer (as are her husband and both of her children in their respective divisions), so I think she could have pulled it off. Besides our instructor, no one in our six-person group of parents, kids, and me had shot an arrow since summer camp.

Bean's archery range is set out on a wide expanse of lawn behind the Fogg House, an L.L. Bean-owned farmhouse on the south-western side of Freeport. Dana lined us up in front of five targets, outfitted us with hand and forearm guards, arrows, and enormous, respect-demanding metal bows.

"Archery is a relaxing sport," Dana said, standing brazenly between an amped-up eight year old and his target. "You just need to relax into it."

She showed us how to aim and how to shoot, then got the hell out of the way. Our arrows whooshed toward our targets one after another. I hit mine - albeit the edge of it - on the first try.

"Yes!" I said, and looked down the line at the others not as naturally sporty as myself.

We retrieved our arrows and tried again. This time, I tapped the relaxing breathing skills I acquired from years of on-again, off-again Vinyasa yoga and made it closer to the bull's-eye.

Whoosh. Thud. Call me Kevin Costner.

At the end of the session, as the van pulled up to collect us, Dana told us we could keep our paper targets. The eight-year-old boy and I were very excited.

The next Wednesday, I grabbed a cup of coffee on my way up to Bean and joined four other fishing-challenged folk at the Fogg House for an hour-long morning seminar on making casting a fly line look sexy. Our instructor's name was Randy. Randy had been blissfully fly-fishing for forty-nine years. He had a leather belt embroidered with golden fish to prove his commitment. After Randy gave us a quick run-down of the casting basics, the five of us - three adults and two children - lined up on the stretch of lawn a few paces from the archery range and began casting our unhooked lines at a row of propped-up hula hoops about twenty feet away.

Now, it has always been a conviction of mine that fishing is boring. Maybe it's because as a child I never managed to catch anything. Maybe it's because when my brother caught something, which he always did, I then felt bad for the fish. I'm tough to please.

As I pondered this contradiction, Randy announced from the far end of the lawn: "Last week, I went fishing for stripers for two hours and didn't catch a thing. That's why they call it fishing, not catching."

See? Boring.

On dry land there was little chance of us catching more than our own hair, which I did manage to do more than once. And I wasn't alone. Apart from the guy next to me, who robotically cast and recast his line like a lion tamer cornered, the mother and her two boys in our group were alternately nailing the motion, their lines whistling smoothly through the air, and wrapping themselves up like, well, fish.

I decided the secret must be in the concentration, if the robot to my left was any indication. I tried to focus, to bring myself "back to earth," as my hippie mother would say. I imagined a rippling river, the breeze slipping through the trees, the snappers snapping, or whatever they do. My right arm moved up and down, casting and recasting the line high over my head. My mind wandered. It was me and the river. It was me and the lawn. It was me and the line.

"Good," Randy called to me. "Now you've got it."

Far on the other side of the Fogg House property, from behind a high line of trees, a rhythmic bang from the sporting clays range poked holes in my fly casting serenity. It was the siren song of my last and most rugged Walk-On Adventure - clay shooting.

I went clay shooting on an overcast Saturday morning the following weekend. The course filled up early - there was a newlywed couple and a bunch of blue-jeaned dads with their blue-jeaned sons. John, an Anthony Quinn look-alike who'd won awards for shooting various things, gave us a rapid rundown of the basics - "keep your eye on the target" being the most useful - doled out protective glasses and earplugs, and then sent half of the group to his assistant instructor and took our half to the adjacent side of the shooting range. Without any dawdling, he stepped up onto the wooden shooting platform, turned to us, and said, "Who's first? C'mon, don't be scared."

The six of us looked at each other, scared. One of the dads finally stepped forward to shoot, then his reluctant kid followed. After that, another dad went, trailed by his less reluctant kid. Then John looked at me.

"C'mon," he said, beckoning.

I stepped onto the platform, which was just large enough to hold the two of us and the shotgun. Since our ears were stuffed with earplugs, John was short on chitchat. He put the butt of the shotgun against my right shoulder, put one of my hands near the trigger, and the other on the barrel of the gun. Then he tipped my cheek to rest against the butt, to help steady the gun during firing. The gun was heavy and cool. Next to me, a person in the other group fired. The sound of the shot rumbled through me like a thunderclap. My heart began to race. My mouth felt parched.

John launched the disc. I watched it float toward me, aimed, closed my eyes, and fired.

The gun kicked back and knocked against my cheekbone, releasing a boom that seemed to drown out the entire world. The clay, unharmed, hit the ground and shattered.

"You okay?" John asked.

"Yeah," I said. "That was scary."

"Let's try another one," he said.

The last thing I wanted to do was to experience that explosion again, but stubbornness got the best of me. I'd come this far toward genuine Maineness, and now I couldn't shoot a gun?

I tried another five times, each one as terrifying as the first, and never came close to the clay. This could most likely be blamed on my tendency to wince just before pulling the trigger. I don't think my eyes were ever "on the target" as John had instructed.

Finally, John gripped my shoulder, gave me a smile and a nod, and told me shooting isn't for everyone.

On the ride back to L.L. Bean, the adrenaline and fear swirling around inside me somehow settled into a pleasantly euphoric buzz. The next day would be the start of another busy work week for me, filled with interviews and deadlines. But today I was brave enough to fire a gun. The van cruised down Main Street in Freeport, past women in oversized sunglasses carrying Nine West bags and talking on cell phones. It was nearing noon, the streets were crowded with shoppers, and the clouds had given way to warm, late summer sun. I was glad to be back in my Maine.