Fall 2021 (19th Issue) by Middlebury Geographic Magazine

MIDDLEBURY

GEOGRAPHIC

19TH EDITION • FALL 2021

MIDDLEBURY

GEOGRAPHIC 19TH EDITION • FALL 2021

FEATURES

3 | Editorial Board 4-5 | Contributors 6-7 | Editor's Note

Grand Themes

10-15 | Admitting Reality by Libby Scaperotta '23.5 16-21 | Beyond Illusions by Brett Gilman '24.5 22-33 | Grand Landscapes by Jiffy Lesica '25

Intimate Scenes

36-39 | The Ends of the Earth by Vaughan Supple '23.5 40-47 | Lil BOSS by JT Titmus '23 48-57 | Cultural Idenity by Jiffy Lesica '25

Photo by Henry Terry

Editorial Board Editors-In-Chief Drew An-Pham '22.5 Haley Hutchinson '23.5 Lead Photo Editor Malick Thiam '24 Lead Designer Jake Gilbert '24 Lead Copy Editor Caitlin Baxter '24

Designers Alnaw Elnaw '24 Olivia Kilborn '24 Libby Scaperotta '23.5 Sarah Rifkin '24

On The Cover:

Simtokha Dzong Semtokha, Bhutan By Jiffy Lesica '25 3

Copy Editors Maggie Bryan '25 Charles Crounse '24 Ethan DeMaio '24 Brett Gilman '24.5 Antonia Gomez '25 Helena Gu '25 SK Hurlock '24 Sylvie Lyu '24 Else Nye '25 Bea Parr '25

Photo Editors Siri Ahern '24 Andrew Grossman '24 Megan Paluska '25 Jiffy Lesica '25 Patricia Hughes '24 Isabel Perez Martin '25 Charlie Deichman-Caswell '24

On The Back:

The Dolomites Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy By Jiffy Lesica '25

Br et t

Contributors a lm i G

n '24.5 Brett loves roaming backroads and meadows in search of native wildflowers and then designing native plant dreamscapes inspired by the wild. Rooted in a deep connection with the land, he's been an organic farmer for ten years and became an Accredited Organic Land Care Professional this past summer.

Vaughan

Lib b 4

'23.5 ple up

Vaughan Supple is a Junior Feb at Middlebury. His piece "Ends of the Earth" was written about his trek across Spain during his first semester. As an anthropology major, travel and writing are two ways Vaughan can put his studies into practice. Outside of the classroom, he enjoys writing, recording, and producing music. This often overlaps with his research in ethnomusicology, a study of music within culture, society, and geographical place.

aperotta '23. c S 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Libby is an Environmental Policy major from Fayston, Vermont. She enjoys the daily crossword, live music, and a good sunset. She can often be found doing something outside with her dog or on long road trips with friends.

Jif f

ca '25 i s e Jiffy Lesica is a 20-year-old photographer from Wilton, Connecticut with an interest in scenes of civic engagement, cultural identity, and environmental sustainability/climate change. While taking two years off before college, he developed an interest in photography as a medium to tell 'global stories'. In photographing with this intention, he hopes to frame a connection between people and their environment, chronicling and sharing scenes of tomorrow’s history.

JT Ti

23 s'

JT was born in Utah and raised in SoCal and Idaho, a state whose vast wilderness cultivated a love for being one with the land. They love spending time outside hiking, biking, skiing, and just breathing in the beauty of life. Music is a must-have, both making it as well as listening to it live or with friends. Majoring in Neuroscience and Conservation Psychology while also learning Chinese and planning on studying abroad, JT has big plans for exploring both of the worlds that we call home, the Earth and the Mind.

