131604_04_11:features 20-27 3/23/10 10:35 AM Page 10
TOP: Archival photo of “Winter Cabin,” a photo from the 1938 Mischianza ABOVE: As a senior, Charles Whittemore ’77 designed and built the cabin now known as the Mars Hotel. When he died in 1989, friends, family, and fellow alumni contributed to a fund in his honor. The fund is used for maintaining cabins, trails, and bridges in Beeslick Brook Woods. OPPOSITE: Students visit Ranger’s Cabin, the oldest of three vintage Hotchkiss cabins still standing.
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belonging to Headmaster Buehler and donated in 1948 by the widow of former history teacher Alfred Hall. (In accepting the gift from Mrs. Hall, George Van Santvoord proclaimed that it was an ideal spot for entertaining “fellow members of the faculty…under delightful conditions.”) By the early 1950s, when membership in the Woods Squad reached a record high of 35 boys, the trails were in constant use, from spring brush-clearing to winter cross-country skiing, recalls Chuck Jarecki, a former Montana cattle rancher and active pilot. “Woods Squad was where you could do projects that lasted and there was no drive to win or beat anyone. The skills we learned have lasted a lifetime,” he said. Voted the most uncivilized member of the Class of 1956 because he spent so much time spent outdoors, he notes proudly that he and two classmates – John Cowan and Dave Northrop – were given a special Woods Squad award at graduation that year. “They built a bridge across the Beeslick Brook at the bottom of the ski jump there, using old quarried stones that had been dumped near the ’49 Fields,” explains retired Instructor in Mathematics and Science Bob Royce, who took over as Woods Squad advisor from Van Santvoord. “Just the three of them by themselves. Hard-working kids. Great kids.” Royce remembers students’ cutting tangled tree roots and maintaining the old hockey ponds (“it was a constant battle, patching the dams and shoveling snow and ice”) although their primary job was cutting firewood. “You get tired. It gets cold in winter. The wood gets hard. And axes bounce,” he says. “I chopped my leg once. The Duke did, too. But he held Chapel the next day anyway. He was a good man.” Time passed, the old ski jumps were dismantled,
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and Woods Squad gradually lost its cachet, although it was occasionally revived in less ambitious incarnations. For a few years beginning in the late 1990s it was reborn as the Green Corps, organized by Jim Morrill and Lynn Mattoon, wife of former headmaster Skip Mattoon. “We were basically doing trail maintenance, and we helped build some of the bridges that are out there now, though Geoff Marchant has repaired them,” says Morrill, for whom the Woods are an invaluable living museum and a required destination for at least two fall field trips by his AP Environmental Science seniors. “For a lot of them it’s the first time they’ve been in there. And their reactions range from ‘I didn’t know these things existed in our own woods,’ to ‘I never understood how rewarding natural history could be.’” Today’s Outdoor Leadership participants have inherited the spirit of yesterday’s Woods Squad even if they don’t spend their time repairing cabins or cutting girdling tree roots. The trails they’ve blazed – this spring with help from Students for Environmental Action (S.E.A.), the on-campus group that sponsors Eco Day cleanups of invasive species and other projects – will ultimately end in the installation of new signs and displays at trailheads and a new map for students to carry with them. All of this is destined to encourage greater exploration while still protecting what a 2005 report by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies terms “an extraordinary educational and ecological resource that has made a significant, positive impact upon generations of Hotchkiss students and faculty.” The report, which recommended clearing trails but leaving the rest of the Woods as natural as possible, might be considered a kind of delayed response to a 1933 article in the Hotchkiss Alumni News, in which concern was expressed that the rules of the Woods Committee would result in over-organization “and the old wildness and freedom of the woods would vanish.” In fact, easier access simply means more students will experience the delights of sauntering, be better informed about the interdependency of forest, lake, stream, and farm, and become more attuned to the collective memory of this particular place. Peel back a few layers and the Buehlers are offering sherry to friends on winter weekends; a few more, and farmers are grazing cows on open pastureland on sunny spring mornings. Go back far enough and you may catch a glimpse of the Wawyachtonoc tribe that local histories say held regular gatherings by Lake Wononpakook. “If students can visualize what this forest looked like a hundred years ago, then they can apply those same rules to imagine what it’s going to look like a hundred years from now, or even just when they come back for their 50th reunion,” said Chris Oostenink, calling the Hotchkiss Woods an essential extension of the classroom experience. “It’s a wonderful and complex ecosystem, a critical resource and laboratory, and it’s right here.”