I worked an overnight at Ashland for the first time in several months this past weekend, and it felt good to be walking the trails again. Somewhat regularly when I come home from working, I think it would be nice to take the kids out to Ashland on weekends I’m not working, for us to hike and enjoy the setting as a family, but it seems my free weekends always get consumed by other things - cleaning, shopping, good old-fashioned slacking off. But the reality is that this job is a big factor in getting me out at all. Still, I continue to think I’ll make it a priority, perhaps this spring when it will be easier to convince everyone to spend a few hours outside.
For this weekend, I learned some things and, most importantly, got my footing again, feeling comfortable speaking to a group. Saturday night we had a lesson on Astronomy, one of the programs that I have assisted with a number of times but still feel a bit nervous about presenting. In preparation, I reread The Firmament chapter of The Natural Navigator, so I had some interesting information about using the stars for direction in mind. And I did present part of the lesson, speaking about those constellations with some connection to wayfinding or orientation in the sky: the Big Dipper/Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopaea, Orion, Canis Major and Canis Minor.
On one level, these are constellations most everyone knows, which makes them a good place to start talking with a group. But there is also more to each than most of us pick up. Most everyone knows you can find the North Star with the Big Dipper, but people sometimes need a reminder on which two stars are the pointers. You can also find Polaris from Cassiopaea, and that provides an interesting way for people to double-check they have the right star and a good option to find it if the Big Dipper is behind clouds or otherwise hard to see, as it was a bit Saturday night when we went out, actually, being low on the horizon and somewhat washed out by Wilmington’s light pollution.
In addition to helping teach a program I have not done as often, another reason this weekend was unusual was that the group was about 20 boy scouts, ranging in age from about 8 or 9 to 17. On the whole, these were older kids, many of whom knew at least part of what we were teaching. I started to worry in the auditorium, when they looked a bit bored, although very respectful and cooperative. It is hard to read how you’re doing with kids this age. But when we got out on Sledding Hill to put what we just learned into practice, I was encouraged to hear some of the boys talking to each other as they picked out constellations and used both methods for finding and verifying the North Star.
Our time on the hillside was enjoyable. We actually had a mostly clear night and found all the basic constellations quickly. I was happy personally to be able to see things I’m not familiar with, making me think I can learn this stuff. Kathy pointed out Jupiter, which was fun to see. The only thing we didn’t quite do was find Comet Lovejoy, which theoretically we could have found with binoculars, which I had, but relied on us first finding the star Algol in the constellation Perseus, which does not resemble much of anything. A large, upside-down and imperfect V is the best description I can come up with. We may have found the star - it was a clear night straight up - but we weren’t sure and couldn’t quite tell which direction to start scanning with binoculars. Not to mention that even if we saw the comet, I wouldn’t have known how to be certain it was what we were seeing.
The trails were icy at this point, with snow that had been trampled now freezing over, and as a few people fell and slid down on our way down the hill, it became clear we weren’t going to do any more of a night hike. Still, the stars had been the focus of the night, and they delivered.
Slipping and sliding would be a theme Sunday morning, too, and it soon became apparent that not only did the teenagers not mind falling down here and there, some of them seemed to be actively trying to slip. Far from being hesitant to fall, they were exuberant about being outside, playing with the conditions and enjoying themselves. Especially the boy who ended the day with absolutely drenched jeans and a smile on his face.
Sunday was a little different from a usual day at Ashland because we were helping this group work on two merit badges: environmental science and soil and water conservation. Much of the teaching had been done Saturday afternoon before I was working, but there were still a few things to go over Sunday, and a pair of hikes to see what we were discussing. Covering the topics we were, it was a combination of geology and ecology, primarily, with attention to environmental damage and conservation methods as we went along.
We split the group in two, and Kathy and I started the morning with our half by hiking up Hawk Watch Hill for an overview of the land and a good backdrop for discussing geology and the rock cycle, from the uplift of rock and its weathering to the transport and deposition of it we would see illustrated as we hiked down into the valley to the Red Clay Creek. The interesting thing about the lesson was the need to illustrate erosion both as a natural process and as something exacerbated and made problematic by human land use. Most of this fell on Kathy, as I served primarily as a helper Sunday, carrying equipment and chiming in here and there when I saw an opportunity.
On the whole, the weekend was interesting to me because it focused on nature but not biology, as much. We certainly discussed the cycle of life in a brief indoor lesson between Sunday’s hikes and you cannot separate living organisms from the environment, contributing as they do to soil creation and retention. But the emphasis took a very expansive view - the big picture in timeframes and what we consider when we think about the environment.
On the latter hike of the day, we were surveying life in two habitats, the forest and the floodplain, and even then the lens through which we saw them was primarily what the life in each told us about the conditions there: relatively wet or dry, sunny or shady, etc. In the forest I kept myself busy spotting birds and trying to get some sense of how many species were around us, since part of the exercise is to compare the diversity of the two locations, but it ended up being relatively unimportant to the lesson. (Still, it was good to have even a few minutes of practice spotting birds in the trees: blue jays, cardinals, hairy or downy woodpecker, a red-bellied woodpecker, what may have been a goldfinch, although that would be less common this time of year and wasn’t as clear as the others.)
If I hadn’t felt quite so much like I’m just supposed to know and unsure I’d even be able to figure it out with help, I would have brought out my tree field guide - it has a section specifically on identifying trees in winter. But I was enjoying the birds and we weren’t in the forest all that long anyway. There just isn’t as much to find in winter as there would have been if we were doing this program later in the year.
Nonetheless, it was a fun weekend and a helpful one - getting me back out after a month or two of hibernating, pushing my thinking in directions I less often explore, like astronomy and geology. As I found when I was volunteering at the Kalmar Nyckel, it’s fun to find your interests expanding at an organization after you get involved for one primary reason and discover other things along the way. For the ship, I was attracted to it for the sailing and found out the history is fascinating as well. And at Ashland, I’m starting to understand and appreciate more about those parts of the world and universe that have typically been a little too overwhelming for me to wrap my head around.
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