tm u

EDITOR'S NOTE

EDITORS' NOTE

I’m a city boy at heart. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, all I knew before coming to college were the echoes of cars wrestling on Interstate-10, overheard conversations in busy Chinatown restaurants, and the sounds of footsteps tapping across concrete pavement. Once I arrived at Middlebury, views of the Adirondacks from my dorm room and news of expeditions across the state filled my adventurous self with curiosities about this place. Fast forward to Spring 2020, the onset of the pandemic. Unsure of what was to come, the next year would be spent pent up in my Coffrin single on Zoom, grabbing to-go meals in Atwater alone, and missing the social scene of Midd students across campus. During this year of discomfort and unrest, I found solace in the places around Middlebury, places I came to fully embrace as my comfort zones. From small scale adventures—runs on sections of the Trail Around Middlebury (TAM)—to big picture moments—taking selfies at the top of Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump—this past year for me has been centered around expedition. Caught in the wave of academics, extracurriculars, and social lives, we so often turn a blind eye to the hidden gems that make the places we occupy special to us. Here at Middlebury Geographic, we want to pay homage to these discoveries students found over these past few years. The 19th edition of Middlebury Geographic features stories inspired by the art of expedition. Amidst a turbulent year, our contributors and editors have used their critical perspectives, sense of place, and ethics of adventure to reflect on grand themes and bring life to the intimate scenes. Their words and photographs serve as a reminder to never stop exploring™ (please don’t sue us, The North Face) and challenge us to continue searching for the places that may soon be special to us. While the future remains uncertain, our mission here at Middlebury Geographic has remained constant: to be a platform for global storytelling, art, and photography. In the pages to come, we share snapshots of our experiences, visions, and encounters that bring light to who we are as Middlebury students, but most importantly, citizens of the world grounded in a love for expedition. We hope this issue invites you to feel and embrace this sentiment. Words by Drew An-Pham ‘22.5 | Editor-in-Chief Photos by Charlie Deichman-Caswell ‘24 | Photo Editor

Grand Themes

8Photo by Libby Scaperotta

Admitting Reality By Libby Scaperotta '23.5 pg. 10

Beyond Illusions By Brett Gilman '24.5 pg. 16

Grand Landscapes By Jiffy Lesica '25 pg. 22

ADMITTING REALITY by LIBBY SCAPEROTTA

Admitting Reality Words & Photos by Libby Scaperotta '23.5

"So Lib, how is living in paradise?" Asked my friends, my family, and even distant Facebook friends of my mom.

ranted, the photos were pretty insane. But like most forms of social media travel stories, they showed merely a highlight reel. Travel stories tend to display a seamless transition from home to foreign destination, with unwavering strength from the explorer as they capture the essence of their site. Yet, my expedition last semester was not one of ease or consistent Instagram moments, although it might have seemed like it. At my departure gate in the Bozeman airport, I sat in the farthest corner I could find. It was completely white outside; a snowstorm that caused numerous near-accidents on my ride to the airport and a short power outage in line at security. I set up my rag-tag pile of winter jackets and bags away from everyone and peeled my two masks down to take quick bites of a stale bagel. The one hour to departure felt like an eternity.

ADMITTING REALITY by LIBBY SCAPEROTTA

I was scared. I was anxious about landing in a totally foreign place, about how I would get from the airport to my apartment, about how I would go grocery shopping without a car and about nearly every other step involved with setting up a new life. It was a total what am I doing moment. I sat there, bagel in hand, and thought, “Who do I think I am?” I had never really spent any time in the ocean, let alone seen coral in real life. But here I was, hours away from starting work as a coral restoration intern in Hawai‘i. There was reason to be overwhelmed. The timing of it all was very last minute. Upon leaving school after the fall Covid semester with the overwhelming desire to not do that again, I manically researched other options. I sent out resumés and cover letters to nearly every place with an email address. Dude ranches in Wyoming, coral gardens in French Polynesia, and farms in New Zealand; you name it and they received an email from me.

When I found an internship that specialized in coral restoration in Maunalua Bay on O‘ahu, I crossed my fingers that they might accept me. And, I got the internship. Afterwards, I spent the next few evenings pacing around my roommate’s living room in Boulder, scrambling to book flights, find housing, and wrap up all the loose ends involved with sending myself halfway across the world for the next four months. I found an apartment one week before arriving on the island. I picked myself – a girl from a landlocked state – up and shipped myself off to a teeny island in the middle of the Pacific. My mom sent my “just-incase” bag to meet me there: a carry-on of bikinis and flip-flops I had thrown together a few weeks earlier for the off-chance that I would drop everything and move to Hawai‘i. I stuck my skis in a friend’s car headed back east, and stepped on a flight to Honolulu. From an outside perspective, it probably did look like I was living in paradise. I mean, it was Hawai‘i. I was right next to the ocean, surfing every day, and hiking insane treks at every opportunity. If I wanted to, I could pretend that I was some sort of fearless, crazy adventurer and write this piece on my exploration of the beautiful island. However, those types of stories fail to acknowledge the reality of a lot of travel. My time on island wasn’t always spent snorkelling above live reefs, encountering wildlife I’d only ever seen on Animal Planet, or posing in a bathing suit on some beach. Oftentimes, my “travel story” was far from that. It was breaking down crying on the phone with my mom at five in the morning on the way to work when my moped broke down for the third day in a row. It was working thirty-five hour weeks to support myself, in addition to an internship, which led to its own fair share of breakdowns. It was sometimes the loneliness and adjustment of moving somewhere by yourself. And, it was wondering if I made the wrong decision to leave all my friends behind at school, disrupting my college experience even more than Covid already had.

