Crow’s Path
By Teage O’Connor
As the air turned to summer, sticky and hot, I started to hear the sweet melodic trill of gray treefrogs floating up from the pond near my house. After a few weeks of listening I realized I had never actually seen one. So, with that sound etched in my deep-sleep memory, a couple nights ago I padded gently down the rocky slope to the retention pond where the males sing their hearts to exhaustion. Armed with headlamps and barefeet, I quietly and patiently tiptoed through the muck along the edge of the pond, weaving in and out of cattails, towards the source of the sound. My cacophonous entrance was greeted with silence.
In the quiet of my patience, ripples running over the surface of the pond drew my attention to the resident muskrat who had come to investigate me before lazily swimming off to gnaw on phragmites roots. Suddenly, a trill at the base of a clump of cattails right next to my feet - a lone male gray treefrog, with its puffy little fingers clamped tightly onto a cattail stalk. When the light from my headlamp flashed on its eyes, the frog blinked, swatted a moth away, then took up its chorus again, its whole body shaking to sing out to the rest of the pond. This moment brought me back to my childhood, to my childness.
Spirit:
The goal of Crow’s Path is to develop a long-term mentoring relationship where mentors and mentees are engaged in a community of curiosity, inquiry, respect, tradition, trust, and reciprocity. I am deeply committed to two primary aspects of these interactions: 1) that they emphasize the development of a long-term and intimate relationship to the land and its inhabitants as well as with one another, and 2) that they are held within the container of several core routines (sit spot, traditional skills, storytelling, giving thanks).
I have seen over and over again how much learning occurs (and sticks) when kids are allowed free time in nature to play and pursue what they are interested in rather than what is assigned to them. I have also seen how many questions - and the amazing depth of these questions -follow from such encounters (What do gray tree frogs eat? Do the females sing too? And how can you tell the difference?). These are inevitably coupled with an eagerness to pursue the answers. Crow’s Path will engage kids in the questions raised by their own curiosity.
Design:
Throughout the fall, the group will gather one day each week, culminating in an overnight trip in November and another one in May. A central part of our gatherings will be to wander through the woods to explore the powerful attraction of the natural world. Our daylong adventures will serve as the substrate for growing strong relationships both with the land and with each other. As we will meet in the same place each week, we will come to know this landscape through the seasons; we will come to know when the first dragonflies appear, when the leaves begin to orange, when the first snow falls, and where the fox hunts.
Mentors:
Mentors will help kids identify and pursue their curiosity and passions, then draw these out through skill building, storytelling, questioning, and time spent on the land. We will be passing on many primitive skills (e.g. fire-by-friction, cordage and basket making, foraging for wild foods, building shelters, etc.) and encouraging the core routines of a naturalist (e.g. sit spot, plant/animal identification, storytelling, etc.). Kids need models to look to, and so it is important that mentors be committed to carrying this culture as well, and not just on the day we meet. There will be a small mentor to kid ratio (roughly 1:3), allowing mentors better to track and attend to the changing needs of each kid. I am excited at the potential of including graduate students in the Field Naturalist program, undergraduates at UVM as well as parents, elders, and others to build our community.
A typical day:
The day will be malleable, driven by each child’s curiosity, but also guided by core routines with a schedule that will look loosely like this:
- Welcome games, nature museum, catching up
- Fox walk into woods
- Open the day at camp
- Bring in fire, thanksgiving address, sit spot, and snack
- Skills/exploration
- Gather back for lunch
- Continue with projects
- Gather for story-of-the-day
Games:
Our day will include many games like Camouflage, Deer-coyote, Memory games, Fire keeper, Sit-spot predator. These nature-based games use a kid’s natural affinity for play to develop awareness skills (stalking, alertness, stillness, owl eyes, deer ears, etc.). The spirit of the games is not to be didactic, but to encourage play, animal mimicry, and attentiveness to one’s surroundings in a fun and non-competitive way. Learning will occur, but the main thrust of these activities is to engage, not teach.
Skill building:
Making cordage, Fire-by-friction, Bird language, Carving – using knives, Coal-burning – for making bowls, spoons, etc., Shelter building, Understanding hazards (ticks, poison ivy, etc.), Harvesting wild edibles (e.g., staghorn sumac), Basket making
Skill building helps us connect with the landscape in a meaningful and direct way. These skills build confidence (there’s nothing like being able to gather all of the materials needed to start a fire by friction), familiarize us with the land (knowing what grows where) and get us to pay attention to the seasons (know when it grows there). Skills will focus not only on the process of creation but on the process of finding, gathering, and preparing materials from start to finish.
There are core routines that I firmly believe in (and practice myself) – including thanksgiving, sit spot, owl eyes, fox walking, story-of-the-day, listening for bird language – that connect me deeply to the place where I live. These routines often work best when explicitly worked on (like returning to a sit spot each day with the intention of sitting), but they as often work well when hidden within the rest of the day (like sitting quietly during a game of camouflage). None of these will be mandatory and many will be introduced over time as the kids gravitate towards these.