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Vermont Semester
A 600 Mile Journey By Ski and Canoe (January-June 2004)

31 May, 2004

Dear friends, family, and everyone else with baited breath, including interested members of the community,

As I lie on the fringe of the Base Camp field, under the shadow of a black cherry tree, tent worm caterpillar paratroopers landing all around me, our boat, the Kasha, drying in the cloudlessly sunny sky, behind which I can see Em, Jane, Saul and Chris C. doing garden work, it is striking me now for the first time that our month of the Connecticut River has, with the exception of a few details, come to a close, and, after two weeks here in Newfane, so too will this program. Trying to articulate what we have done, what we have experienced and what we have felt over the course of this last month is nearly impossible and, for me, is the ultimate exercise in conciseness.

When we last left you, Misha had arrived at the Vermont Leadership Center in East Charleston, the van was being loaded, and we were making final preparations for our departure. The morning after portaging the Kasha and all our gear down to the "Hobo camp" beside Bill Manning's River House we christened our boat with a fir bough and some water from the Clyde River. After a moose nearly walked through our camp at dawn we packed our gear for real, loaded our two canoes (the wood-canvas, 20-foot "Kasha" that we had made with Rollin Thurlow, and the "Tripper" made by Old Town and into which our three instructors piled themselves), we began working our way upstream on the Clyde towards Island Pond accompanied, for an hour or so, by Bill Manning who departed after reading a Kipling poem as we gently rocked in a backwater. After paddling and occasionally poling most of the day up an ever-narrowing stream over beaver dams, past alder, cedar, big brown ash, and mud, we made our first camp upstream of our first riffle. Stefan, Chris K., Ashirah, Mathias, and Joe all commenced to continuous fishing for the whoppers we were all seeing, but their results led to the christening of that camp as "No Fish Camp." The next day, after paddling across Island Pond, portaging over the St. Laurence/Connecticut watershed divide, and paddling part way down the crazily windy and seemingly ever narrowing Nullhegan River, we camped on Nullhegan Pond at "Fish Camp."

A word about camp: our kitchen, gear-storage, main sleeping, and hangout area consisted of a green nylon tarp hung between two trees over our throw rope. Two tents, one that we made, were set up most nights as shelter from the rain that almost never came. We had two bug nets, but we only hung them once. There were no bugs to speak of. Our cooking setup was another titanium stove, but without a top or door, providing us with a much more quickly set, lower impact fireplace than making an underlayment from green logs or stones with a spunhungen from which to hang our pots.

From Nullhegan Pond we continued east and downstream through a stretch of unnaturally oxbow infested waters were we rammed a submerged tree stump and popped a piece of cedar planking off the bottom of our boat about the size of three fingers together. The canvas was not damaged at all, nor were the ribs, so we epoxied it back in at our camp halfway down a series of rapids that were too shallow and technical for a loaded Kasha and that we had portaged the upper half of.

We awoke next morning to about three inches (I'm sure my memory has exaggerated greatly) of wet snow, more falling from the sky, and a day of lining the Kasha down the remainder of the rapids while Ashirah fended off and directed with a pole from the stern. The Tripper ran the rapids loaded.

Everyone else would, we decided, walk their packbaskets to the confluence of the Nullhegan and Connecticut Rivers, stopping half way down to have a fire, warm up with some tea, portage a mile and a half of a particularly bony stretch of the river, and continue lining from the end of the carry to the Connecticut. Can I say more than simply that lining in the snow was fun, maybe more fun than paddling in the sun, and that I, at least, was wet and warm, thrilled and nervous the whole time. At one point Mathias and I hopped in the Kasha with Ashirah over some flatwater and got a chance to take in the crazy Vermont weather and the contrast of the snow on the fir and spruce reflected in the placid water. After regrouping at the mouth of the Nullhegan in Bloomfield where Misha had dropped a food re-supply, we paddled downstream on the extremely swift-feeling Connecticut to the mouth of Paul Stream to layover and meet up with Kevin Slater in the strip of trees left between a farmer's hay field and the River. It was there that we noticed fiddleheads for the first time, and as our knowledge of wild foods grew with the changing of the seasons, we began to integrate huge quantities of fresh picked and dug greens and roots into our diets (I think I gained a lot of weight this past month).

With Kevin we poled for two days, and, while many of us were starting to get the hang of the arts of poling upstream and snubbing downstream (myself not included), it soon became clear that nothing but a lot, no, a lot of practice and some intuition could prepare us for the ultimate poling challenge: the end of our trip.

After Kevin, his dog Fiona, and his two wood-canvas canoes we had been practicing with departed, we continued our journey south along the ever-slowing, ever widening Connecticut.

