Criss-cross-applesauce, they lean forward. “Eyes on Jen,” they watch as she peels masking tape from her painted, striped maple staff, demonstrating how to make brown and red rings. The students are sharp and springy as carbon steel as they go to their stations, painting acrylic rainbows and wrapping soft yarn handles hung with feathers: barred turkey, iridescent pheasant and bright tropical birds. The room is divided into three areas. It is crackling with quiet excitement. Each table is strewn with tools and materials, with an adult to supervise three or four children until they rotate and begin again.

At the bead station, children count in groups of ten, making sure there are five beads for each child. They sort and investigate. This group of beads with the cool grey hue, tiny white lenticels and narrow pith are different than that group with the course, raised lenticels. They are thick and pithy with brownish bark, they notice. “The beads with the white lenticels are red maple,” they are told as they remove the styrofoam-like pith with wood screws, awls and paper clips. The warm grey bark is elderberry, they learn as they carefully carve alternating stripes of brown bark, green cambium and creamy wood. They handle the tools with careful fingers, vulnerable and pink. Adrenaline is a boon to their focus and an anchor for their memory it is said in the Wilderness Awareness School.

Another focus and anchor to learning are the senses and the emotions. Sensuous and aesthetic makes learning not only fun but deeply memorable, as we experience throughout the day. At lunchtime, in the chill air, two children help build a log cabin fire, the center filled with white birch bark and “little wispies”, the crisp, dead, ever-dry branches snapped from a conifer tree. Stomachs rumble as we breathe the sharp smoke and watch our bread swell and turn brown. Earlier, Kathy punched down sticky dough that we are wrapping around fresh green sticks of maple and cherry. Some of the bread is ready now, crispy, hot and golden with a soft middle. “Oops,” some are now black like the charcoal camo “paint” on small faces! Everyone is smiling and eating, laughing, warming fingers and toes as the young fire-tender carefully lays another white pine branch on the fire.
White Pine with five-needles-as-one, like the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee or “People of the Longhouse” confederacy, is called “The Tree of Peace”. This potent symbol of the only appropriate response to a bully says to stand tall and speak true words: “That feels mean.” Or “Stop! That hurts my feelings.” In the afternoon, we heard a story of a boy long ago who thought he was defending himself only to find that those who witnessed his punches, thought he was the bully more so than the person who spoke the ugly words that enraged him. Afterward, the young ones offered helpful solutions and suggested good words to use in such a challenging situation.

We finished the day with a concert by the Jacksonville Blues Band. Deacon was so proud of his dad that he could not contain his reserve. He burst into a wild dance of enthusiasm, shortly followed by the rest of the school. I didn’t know he could dance so well or that school could be so fun!