Two parents and a younger sister calmly approached the quad along the boardwalk on a bright and sunny day earlier this week.  Then a teenage boy noticed them from the Adirondack chairs, stood up and walked towards them.  The sister immediately burst into a run until they met; she jumped up with a shout and hugged him fiercely around the neck, her face pressed against his shoulder, as parents caught up for a family embrace – younger sister at the center.  It was one of many wonderful reunions I witnessed on Tuesday as Session One ended for our Wilderness Trippers and Girls Camp campers.

I still remember the end of camp vividly.  For seven years I spent seven weeks a summer with the same camp in the Adirondacks of New York State; the first five summers were in camp and the last two were on trips.  The final day was always bittersweet as I balanced the joy of seeing my parents with the loss of leaving people and places that I had come to love deeply.  After seven weeks the separation became more intense than the reunion for me and I still remember teary car rides home as I thought ahead to the next summer.

Yet both parts of the transition – moving towards family and away from camp – highlight the power of time away in summer.  Boys and girls grow tremendously at camp and on trips; and they grow even more with longer sessions and with each returning year.

In the excitement of reunion is increased self-awareness and self-esteem, which children are often eager to share.  One grandmother I talked with on Tuesday said, looking at her grand-daughter from twenty feet away, “I can see it (the self-confidence) in her face.”  Similarly, the emotion of loss reveals the profound connection children often have to friends, leaders, and place that may be unlike connections that child has at home.

For me, summer camp was where I gained the confidence to help me navigate middle school and then flourish both as a person and in high school.  I am not sure how I would have faired without building up my bank account of self-esteem each summer before paying it back out in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade.  It is my hope that the two hundred boys and girls who return to their families this week buoyed by the experience and ready for new challenges.  I also hope that the excitement and emotion of departure this year will be turned around for an arrival in 2012 so that the growth may continue for each child.

Food is often on our minds, whether it be excitement for the next meal, making choices about the source of our ingredients, consideration of how much to eat, or so many other factors.  Each time I learn about the megatrends in the United States food system, I feel like I have a better context to understand my own choices.  In particular, I realize how difficult in can be for us to make healthy choices when our national food policy makes consumption of added sugar and fat cheap and easy.

Thanks to the Grist, I have come upon an interesting graphic about the component calories in an individual diet over the past forty years.

Civil Eats infographic showing the distribution of calories for an average American

A group named Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism have partnered to create an interactive infographic from a USDA data set of “loss-adjusted food availability data from 1970 to 2008.  It shows the change in total calories and their distribution during that time.

This documentation illustrates the impact of inexpensive commodities on the U.S. diet.  The irony of a strong food supply leading to poor health is painful and difficult to address, but a core challenge for our society.  At Chewonki we try to bring these issues to light with healthy food choices and food system education, but it is still difficult.  Food choices are intensely personal and often quite challenging to navigate in a public setting.  We will continue to explore the best ways to educate for healthy and empowered living.

On Tuesday night, March 29, I will be at the Waynflete School in Portland, to represent Chewonki as co-sponsor of a presentation by ocean explorer David Gallo:  The Titanic and Beyond: Lessons from the Deep Ocean.  The event is to raise ocean awareness in support of Waynflete’s Sustainable Ocean Studies (SOS) summer program, which had its inaugural year in 2010 with at least one Chewonki alumnus in the group.  The program is directed by David Vaughn, who was on staff at Chewonki earlier in his career, and is open to rising 11th and 12th grade students.

Nine semester students who have chosen a whitewater canoeing workshop for their spring break will be at the event, along with many of our Waynflete alumni from camps, trips, and the semester.

Sierra and her friend found a ground nest yesterday with a couple cinnamon-colored, speckled eggs each with a slight tear drop shape and about three centimeters along the long axis.  The nest was at the base of a small sapling, slightly under the cover of a fir sapling nearby, and within ten meters of a field edge.  It was fashioned of leaves into a small cradle, but otherwise quite simple.  Not many birds nest on the ground and our first guess was that it was a Ruffed Grouse.