As we paddled that day after leaving Kevin we all experienced a dramatic change in our way of life. Many described it as if the carpet had been pulled out from under us. From our time up until we met Kevin it had seemed sufficient to simply dip water from the rivers we had been traveling on, boil it to kill bacteria, and drink it. The day we left Kevin, though, we passed a pulp paper mill, hundreds of farm fields some of which allowed their cows to squelch and erode right down to the water's edge, through towns, and past at least two dozen half-submerged cars from every vintage imaginable and it all states of decomposition. The seemingly friendly river had morphed, in one day, from clean water, a resource more valuable than any other, to simply a mode of transportation. Connecticut water changed from the liquid that 80 percent of our body consists of, to something that our bodies rejected as bad, leaving many of us with cramps, diarrhea, and an unquenchable thirst. We were all profoundly changed by that realization and spent the next few days trying to come to grips with it as we scanned the topographic maps for clean streams from which to gather our water.

All Ski section we had been batting around the idea of a night ski. Our dream never became reality, so we proposed it to our instructors again, and found ourselves, the night after Kevin left us, waking up at 2:00 in the AM to the beep of Chris C's watch, packing our boats in the pre-dawn hush, and were on the river as the sun rose excruciatingly slowly and none too soon as it had been a crisp, clear, cold night. As we paddled through the enveloping mist, our socks on our hands, we realized that water droplets were freezing to our gunwale, and that water I had been splashing on Joe's seat with my half-asleep paddle strokes had also frozen, and, Joe realized with dismay as he tried to rise, the seat of his pants had also frozen solid to the canoe. We greeted the sunrise with joy bordering on impatience. It's a funny thing to be able to say, but that morning we saw the sun rise over Vermont while sitting in our boat in New Hampshire. The river is owned by NH, and it makes so many crazy oxbows that at more than one point the river flows with a slightly northerly direction, almost eroding off islands from the Vermont mainland. As the sun rose we passed one such spot and, looking behind us, could see Vermont, and behind that the "pink and rosy fingers" of the new day. After stopping for a boil-up Breakfast shivering around a big blazing fire we paddled on through the morning, portaging around a dam as the sun began to warm the trees and rocks, and continued on towards our camp on Moore Reservoir where we setup a sail to capture the barley noticeable wind, and where we, as Joe fondly recalls, "ate lunch, slept, ate dinner, slept and then ate breakfast."

We continued down river after our nighttime adventure, portaging over countless dams, to another camp sandwiched between hayfields ablaze with dandelions and the river, where we met up with Brian Lapierre again who spent a day with us talking about medicinal plants and natural remedies (there's treasure everywhere!) before continuing downstream (still) to Hanover, NH.

We had long been planning a stop in Hanover to shop at the food co-op and buy some ice cream, and as we walked the hectic streets of town and past the Hanover High School we found it hard to withhold judgment and not become overwhelmed and caught up in the roar of the outside world. For me the most challenging part of the excursion was the shopping at the co-op. It has been such a long time since I have been a store and it was hard to not be overwhelmed by the multitude of choices, incitements, and marketing tools with which we were being bombarded. The colors, people, sounds, rush, shopping carts, florescent lights, and hundreds of veggie stews worth of organic, non-organic, pre-peeled and cut and plastic wrapped carrots from three thousand miles away were almost too much for me. That was nothing compared to the sight of bulk chocolate, granola, and dried mango. It was almost too much at once. Like culture shock, although I've never felt culture shock anything like that before. We were all overwhelmed and spend that evening at -­ are you ready-- "Established Jungle Camp" talking about re-entry. I still think it will be a slow, somewhat scary process to find places for ourselves in a society that seems to have such different values.

From Established Jungle Camp (where we discovered ground nuts‹eat like potatoes) we portaged our gear around Sumner Falls and then ran part of the extremely low water in the Kasha while the Tripper ran the whole thing. That evening, when we camped under the shadow of Mt Ascutney for a week-long layover, we found a small steam with a waterfall with a shower, sink, and bathtub in which we could lie down and get completely submerged. Jane, while trying to climb farther up the waterfall for her shower, slipped on a piece of wet moss, and slid, bumped, and splashed about 15 feet down where she landed, on her feet, in a small pool, pulling a ligament and cutting her chin, and spent a few weeks recuperating with crutches and an air cast, paddling all the while. She is now "better than as good as new" (mostly her words).

While laying over at Ascutney we were met by Roger Haydock our geology teacher, Mathias's two brothers, their cousin, and Rebecca, fresh off the high seas of the Caribbean, the ground still rocking underneath her tanned toes, and hiked to the top of the ancient volcanic magma chamber that is Mt. Ascutney, once buried a dozen miles under rock that has long since eroded. Now there is nothing left but a small granitic mountain topped with fir, spruce, radio towers, a lookout, and a hang glider launch pad with flights leaving weekly for places as far off as the coast of Maine.

