Alumni Profile: Author and Playwright Liz Maccie - Newark Academy

as well as the Navajo National Monument in the middle
of Arizona; and, of course, the Grand Canyon.
The group travels by van, purchasing food supplies
at local grocery stores and cooking meals in the
campgrounds. We spend time among the desert varnish
that decorates the gorge walls of the Green River, the
petroglyphs and kivas of the Ancient Puebloans, the
sandstone and shale of the redrock throughout the
region, and the buttes and hoodoos of Bryce and Zion.
We hike to Hey Hoe Mine, canoe around Bow-Knot
Bend, traverse Walter’s Wiggles, and scramble up
Angel’s Landing.
Each night John gathers the troops for a campfire chat,
reading a story about a hallucinogenic flower from
Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire or a creation myth
from a Native American anthology. He talks about
the geology and history of the Southwest,
explaining that limestone is a sedimentary
rock made of compressed bodies of ancient
sea creatures or describing John Wesley
Powell’s historic trip down the Colorado
and Green rivers. And the kids learn.
However, the real learning emerges out on
the trails, among the dramatic landscape
of the Southwest, where students are given
a good deal of independence to explore
the world around them and, as happens
when experience becomes the teacher,
to make mistakes within the safety of
the group.
In all these years, only a small group
of teachers has had the opportunity to
accompany and learn from John. Joe
Borlo served as the accomplice most of
those years, and in the last decade Lisa Swanson,
Kathleen Sigrist, Arlene Jachim and I have chaperoned
as well. After one single two-week trip, I marveled at
the idea of doing such a thing 25 times. Of course,
as John attests, he didn’t start out knowing that he’d
reach such a milestone. What kept him going back
all those years? Was it just the beauty and majesty of
the landscape? The chance to “get away”? In my mind
it’s perfectly clear: the only thing that could keep a
teacher going back year after year is a dedication to
and passion for sharing such a place and an experience
with his students.
NA NEWS fall 2008
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