Back at my computer now, I have done a brief check for verification and it seems that we are on the right track.  As you make your own observations this spring, a printed bird guide will always be handy, but you might also want to visit the Cornell Lab of Ornithology site called All About Birds.

Your online guide to birds and bird watching, All About Birds, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

In this case, having a hunch helped the identification as the guide is not easily browsed by nest type or egg characteristics.  There are a lot of resources out there, please share your favorites.

Moonrise over Osprey Point

Clear skies have been a boon for full moon viewing over the past few nights.  Earlier this week the rising moon inspired a quick jaunt to The Point over snowshoe-packed trails just before dinner in the Wallace Center.  After a number of weeks with powder conditions, we have moved into a freeze-thaw cycle that has consolidated the snowpack, especially where we had skied or snowshoed on the main trail system.

We eat breakfast at a square table, made of maple – birdseye in the legs – by a craftsman in central Massachusetts and gifted to us by my college friends at the time of our wedding in September of 2004. From our chairs we have a view to both the west and south, which includes Esty House, Pine Cone, South Hall (cabins at Chewonki), some cleared areas and the forest between our home and Montsweag estuary, which we can see at this time of year when the leaves are down.

Some mornings Sierra and Jenn study the birds at the suet, feeder, or dead ash trees around the house. This morning though, three grey squirrels caught our attention as they scrambled, one after the other, up a red oak along the historic stone wall to a taller red maple. I asked Sierra what they were doing. Maybe they were playing? Possibly. There were no nests nor obvious food caches at the top of the 20-25 meter red maple.

We paused to each take a bite of our bagels and then were distracted by something in the room. When we looked back to the treetops a few minutes later, the squirrels were no longer jumping from branch to branch. Where had they gone? We looked carefully and Sierra saw a bundle in a branch up high – one squirrel curled up on its haunches in the crook of a branch. But where were the other two? I finally spied them sitting at the junction of the same branch with the trunk.

I am not certain why they ran up to the treetop at first light, but I have an idea. Six years ago, Lynne Flaccus, Chewonki Head Naturalist, taught me that raccoons will climb to the top of white pines in winter to bask in the sunlight for warmth. Could that be what these squirrels were doing? At first light, only the treetops are in the sun on the west side of Chewonki Neck. Sure enough, sunlight was slowly inching down from the smallest branches to where the squirrels sat. Perhaps that is the reason, but we will have to watch for a couple more weeks to see if there is a pattern in their activity, timing, and in relation to the temperature (it was -2F at the Wiscasset Airport at 5:53 this morning).

Sunrise over Osprey Circle on February 3, 2011, the first full day of semester 46.

Living on Chewonki Neck provides me and my fellow residents with countless moments of beauty.  After another blizzard this week we awoke to crystal clear skies, single-digit temperatures, and deep white in all directions.  My walking commute from “Chateau,” my house at the south end of campus, to the “Farmhouse,” where my office is, includes this view of Osprey Circle.  Here is where the oldest boys (“Ospreys”) live in summer and, for now, the girls of Chewonki Semester School reside in winterized cabins here during the academic year.

This winter our facilities crew made a wonderful decision to snowblow paths between the cabins instead of plow with a truck, which means narrower, human-scale pathways, and less area of grass to freeze, thaw, and trample – this destroys the sod for summer – in the late winter and spring.  With over two feet of snow on the ground now, the paths around campus have a magical quality to them right now.

This photo was my personal reminder to take a “time-out for beauty.”  Tonight the semester students enjoyed a three-dimensional slideshow presentation of natural history images by Roger Richmond, a professor of architecture at the University of Maine in Augusta.  Roger captures spectacular lose-up (marcro) images of natural details all around us.  By sharing the images her reminds us to stop, see, and appreciate the beauty around us each day.

Chewonki is partnering with Frontier Cafe, Cinema & Gallery in Brunswick for three screenings of the acclaimed documentary Race to Nowhere.  The film was inspired by a series of “wake-up calls” that caused director Vicki Abeles “to look closely at the relentless pressure to perform that children face today.”

