November 11th, 2009 kathrynh
::K::
Jon Young visited recently. Two days of sitting around a fire listening to his stories about the Wilderness Awareness School’s (WAS) history answered one of my lingering questions about the Anake program: why do we devote so much class time to community building skills when we could be learning naturalist skills? It turns out that I signed myself up for an intriguing educational and social experiment.
           The “village†concept is a core element in the program’s structure. Local community members of various ages are involved with the school. The school has asked some members to assume the role of elders and aunties/uncles (seasoned adults preparing to be elders). They offer grounded perspectives on the world. Adults and children constitute the other half of the WAS community. This community structure provides a weft of mentors for all students. Consequently, such a tightly woven community maximizes learning. Jon Young remarked that students acquire naturalist skills more quickly when they can rely upon a strong community for knowledge, encouragement, and inspiration than when they try to attain them solo.
           I agree that the community WAS builds around its students leaves us with no excuses to opt out of learning. Be it an elder who comes and participates in classes or a five year old who asks us to construct a shelter with them, we are surrounded with multigenerational knowledge!
           The village system is one to which humans naturally gravitate and, yet, I realize that the communities I form after the Anake program might not appear as noticeably cohesive as the group at Linne Doran. With friends and families living across the country (and in some cases, across the world) from each other, village structures are present, but more scattered today than they have been in the past. For me, that is okay. Airplanes, cars, telephones, and the Internet allow people to stay in touch and to “keep the home fires burning.â€Â The future communities I form might not have a tangible epicenter, such as the Malalo meeting area at WAS, but, with a bit of effort, members can still share ideas and learn from each other. No longer dependent on place or proximity, the “home fire†becomes a network of people dedicated to supporting one another’s quest to understand the environment.
           Perhaps one day I will cease roaming the country, find a place to settle, and root myself within a fixed physical community like that of WAS. Until then, however, I must recognize the mentors embedded within the communities I encounter. I will strengthen the mentoring relationships I find within each one, be they with elders or youth, and begin weaving them together to create my own diverse learning “village†that travels with me on my journeys.  Â
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November 2nd, 2009 Evan
9 October 2009
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Having gathered the food, now it must be prepared. The gathering, it turns out, is the easy part; just walk along and chuck stuff (respectfully) into a sack; toss the sacks (gently)Â into the car and off you go. But processing! With all the variety of forage we raked in, Alexia’s home became a muti-tasker’s paradise; attention deficit disorder was your greatest ally. This was experiential education at its best. Boxes of apples were boiled into applesauce which then became the star of the canning demonstration, ground meats and dried berries together with rendered sheep fat were turned into jerky and pemican. We mixed salal, huckleberry, salmonberry, even some hawthorn into mush for dried fruit peels. We made rose hip honey and rose hip syrup and a sauce of over-ripe golden plums. A half dozen wild cereals were threshed, winnowed and baked into soda bread.
The kitchen was clockwork chaos – innumerable projects flying in and out of the single stalwart oven; the stove constantly covered in a shifting medley of pots and pans, each touched in turn by the better part of seventy-odd hands. Two fish baked in a sauce, chicory root “coffee” bubbled on the stove next to a pot of leeching acorns, soft white cheese was made from scratch.
For those of us needing a moment’s rest, and any who preferred to learn in a less intense environment, scattered stations appeared about the yard. Alexia showed us how to handle a beehive, Shondell watched over a racked and drying sheep hide as we kneaded and massaged it into a usable skin. A borrowed cider pressed whirred and rumbled in the driveway, which meant we had to stop and sample fresh pressed cider: fill your cup straight from the spout – you can’t get it any fresher than that! Behind the house others sat cracking hazelnuts and walnuts and trading stories.
Then guests arrived from the school’s extended community and it was time to eat. We gave thanks for the fruit of the earth, for the energy that transformed it into the meal before us, and for the knowledge passed on by so many people that made our feast possible. As we ate the sky lit with bright pinks and blues and everyone paused to watch. Eventually dishes were put away, a fire grew in the fireplace, and we drifted from food to conversation and song.
This was a “fire hose day.” Information flowed in an uninhibited barrage: place yourself as close to the center of the stream as you like, style your experience as you desire, learn as much as you can. The evening flowed from preparation, to feast, to relaxation: the day moved with all the natural rhythm of a crashing wave. By day’s end we were left with the tingling exhaustion of a day spent hard at play: tired, but smiling, like children coming in from a long day of sledding and snowball fights.
At long last we left, feeling full, warm and tired. I was sure we had stayed late into the night, but when I returned home my clock insisted it was only nine thirty.
I went to bed anyway.
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