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5/01/2006

"Sleep? We can sleep on the river! We have packbaskets to finish, food to pack out, tarps to sew, and the canoe needs another coat of varnish. We have a month long expedition to plan. We don't have time to sleep. We'll get our energy from love. Love will give us energy".

Dear friends, family, and members of the community, we find ourselves at the brink of another expedition. On Monday we will carry the Kasha, the twenty foot canoe they built last semester, and the Chaga, the boat we built and just named, down to the Clyde River. Their hulls will touch the water and from then on, we will be river people. We will travel on the ancient highways of our ancestors, and make our way to the mighty Connecticut. We shall live with, on, and beside the water and it shall be our life. So we find ourselves with boundless excitement as we prepare for our approaching departure. We all loved the trail life of the winter and are eager to be on the move again. Our home will be where we make it once again, be it by bog, stream, or river. But I'm getting ahead of my self, let me start at the beginning of the week.

Our week started off with a visitor from southern Vermont. Misha is looking for a Kroka summer programs director so he can focus more of his energy on Kroka's high school. Enter, Emily. Emily is interested in the job so she drove all the way from Brattleboro to be with us and see what our life is like. We spent an evening and a morning with her and shared our stories in exchange for hers. It was nice to be able to spend time with Emily and it's exciting that a major change for Kroka is about to come about. A few days after she left we heard that she and Misha had decided it would be a good job for her. Congratulations Emily!

One windy but sunny afternoon half way through the week we were treated to a most interesting water quality lesson from Fritz, a field researcher who works at the center. Armed with a bunch of water testing equipment, the only one of which that was recognizable to me being a fine net, we went down to a small river that runs into the Clyde and sat on a logging bridge that runs over it. Sitting on that bridge I learned to look at water in a new way. Fritz taught us to understand better the cause and effect our actions have on the quality of water in Vermont. So many things can affect the quality of the water it's overwhelming to think of doing what he is doing for the center, testing quality of the streams and rivers in the area and finding out why they are like they are. His work involves lots of being outside and planting gadgets in the water, which record the temperature and other things over the period of six months. After a lot of very interesting talk we went down to the river and replaced one of his little data gathering gadgets, a thermograph, as well as looking for macro invertebrates on the rocks. All through the lesson our Water Cat, Ilene, dutifully took detailed notes for her water quality big job. I look forward to getting more lessons from Ilene on the river. Thank you, Fritz, for your time. We enjoyed it greatly and learned a great deal.

We all sit in a small room, journals open in front of us. Blankets cover the two windows and the only light comes from the projector, humming in the center of the room. A slide changes and a voice calls out in the darkness, reciting a poem, telling a story, or explaining a slide. We are rehearsing for our big presentation to the public. The presentation we planned was centered around Daniel's most excellent slide show. It starts with a dance, a dance of our life, each person miming out a chore or activity while singing. After our dance we sat down on either side of the screen and began the show. Daniel was the narrator but we all had a piece to say, from reflections from morning meditation to simple introductions. We ended with a human arch, singing "Step by Step." That evening after our audience had gone home we had a little celebration up at Tent City. Public speaking and presentations have been something we have been working at and we saw how far we had come from our first presentation back in January. We all had worked really hard on our pieces and I thought we delivered them beautifully. We were all proud of the show we had put on when it was over.

A great part of our energy this week has been spent pounding ash for our pack baskets. We put the brown ash logs on a ledge and took a mallet and hit the log. To the passerby it looks rather silly, a seemingly sane person hitting a log that shows no signs of being defeated. But we know better. By pounding on a brown ash log you cause the winter growth ring to separate from the summer growth ring. When you've pounded enough you can pry the grain up and with a satisfying ripping noise pull a thin strip of wood off the log. After all the ash was pounded we had a big stripping party in the workshop. We got the little stove cranking and stripped to the beat of Paul Simon and Sweet Honey. We stripped the thin pieces of ash into long one inch, and half-inch pieces with our knives until we had a huge pile of uniform weaving material. Early on the morning of weaving day we counted up our piles. We needed enough ash for us (twelve), and the people from the center (four) to make baskets and we were short. We looked at each other and set to work. There was a team pounding on a log down by the pond and a team in the workshop stripping as though their life depended on it. We had to start our baskets today, both because we had said we would to the people from the center and because our tight schedule would not allow for any delays. Every piece of ash that was pounded was taken up to the workshop right away to be stripped. At seven o’ clock we had enough for thirteen baskets. The dull thud of the mallet hitting the log could be heard in the workshop. It sounded to us like a second hand, ticking its way relentlessly forward, eating into our morning. At nine o’ clock we counted up the ash we had processed. The pile seemed big, but was it big enough? Enough material for one basket was counted, two baskets, three, and I am relieved to report that we created enough material for all four of the baskets we needed that morning.