ADMITTING REALITY by LIBBY SCAPEROTTA

Travel isn’t always pretty pictures or moments of awe. Often, travel is uncomfortable and intimidating. But, the personal growth that comes out of these types of experiences, the ones where you’re scared shitless, is truly unmatched. I learned a bit about how I wish to spend the rest of my life: sharing joy with others and having a career that never really feels like “work.” Saying “yes” and finding beauty in everything around me. I learned that anxiety and fear do not have to hinder me. Difficulties push us to overcome what is holding us back; these obstacles prove to be fuel for the journey of growing up and learning to become who we are. So yes, my last semester did include jaw dropping scenery and camping adventures that before I had only dreamt of. And yet, none of those highs would have been possible without the lows. And, I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

BEYOND ILLUSIONS REIMAGINING THE LAWN WORDS AND PHOTOS BY BRETT GILMAN '25

BEYOND ILLUSIONS by BRETT GILMAN

am constantly surprised and enthralled by nature’s unending ability to amaze, particularly in the realm of native plants and pollinators. I first learned of the Ecotype Project, a stewardship and research initiative dedicated to the safeguarding of local native wildflower seed, in my senior year of high school. Dedicated to pursuing my passion and curious about how I could make my own impact, I decided to apply for an internship. My task was to meet and interview many of the key stakeholders (farmers, nurserymen, botanists, non-profit organizations) involved in the initiative to learn how they do what they do. This allowed us to make protocols for each stakeholder archetype, and the replication of these models is the goal of the Ecotype Project as part of a budding native plant movement in the Northeast. Each week, scientists from the Connecticut Agricultural Station visit the home-base farm of the Ecotype Project. At this farm, rows of wildflowers are grown to create living seed banks, and these scientists perform pollinator surveys on these plots each week as they bloom throughout the year. While shadowing this process, I observed luminescent pink blooms of Swamp Milkweed. As waves of bumblebees and butterflies buzzed about, I watched a minuscule one-millimeter hoverfly circle the bloom, bouncing from leaf to leaf, but never going for nectar. This was extraordinary. A few days later, I was sitting on my front step watching the new blooms of Black-Eyed Susans in my front yard when a hoverfly appeared. It circled the bloom, bouncing between the leaves of abutting plants. I watched it, followed it, and photographed it. All of a sudden, a female hoverfly landed on the bloom. The two became entangled, and they zoomed off to a nearby shrub leaf. At that moment, I realized I had just observed the behavior that the scientist had explained to me back at the Swamp Milkweed. Male hoverflies emerge earlier than the females, and they employ a mating strategy called patrolling that involves circling new blooms and waiting for females. I was absolutely fascinated and thrilled that this extraordinary event had taken place right outside my door, all because I had planted the right plant in 18