The film will show for three consecutive nights in Brunswick:  February 7, 8 & 9, with screenings at  5 PM and 7 PM. The film runs 85 minutes and will be followed by a 30 minute Q&A. Tickets cost $8.

Race to Nowhere features the stories of young people across America who have been pushed to the brink, educators who are burned out and worried that students aren’t developing the skills they need, and parents who are trying to do what’s best for their kids.Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace, students have become disengaged, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.

Race to Nowhere is a call to mobilize families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens.

To reserve tickets and for directions to Frontier, contact Michael Gilroy at www.exlorefrontier.com

Sierra, my daughter, will be closer to five years of age than four by the end of next week (February 11). Recently she has begun to ask more and more of the questions I have been looking forward to hearing.

In the past week she has asked, “Daddy, why do polar bears eat people?,” “do wolves live on Chewonki Neck?,” and, from last night, “are monsters and trolls real?”

Each of these three questions has come at bedtime in that precious transition between day and night when she processes so much of what she has absorbed via all five senses over the previous twelve hours. Each question is a challenge for me, the deliberate parent.

I do a quick calculus: What is she really asking – literal or other? Where did she learn what she is asking about – do I need to be concerned about the source? Do I need to filter the answer for her developmental stage? And, do I need to filter the answer because I want her to sleep through the night (important for question #3 above)?

My inclination is to be as complete as possible in my answers, especially for the natural history questions, and not sugar-coat the reality of the natural world, including predator-prey relationships. Yet she is also developing a greater sense of fearfulness as she learns about the world and I want to encourage her sense of safety where it is appropriate. Furthermore, my wife, Jenn, and I want to promote her imagination through pretend play, especially in the natural world, where fairies and gnomes exist alongside monsters and trolls (we even call the former on the phone sometimes).

So, in the past week I have acknowledged that polar bears will eat people because they are bigger than we are and because they live in areas of the world where prey can be scarce; bears must eat what they can to survive. Although interested in these facts, Sierra was more satisfied when I confirmed that polar bears do not live at Chewonki, in Wiscasset, or even in Maine.

Another night we spent ten minutes discussing wolves. We covered their current range and historical distribution, which included Chewonki Neck. When explaining that people had hunted wolves to extirpation (skipping that term for now) in many parts of their range, she asked why. I talked about the fear humans felt (real and perceived) as well as their predation on smaller livestock. Astutely, she asked how sheep defend themselves from a wolf. Here my knowledge and experience hit a limit, but we figured that they might huddle as a flock for mutual protection. She concluded that “wolves are bad” because they eat sheep. I let that rest and we moved on to the differences between wolves and coyotes before she was satisfied for the night.

Of all three questions, monsters and trolls presented me the greatest challenge. On one hand, I want to nurture her imagination, yet embedded in that question was another question, “do I need to worry about monsters and trolls coming to get me in the night?” Sierra has been getting up in the night for reassurance for some time now and we are just getting back to a full night of sleep pattern. Toeing the line, I said, “There are no monsters or trolls here, Sierra, you are okay.” But Sierra repeated, “are they real or pretend?” With the pressure on I concluded that no matter what I said, her propensity for pretend play would win out at this age, so I continued, “no Sierra, they are not real, but we can pretend play with them.” Did I say the right thing, I wondered, or did I just squash a whole world worth exploring? She continued, “if they are not real, then why are they in books?” Hoping for a way through, I repeated my line about imaginary play and she seemed satisfied. Her next comment was, “I’m tired. Can you turn out the light.” Phew.

As parents everywhere know, raising a child requires a continuous stream of decisions small and large. As a teacher, I usually feel extra pressure (self-imposed) to make my actions, words, and intentions just right, especially when Sierra expresses curiosity about the world around her. Unfortunately, I make mistakes everyday, some that I am aware of immediately and others that come to light over time (will her imagination suffer due to my claim that monsters and trolls are not real?). My hope is that the mistakes I make are small enough that they become another source of healthy learning, for me and for Sierra.

Most of all though, I look forward to the next questions, and to learning more through our conversation together. As we can all recognize, an “almost five” year old has a lot to teach us.