We all met up in the center for the packbasket lesson, taught by Ashirah. All day the room was filled with people sitting on the floor, surrounded by pieces of ash. The baskets are made with fourteen one-inch upright pieces and a lot of half-inch weavers. We first made a bottom for our baskets and then wove the weavers around the uprights. It was really fun to be working on your basket, pushing the supple weaver through the stiff uprights and watching your basket take shape as the weave moved higher and higher. This is a craft we will have for a long time and this was the time we were getting to know our baskets, and the time when our work would determine their shape. We worked out on the pouch in the sun in the afternoon and by dinnertime we had a neat line of half finished baskets waiting for the sun to rise the next day. We all finished our baskets the next day, extending the weave to the top and sewing on a strong rim. At last, after one and a half days of fun work, we got to put the straps on our baskets, making them complete. That night we proudly lined the fruit of our labors up under the tarp at Tent City. The river was becoming more and more real with the addition of our packbaskets.

Two days from when we would be on the river Kevin and Polly, experienced wilderness guides who run dog sledding trips in the winter and river trips in the summer, visited us. They brought two of their big Yukon huskies and a boat load of stories. Polly gave a beautiful slide show on the ten years she spent in the Yukon wilderness, living the bush life and guiding big game hunters. She left Maine at twenty with very few bush skills and created a life for herself in one of the remote parts of the world, The next day Kevin gave us a lesson on poling. We drove up to Echo Lake with a trailer laden with canoes and spent several sunny hours learning how to propel the canoes using a long pole. Poling is a lot of fun, and the time seemed to fly. We are very grateful that Kevin and Polly came from Maine to share with us. They know so much and it's inspiring to see the life they've made for themselves.

Soon, we will leave our home of the past month, our little village of tents on the upper field, and strike out to a new life. We are so very grateful to the center for opening their doors to us. The space here has been perfect for our need and the resources of knowledge that everyone at the center has, has been great for us. The river is coming. In just one day we will dip our paddles in the water, pull a stroke, and we'll be off. But there is still much work before we can commit our selves to the mighty waterways. As I walk through the center and up to our field I see my companions working hard; Paul-Ivan is coordinating the food pack out, directing many busy hands in the packing of olive oil, flour, and lots of grain. Colin is up to his elbows in sourdough crackers, mixing new batches while making sure his baking batches don't burn. Sarah can be seen pouring over paper work, figuring out many important guest teacher logistics and filing receipts. Ilene has just gotten a bunch of water testing equipment from Sterling College and can be seen looking up facts in the center's many books. Evan is here, there, and everywhere, documenting our activities with his slide camera. Tommy has also been documenting our activities through digital pictures, and just gave us a great weather lesson. Andy is putting together a first aid kit for the river and chasing all of us down with his vitamin C. Daniel has mapped out our route and will be giving us a presentation on it soon. Hannah is continuing her research on rocks and bringing much joy to our community through the poems she reads at meals. Hans is finishing up his many lists of river gear as well as overseeing the creation of two giant tarps that will house us all for the coming month. Lily is working on a fermentation presentation for the group all the while checking on bubbling concoctions hidden about camp and in the center. And I, Tom, am writing this update.

I am happy to report that we've got everything completely under control. An excerpt from Ilene's group journal best sums up our situation of total preparation. "Things were on the verge of becoming chaotic... two pots of boiling water, two slabs of frozen beef, two onions needing to be sautéed, cheese to be grated... and my bloody nose!" The river is coming fast and all we can do is hold on and keep picking away at our to do lists. We have a lot to do but when I sit down for a meal, and look around at the smiling faces of my companions, the barrier of preparations seems to melt away and I know there is nothing of which we are not capable. We're gonna be running off love the next two days, love will give us energy.

And so I bid you farewell. We are off, on a grand voyage in two huge canoes, the Kasha and the Chaga. Our packbaskets will be filled by the necessities of our simple life and we will carry all we need back down the length of Vermont. We will eat knotweed pie, we will laugh, we will work and we will live the good life. And so I bid you farewell, we are off, the river beckons, and we will listen.

For the Vermont Semester Program, this is Tom

P.S. We don’t know when the next update will be written. We may be able to get one out on the river or we may not be able to until June.

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