A Month In The Woods

 

For the past few years, Transition Catskills has joined with other foundations and grantors to offer support to The Michael Kudish Natural History Preserve, 101 acres of pristine wilderness located in the town of Stamford, New York. 

 

Among the many activities offered at the preserve, there are several Nature Walks that I have joined, each with a specific focus: birds, fungi, weeds. I have always come away with a new appreciation for the Catskills wilderness right outside my door. One of the birders who joined us provided a shorthand for identifying calls. The next morning, I awoke to a bird tweeting, “Here I sit in a tree. I’ll be here all day,” and I knew it was the serenade of the red eyed vireo, a treetop dweller who is more often heard than seen. The weed walk I attended was led by Michael Kudish himself, a renowned author and geologist, who was delighted to impart the Latin and common names of any sprig one might point to. From that point forward, I could identify the plants that insisted on voguing in my vegetable garden. 

 

Last summer, I decided to check out A Month in the Woods: A Summer Workshop for Youth, a program at MKNHP for the past 8 years.

 

The twenty-one students ranged in age from 6 to 14.  The workshop convened five hours a day, five days a week, for one month. The first two hours were devoted to learning, then an hour’s lunch, followed by unstructured play in the afternoon. The curriculum is based on “The Catskills: A Sense of Place,” which was developed by The Catskill Center. Every morning, the kids learned a little bit more about that day’s topic. 

 

               Mondays:        Water Resources

               Tuesdays:        Geography and Geology

       Wednesdays:        Ecosystems

             Thursdays:        Human History

                    Fridays:        Arts and Culture

 

I stopped by on a Friday to hear about the Hudson River School painters. Following the class, the children sprawled on a large wooden platform to create their own plein air landscapes on small canvases. There was no shortage of subject matter – all one had to do was turn around to behold a mountain vista or a forest still life. 

 

As it always does, the noonday fire whistle in the nearby village announced lunchtime, and everyone dispersed to their preferred spot. One group of children dined in a majestic quaking aspen that fell years ago, though it still leafs out in spring. The horizontal branches are an ideal perch for enjoying brown bag lunches, and the heart shaped leaves provide a veil of privacy. Approaching the tree with my own pb&j, I overheard snippets of earnest conversation many decibels lower than the usual racket of kids when they tromp across an open field. Even nature has spaces that are more conducive to indoor voices.

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After lunch, the kids engaged in that rarest of commodities: unstructured play time. The Internet has many examples of Ted Talks and erudite articles positing how important play is to a child’s development and bemoaning how unstructured time has been sacrificed to piles of daily homework. These lucky kids, for four blissful weeks in summer, are free to form societies, build forts, dam streams, practice turning a blade of grass into a whistle, or identify the shapes formed by clouds. 

 

That afternoon, some kids continued work on their unfinished landscape paintings. Others were happy to give me a tour of their forts with names derived from movies, books, or just a mumbo-jumbo of nonsensical words. One area bore the official title of “Ossification Pit” created by Daphne, who was not present that day to explain its function. No doubt if I’d attended one of the geology lessons, I would have understood.  

 

The kids adore this program and are loath to say goodbye when they age out. Every year, a small grant funds a couple of graduates, who return as paid interns. Jack was one of the first students since the workshop’s beginning in 2017. This was his last year as an intern because he was college-bound to study Environmental Biology.

 

In the fourth and final week, the kids’ laughter was punctuated by occasional bursts of sorrow, as they realized the workshop was coming to an end. They inspected the netting packed with leaves that they had placed in the stream several weeks ago, looking for the larvae of caddis flies and beetles called water pennies. They monitored the plot of ash trees one last time for signs of the dreaded emerald ash borer. They played a final round of the Water Dance, a game where they acted out the cycle of water body, evaporation, condensation, precipitation and runoff. 

 

On the last Friday, the parents were invited for a lunch catered by T.P.’s Café, with ingredients carefully listed to accommodate allergies and food preferences. This was followed by the closing ceremony, where all students received a copy of Kudish in the Kaatskills, an award-winning collection of articles written by Dr. Michael Kudish. The children were honored for their talents: one boy, for his realistic clay rendering of a tiny hamburger with fixings and condiments; another beamed as he was designated The Muddiest; and a girl was proud to be singled out for her knowledge of layered rocks. And so it went, until each child felt appreciated.

 

Finally, the parents led the way to the cars, and the children called to each other, “See you next year!” The interns collapsed the pop-up tents and the folding tables. Trays of leftover mac-n-cheese were foisted on the willing. And the fauna and flora? I suppose they went back to doing whatever it is they do when no one is looking. Or could it be that they too, along with the staff, will miss the laughter and joy that these youngsters shared so freely with the land?

 

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