A Special Place: Students Create Their Own Nature Trail by Susan Bonthron Susan wrote this reflection following a Community Works Summer Institute for teachers at Guilford Central School which had, as a related component, a "Kids Institute." K-8 students spent the week parallel to the teachers' Institute working with educator Cynthia Hughes to enhance an existing nature trail. At the end of the week Susan took part in a guided tour of the trail with other Institute participants. I look around the circle in the library. All of us--K-8 teachers, high school students, a bus driver, the principal, adult volunteers from the community--have spent the past five days inspiring each other to think about teaching and learning new ways. It's been hot and rewarding, frustrating and enlightening. We've done it for a number of years now, this gathering in July to help each other learn about the practice of service-learning. Every year it gets better as we know each other more deeply, and encourage each other by example to climb out of our boxes and think in new ways, open ourselves to new ways of thinking about teaching. But I am still not prepared for what will happen to me this afternoon... On this trail I revisited my childhood and knew again the sacred nature and importance of a sense of place. This is the first institute in which we have managed to include K-8 students. They are not in the meeting room with us, because it's hard to ask younger children to sit still hour after hour--not even adults are very good at it. But they are with Cynthia Hughes and Laura Lawson Tucker, and they are having their own "summer institute" with shorter hours. I find out this afternoon that they have interviewed a town elder and been entertained by his ribald stories, they have learned to make musical instruments out of things they found along the nature trail, they have listened to stories and written poems, and best of all, they have turned the nature trail itself into a magical place invested with meaning they have made themselves. The children are posted at various spots along the trail, where they will act as guides to us "adults" as we are led along it. First we enter through an arched tunnel of bent saplings the children have made to entice people onto the trail. (To fully appreciate this, you should know that the trail entrance was formerly a mass of poison ivy which discouraged most teachers and all but the most carefully protected adults and children from wanting to set foot on the trail at all.) Now this beautiful tunnel on its bed of wood chips invites you into the cool forest as if you were re- entering your childhood, and so I felt. At each "station" along the way, the children have placed hand made wooden boxes with hinged lids, which the student guide pulls open with great ceremony, to reveal a sheet of poetry or writing about what you see around you there. The boxes and poems are made with equal care and will withstand all but the most inclement weather. The poems are read by tremulous, hurried, or confident voices of children who trust the adults they are reading to. At various spots along the trail we are treated to explanations or demonstrations of a particularly beautiful wolf-shaped rock, or a circle of stones with a miniature scene laid out inside it (complete with teepee, trees, and a river), or a musical sound that's made by two saplings tied together with string that bend and rustle when another branch is dropped on the string. There is a "bird room" where benches made of logs let you rest and listen to the birds sing. There is a starfish-shaped tree root on the trail (left behind where a tree was cut down), and it is outlined in small white stones as if the ghost of the tree were being honored in the revelation of this beautiful natural pattern. Further on, two boys have built a bridge of stones across the creek to a large rock, where they sit in thoughtful poses to show us they feel this is a special spot that invites quiet reflection. Another boy has built a structure of bent saplings into which you are invited to climb, and which forces you once you sit there to stare up at the canopy of leaves above. You realize you have been so entranced with the trail and the ground that you have missed a whole different world that nods and trembles above your head. As the end of the trail, there is a huge log jam of jumbled trees and brush over the creek. At first you think, "How will they ever get rid of that?" And then a small face appears in the dead center of it, and next to it another, and the two boys show you the entrance--decorated with softly sculptured driftwood, leaves and string--to their secret hideout, and this cavelike opening invites you to enter and leave your adulthood utterly behind. On a nearby log the boys show off their museum of collected objects--a rusty can, a piece of Styrofoam, four bottle caps--displayed with such care and attention that you see them for what they truly are, not junk dropped in the woods, but found treasures. Nearby you can count six green and rust-colored frogs in a small vernal pool left behind by the stream, but you only see them if you stand very still and look quietly and help each other to point them out. On this trail I revisited my childhood and knew again the sacred nature and importance of a sense of place. Because children have this inborn capacity to respond and live in their imaginations in such a setting, and because the adults who worked with them understood both the nature of children and the nature of place--how to respect and honor both--a magic was revealed and shared that all of us need, and that earth needs too, from each of us. My friend Paulus Berensohn asked the tribe of aborigines he stayed with in Australia why they made art, and their carefully considered answer was, "To sing up the earth. She needs our praise and encouragement." Those children were singing up the earth, and they made my heart sing with them.