After getting a huge food re-supply (at least 40 pounds of cheese for 2 weeks) from the Kroka truck we said goodbye to our base-camp bound friends and eagerly awaited the arrival of Grandfather Ray again for a day of finger weaving and preparation for our individual solos to begin the next morning. After waking, eating a breakfast of seven grain, and exchanging hushed good-byes we headed out into the woods with a tarp, sleeping bag, ridge- line, and water bottle to spend 48 hours without food or contact with any other people, inside a circle with a ten-foot diameter. Grandfather predicted that we would "stand till you're bored of standing, then sit Œtill you're bored of sitting, they lie Œtill you're bored of lying. And then you'll just be bored. And then, maybe then, you'll start to listen."

I spent my two days watching the hemlock and basswood trees above my circle, trying hard to find some sort of pacifistic energy to prevent me from swatting at the two or three mosquitoes that never seemed to get bored with me. I watched a small spider complete her web and catch a few dozen (literally) small flies over a two hour time span. (Thank God for spiders.) The purpose of the solo was in part to begin to think about the Next Step and what life after the semester program will mean. When we arrived back at our camp, greeted by kasha with onions and lots of cheese, a biscuit, and some Japanese Knotweed Crisp to celebrate Stefan's birthday which had taken place while we were on our solos, we were all still in an individual, theoretical mindset.

After breakfast (in a much more literal sense than normal) our instructors and Grandfather packed their gear and departed, leaving us on a group solo to the confluence of the Connecticut and West Rivers. Our group dynamics and stomachs both precariously placed by the two-day solo and fast, we began the last 50 miles of downstream paddling in a slight drizzle.

Rain had not been a common occurrence for the entire month thus far, and had been almost as non-existent at our base camp at the Vermont Leadership Center, so traveling in the rain was a mostly new experience for us. Because of the lack of rain, we had heard, canoes of 12-year olds paddling down the West River were running aground in the few-inch-deep water. We had been praying for enough rain to float the Kasha up the West, but it had not seemed a likely occurrence.

That night, after finally giving up on our bow-drill fire at 8:00 to have our first dinner since the beginning of our solos, the sky opened up on the seven of us in our sleeping bags under that green nylon tarp, and we were just able to save the coals from the fire so we wouldn't have to spend time the next morning trying to get another bowdrill fire. The lightning striking all around us was deafening, and we learned the next morning while portaging around Bellows Falls that there had been an inch of rain during the night. Almost every night from then on we would be woken by lightning, thunder, and the beating of raindrops on our tarp.

Only a few short days later we met back up with the instructors at the mouth of the West, and after exchanging greetings and stories we paddled up to the end of the Retreat Meadows, and, after a stop for lunch and a thunder shower partway up the first tiny quick water, we realized that poling up the West would be hard work. Our first day was exhausting as all seven of us exchanged our paddles for poles and polled and pulled our boat up to camp. It had taken us all afternoon to go two miles, and after another night of rain it seemed like the going would be even harder: the volume of water we were pushing our way through was the culmination of a week of hard rain storms. We decided that, to lighten the boats, we would have half the group walk with packbaskets while the boats were poled up the river. We made two miles in a day that way, and camped at the Kohout residence, just behind the shop where we had made knives in January. They generously provided us with a bunch of eggs and other goodies, and allowed us to drop a bunch of extra gear to expedite our movement upstream. After two more days on the water we arrived at our takeout spot on the morning of the 27th of May, and, in two loads (three miles each way), with an ice cream intermission halfway through the packbasket load, we portaged all the gear we had with us and our canoes back home to Newfane.

We have now set a semi-permanent camp behind the big yurt at Base Camp, and, after a few days of drying and cleaning up from the expedition, we are now settling into a base camp routine. We have academics to complete, meals to prepare, presentations to organize, and lists full of other projects to complete. Deer and moose hides that we had been preparing at the Vermont Leadership Center were brought with us on the river, were tanned on the trail, were smoked yesterday, and now await our moccasin patterns. A chicken was donated to the program, and we spent part of the afternoon yesterday getting a lesson in killing and preparing it for our food. We are also in constant preparation for our final presentation at the Hooker Dunham Theater on Sunday the 13 of June as well. (It's at 7:00, is open to the public, and tickets are going fast. Call (802) 387-5694 for your tickets today.) We also have another event at the Connecticut River Fest. on June 5 where the Kasha will be part of a flotilla, and where Kroka will have a booth where we will share some of our experiences. Come to the Wilder Picnic Area (near Rt. 5, south or Norwich) between 10:30 and 6:30 to see us there.

So that's what we've been up to this past month. As has been the case for the past five months, we are again realizing how valuable this program is for each of us. We are now in the process of writing "essays" on what the trip means to us and it is impossible to know where to start. Yes, what does this trip mean to me, but the true question is what does it mean to the people I will surround myself with in the future? How do I take whatever it is that have garnered from this trip and distribute it evenly to the six point a lot billion people out there who, I feel, could use an experience like this? This world we have been skiing and paddling and living through has made me who I am. Now I must take what I have learned about myself and give it back to the world with every capillary and pound of cheese in me.

For the Vermont Semester Program,
Evan Griffith