Celebrating40Years in the Outdoor Classroom - The Chewonki ...

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Retracing the Steps of Clarence Allen My journey to New Discovery, District No. 9, in Marshfield, Vermont, started with an email in July of this year from Schuyler Gould, step-grandson of Clarence Allen, the founder of Camp Chewonki. Schuyler had transcribed a journal entry written by Clarence on December 3, 1904. That winter, at the ripe age of seventeen, Clarence worked a 10-week stint as schoolmaster in a one-room schoolhouse, instructing over a dozen 14 / Chewonki Chronicle WILLARD MORGAN pupils ages 5 through 18, often in temperatures so low they had to thaw the inkwells on the woodstove. This particular entry documented a Saturday hike by Clarence from his host family’s house across country and up a nearby mountain. Reading it, I realized the rich well of natural history information it contained. After an early encounter with a skunk, which lured away his canine companion, Pompey, Clarence recounted the next leg of his solo hike (spelling and grammar verbatim).
The foothill I struck first was covered with beautiful firs. They ranged from a foot high to fifty all rich green and being so thickly intergrown gave that healtfull firry oder in profusion. On the other side of this ridge of firs I came to a clearing. The trees had been felled and left branches and all as they were so that the thickly matted branches made a sort of mattress, which was appropriately covered with a blanket of snow. The blanket concealed the hollow places and wanting to rough it rather than going around, I started to cross. My foot would strike first a hollow and sink down to my hips, then a slippery branch or I’d stubb my toe and go headlong. It was great fun and exercise and I reached the other side in a little while. Another strip of firs, which like the first was literally covered with rabbit, mice, skunk, and many other tracks and beyond another clearing like the first. Clarence’s description of this high country above Marshfield village is classically post-agricultural New England. By 1904 much cropland and pasture had been abandoned in favor of rich soils in the Midwest. Thirty- to 70-year-old forests were fine sources of lumber and firewood as loggers cleared much of the mountains across northern New England at the turn of the century. The slash left behind fed a series of conflagrations that incinerated peaks in the Adirondacks, Green Mountains, White Mountains, and western Maine, leaving soils exposed to erosion. Rocky bald peaks and a constellation of fire towers, familiar to today’s hikers, are long-lived reminders of that era. By 1904 deer, moose, beaver, mountain lions, wolves, and other large mammals were extirpated from the region, so rabbits and skunk would have been some of the larger wildlife left in Marshfield. Clarence knew his trees and his tracks, and he had a keen eye for detail. I wondered, could I retrace his trail and compare the landscape of 1904 to 2010? Although natural history was my first interest, I soon realized this would give me an opportunity to walk in Clarence’s footsteps and consider my own role as the heir to his Chewonki vision less than two months into my term as president. It was early August, with camps in session, trips scattered across the state, Family Camp close at hand, and the semester on the horizon, but I chose a date, August 28, and made plans. Continued on page 16 Visit our website at www.chewonki.org / 15 JOCK MONTGOMERY
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