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4/23/2006

Smoke rises from our little village of wall tents at the end of the field. A chickadee calls. The slight wind makes the trees dance. No one is in the tents, yet along the edge of the field, and hidden in the fringes of the wood there are silent figures. Some sitting and some standing, each of these people have created a space for themselves and are distinctly alone, although another person may be but twenty feet from them. Time seems to stretch out and the wind, the birds, the trees, the sky, and the sun are all that exist. Then, entering your mind almost reluctantly, a call echoes out across the field. Morning meditation is over and breakfast is ready. So begins our day.

I welcome you friends, families, countrymen, and members of the community, to another email update. I write to you with news of our third week here at our northern base camp, one week to the river! The buds are starting to swell with the energy of spring and there is a strength in the sun that makes us cast off our woolen clothing of the winter and bask in the sun's new found power. The distant stars are kept company by peepers at night and the sun comes up earlier everyday.

Our week started out with a lesson on the flowers and vegetables that would soon be poking their heads above the ground to catch the sun's rays. Tommy, Evan, Daniel, and Andy had run into a very interesting lady, by the name of Penelope, on their solo. She just fifteen minutes from North Woods and they had ended up spending a whole morning with her doing farm chores, followed by a brunch of which they speak quite often. They were very excited about what she could teach us so Chris contacted her and not long after we were seated in her barn on a beautiful little farm. Penelope spoke to us most passionately about saving seeds from the plants we grow and explained about plant pollination, showings us pictures of the inside of a plant. Penelope cares greatly for plants and her love of them shines through in the way she walks and talks. Thank you Penelope for sharing your passion with us as well as your orange slices.

Chris's parents, Burt and Nancy, arrived that night to whisk their son and Ashirah away for the weekend. So Chris and Ashirah left us to our own devices for a day and a half while they visited with each other and Chris's parents. It was Easter while they were gone but we had a great Easter anyhow. We had two egg hunts, one inside the center, the eggs being bags of nuts, raisins, and chocolate, and another up at camp the eggs being hard boiled eggs that Daniel decorated. It felt like we were a family when we celebrated and I caught myself thinking about other holidays with the group, forgetting we would not be together forever.

The next day a startling change occurred in camp. Hannah had come down with the flu the day before and when we crawled out of our sleeping bags in the morning we found that three more had joined her and a forth would follow at midmorning. All our germ control know how was clamped down on the slippery virus, we boiled our dishes, put hot water in the hand washer and touched elbows instead of holding hands before breakfast. The flu was here but life must go on. Every night it seemed our sick tent gained a body struggling for health and during the day sleeping bags could be seen spread out across the field each home to a member of our community. "Nurse Chris" could often be seen bustling from one tent to another, giving out tea, making special orders on food, and tidying up after the sick folks. Those who felt up to it worked on the canoe, which was progressing rapidly. Paul-Ivan, Andy, and Ilene worked on the boat a lot that week and were joined at times by Lily, Daniel, and myself. The three of us were in purgatory, a place in-between health and the flu. We all felt the darn little bugger some way or another. Here's how much everyone was touched. Daniel was bumped, Sarah was grabbed, Hannah was British Bulldogged, Lily was rubbed, Ilene was breathed on, Colin was strangled, Hans was burned, Andy was neglected, Paul-Ivan was undisturbed, Tommy was possessed, Evan was washed over, Chris was feathered, Tom shook hands, Stefan was smelled, and Ashirah was tapped. It was hard to have our community split up and in that way our week felt disoriented.

Rollin the canoe builder had to leave after the first week of construction but his canoe building partner, Peter, at the North Woods Canoe shop came all the way from Maine on Monday to spend the week finishing our boat. It was good that there were people healthy enough to work because work had to continue while we had a canoe teacher. Our big baby has progressed greatly, she's nearly finished. We stretched a giant piece of thick canvas over the smooth bottom of her and pulled it tight with a come-along. Then we nailed the canvas on at every rib with little nails. For the next operation we took the canoe outside. We filled the canvas with a quite toxic substance called aircraft dope. "She's looking real pretty," Andy says to me one hot afternoon after the seventh coat of blue dope. She is looking real pretty, her sleek hull is a royal blue and the grain of the wood inside has been deepened by varnish. We carried her up to our camp and ate lunch by her. Everyone who had not seen her in a while because of their sickness got to bask in her glory and we discussed what might be an appropriate name for her. We haven't been able to come to a consensus about it yet. All we have to do on her still is put a few more coats of varnish on and then we will take her out for her maiden voyage in the Clyde.

At the end of the week we started seeing more faces showing up at meals, the dead were coming to life! We were able to get back into our normal routines and for the first time in five days we read our job wheel. It's nice to have our life coming back together and very exciting to think that within a little more than a week's time we will be on the river! We will be making pack basket this week and doing lots of preparations for our trip down the Connecticut. Soon we shall be eating fiddleheads and other treats the river has to offer. Our two canoes will point their nose's south and the river will carry us back to where we started.

The stars are out. I gaze up at them as I fall asleep and I think of all my ancestors, stretching back thousands of years to the time of giant beaver, they all have fallen asleep to the celestial dance. The stars are out, and we are blessed enough to sleep beneath their majesty every night.

For the Vermont Semester Program, this is Tom.

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