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Chapter 4. A Teacher on the Long Trail
- University of Nevada Press
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c h a p t e r 4 A Teacher on the Long Trail j o h n e l d e r During my four years at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English, I’ve often taught courses whose titles recycled combinations of the words “nature,” “writing,” “landscape,” “reading,” “place,” “Vermont,” “mountains,” “watershed,” and “home.” Looking backnowatthiscomicalcontinuum,however,Icandiscernaprogression in it—a story with two main chapters, and with a third just beginning. The one that dominated my first couple of decades of college teaching combined equal parts of hiking and of reading and teaching nature writing; it culminated with my request for a split appointment between English (my original department at Middlebury) and Environmental Studies. The subsequent turning in my path as a teacher began about a dozen years ago, with a series of expedition-related classes at Bread Loaf, my summer institution. These outings built upon my individual hiking experiences through extended camping trips with my classes, while they complemented the previous study of nature writing with morefocusedattentiontonaturalhistoryandNativeAmericanliterature. 5 2 t e a c h i n g i n p l a c e More recently, I am beginning to focus on issues of conservation, community, and sustainable communities. In none of these regards have I been a pioneer, by any means, and in all of them work is now being done by others that goes far beyond what I have accomplished. But though mine might be, as Wordsworth says in framing Michael, “a history homely and rude,” I would like to relate it as one teacher’s path through the thickets of academia and into the mountains of home. Each of the chapters in my story as a teacher begins on the LongTrail. This is the footpath leading from the Massachusetts border to Canada that coincides with the Appalachian Trail in its southern portion. During our first several years in Vermont my wife, Rita, and I spent quite a few weekends on the Long Trail, which passes just a few miles to the east of Middlebury. Having grown up in the Bay Area, where my own earliest hiking experiences were in Yosemite and hers were in the mountains above Santa Cruz, we found that our initial impressions of the Vermont mountains were not altogether positive ones. Whereas California summers were predictably both rain-free and mosquito-less, here we contended with muddy trails as we swatted away black flies in June as well as mosquitoes in the latter part of the season. These mountains were also largely devoid of the sublime vistas of the West; the Greens are a rolling and heavily glaciated range, and only a few summits on the Long Trail even rise above the tree line. But hiking along with our eyes on the ground and the nearby trees, we slowly became attuned to the distinctive beauties of northern New England. These are moist woods. Several years of leafage composts sweetly in the filtered sunlight of a morning in summer, beside trails edged with sorrel, bunchberry, and blue-bead lily. Grand glacial erratics punctuate the forests of Vermont. The larger and flatter of such boulders are often carpeted with the fern [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:33 GMT) j o h n e l d e r 5 3 known around here as rock-tripe. The smaller, rounder ones often have a yellow birch balanced on top, its thick roots roping down on either side to find purchase in the scanty, black mountain soil. Majestic bracket fungi rise stairstep fashion on funky snags that are also likely to hold pileated-woodpecker holes as big as a couple of volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In hiking the lower elevations of the trail we would sometimes hear barred owls calling at dusk, while when arriving at the highest ridges we would usually be greeted by the piercing call of the white-throated sparrow. The pleasures of such a forest are intimate and familial, not only because they are often small and have to be concentrated on to be fully appreciated, but also because they are limited in variety. In the forests of Costa Rica we might have encountered hundreds of species of trees and birds during several days of hiking. Even in the southern Appalachians we would have seen much greater ecological diversity than here. But in Vermont, once you’ve learned twelve or fifteen trees you can go for hours without seeing a new species...