BEYOND ILLUSIONS by BRETT GILMAN

the right place, and had opted not for ornamental and sterile traditional plants, but instead for native plants fit for these majestic wild pollinators. It strikes me that strangely, the outdoor spaces that we so often inhabit do not emote this same sense of magic. The ecological wasteland commonly known as the lawn is devoid of all life that is not human. A tyrannical monoculture of fescues reigns over a silent terrain of shallow nothingness: no fluttering, no buzzing, no wonder. It is a place of quick feet, where frenzied brains zoom about, their masters more closely connected to a screen than the Earth below. Yet, they are outside as they walk on blades of grass. But turf is deceptive like that. Although green in color, it is a false idol, an extension of the erected, an element of materiality more so than of carbon. Born of the Anthropocene, the lawn has no place in a truly green future. Lawns are pervasive forces of degradation. They cling to the land like ticks, feeding drunkenly on liberally-applied synthetic inorganic pesticides and fertilizers. More than 40 million acres of U.S. land are clothed in some form of lawn, an area nearing in size to the entirety of New England. This magnitude makes lawns the single most irrigated crop in America- one that is in so many ways entirely useless. Lawns serve to divorce what few habitat patches that remain from each other and in doing so, divorce humans from the natural systems that sustain us. By weaving native plants back into the matrix of suburbia, we can foster a landscape that facilitates the dispersal of wild bees and soften a mindset of resistance to the wild. All land, not just farms, preserves, and parks, is integral to the survival of wild native bees. Given the fact that low-resistance landscapes encourage greater dispersal of wild species between fragmented lands, ignoring the lawn as a site of regeneration is no longer an option. The idea of a lawn must cease to be a concept that is culturally upheld and reinforced, and instead must be culturally stigmatized. Our human-made landscapes must work to regenerate and promote the beautiful complexity of life’s systems of fertility. Land is meant to thrive.

However, getting rid of the lawn is no easy task. It’s one that requires carefully dismantling the intricacies of a widely-adored lawn culture. It is not enough to randomly scatter native wildflower seeds and hope that these divisions will reform. We must sow a worldview where land is viewed no longer as a commodity but is instead respected and protected as a shared space of community. In the grand scheme of the climate crisis, “[…] protecting and valuing the earth’s ingenious systems of reproducing life and fertility of all of its inhabitants, may lie at the center of the shift in worldview that must take place if we are to move beyond extractivism.” In order to safeguard the systems of the wild, we must restore a sense of community grounded in a connection to the land and work to renew a perspective that sees humanity as part of the interconnected web of all things, tasked with the duty of regeneration.

A hover fly on a black-eyed susan 19

BEYOND ILLUSIONS by BRETT GILMAN

And yet I find myself asking, how do we transform the world that we have now with the world that is needed? In the context of a crisis with a deadline, this question needs to be answered, and in one way or another, it will have an answer. It is time for a new garden aesthetic, a new social contract with the land, one that values the ecological systems that sustain us and bring us in closer dialogue with the land and each other. By matching plant to place, we can foster a unique spirit of place that connects people to each other through the land and builds community around native plants. I envision landscapes featuring intentional and highly-designed patterns of native plants where engaging juxtapositions of these flowers’ structural forms are valued for their beauty in all seasons. The white bells of Foxglove Beardtongue billow like sails floating on an early July breeze, these columns paired so nicely with the vibrant orange umbels of butterfly weed. With the fall comes a new palette of rich golden oranges and browns, where structure takes the stage in a performance of light and movement: the seedpods of that butterfly weed now a warm brown with a tint of blue, decorated with a shower of the delicate wispy blades of wavy hair grass. Seeds will be cherished as public goods rather than exchanged in the extractive tradition of commodification, and the process of pollination will be beautiful in its own

right. I seek the creation of landscapes that encourage a more intimate dialogue with the land, where curiosity and imagination are renewed in commonplace and electrifying explorations of the wild and it's magic. In this movement to reconnect our fragmented landscapes and to fortify our green corridors, we must make apparent the cultural values that invisibly wove a norm of ecological and social rift into the tapestry of life. Let’s reimagine the ecology of our landscapes and renew a sense of hope and possibility. At night upon my pillow, I sense sleep on the horizon as a familiar friend reaching out his hand. Peacefully, I drift away into a world of adventure, of quiet serenity in a landscape of native plants. I enter a land anew, where plumes of fantastical blooms dance in the wind, hearty seed heads are illuminated and adorned with crowns of early evening gold, bumble bees and birds enjoy a well-endowed landscape, and where hoverflies flit from bloom to bloom. These secrets of a hidden world are known only to those who humble themselves before the most awesome magic of the Earth. I see a landscape of acceptance, connection, humble and virtuous ignorance, emancipated sensibilities, and expanded imagination. I dream of rolling back the lawn and rewilding the landscape, but it is no fantasy.

Rolling slopes of the north (Monacobreen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard 2019) 22