by Ella Deutchman, Environmental Education Fellow | February, 2024
January 9th, was our first substantial snow of the winter. We were brushed with it, on Halloween, but nothing since. The yearning for snow was palpable, its absence, eerie. For Eagle Bluff’s Animal Signs class, we use a double-sided piece of paper that shows animal prints in snow on one side, and animal prints in soil on the other. For our training for it, we used the soil side. The snowflake lights glowing in Lanesboro were lovely but dissonant. Our “stick season” extended far beyond its usual tenure. Finally, we woke up to snow sparkling on everything. Blanketing the luggage rack, resting atop branches. Amplifying light in such a way that even the overcast sky became something new.
As an Environmental Education Fellow at Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center, me and a handful of other fellows spent the fall teaching two 3-hour classes a day, or acting as liaison for visiting groups, guiding them through their 3-day 2-night Eagle Bluff experience. Now, we find ourselves in a winter lull, where school groups are less frequent, and so we’ve been spending much of our time in training, settling down and refreshing with the season.
We were supposed to go on a hike for our iNaturalist seminar that morning. Instead, we donned snowshoes and trekked to the abandoned power plant, down a path I’d never walked before. I brought up the back of the line for a while, compelled by the beauty of so many people I have come to love stepping through the snow-covered path.
We laughed and talked about polar plunges and songs that match moments and what kind of swimmers’ builds we have, about Ann Patchett novels that feel like exactly the kind of book we want to be reading, about how snow obscures sense of place in a delightful way. We shook flakes off prairie plants and photographed lichens and bare branches and dormant buds to upload to iNaturalist later. We made our way up hills, which I’ve been running up more of lately, and my body felt ready for them, strong and sturdy in the snowshoes’ hold. We reached the overlook and catapulted snowballs off it, at each other, some of us ducking behind the step down to the overlook, which served as a makeshift fortress.
Post-snowballs, we walked over to Chickadee Central, three benches in a U-shape flanking a couple bird feeders. Mary, who was leading the seminar, told us if we took a seat and kept quiet the birds may come. She sprinkled birdseed onto our gloves and hats, and we sat in the quiet.
I can’t quite put a finger on the peace I felt there, in the mid-morning stillness. I noticed the wind in a more dimensional way, its sound and its shape. I watched the eyelids of some other people flutter close and so I let mine, too, and we stayed on the damp bench on the edge of the woods waiting for birds that didn’t end up arriving. There’s something to be said about collective quiet among the trees, something that I can’t say enough of- the way vitality starts to gather and whisper, like a secret we’ve been keeping from ourselves for no reason.
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Upon brief glance, I may not seem a likely Environmental Education Fellow. I am not a scientist, nor do I particularly want to be a teacher as a long-term career. I cannot identify animals or plants. I don’t know which mushrooms are edible, how to maintain trails, or much about phenology, although the concept appeals to me.
I am, however, a person who exalts in the outdoors; who delights in communal cooking; who loves watching children overcome their fears and enjoy eachothers company; who feels reinvigorated from confronting my own anxieties about public speaking and being perceived so heavily. I get energized from learning; love to be with the seasons as they change; find profound solace and laughter in being surrounded by a community of peers.
I am a seeker of experiences that make me feel alive, that connect and remind me of my connection to others, myself, and the world around me. That’s what the fellowship has been for me so far- a lesson in relationship.
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After snowshoeing, I listened to the Adrianne Lenker album “Hours were the birds” for the first time, and haven’t been able to stop listening to it since. On the second track, called “Lighthouse”, she sings, “And I met you on the corner of the seasons”, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that line. To meet on the edge of something cyclical! A season’s change like a dog-eared page in a book, a defining of the undefined, a nook to create shelter in.
Perhaps that’s what felt so unnerving to me about this year’s snow-lack- I couldn’t find my place in the story of the seasons, the phenology was askew, the weather wasn’t keeping time in the way I am used to.
We come to depend on markers, on patterns, and when they change, we are lost, we can’t find our footing in the circle of the seasons. The cycle is no longer clockwork.
I went on a pre-sunrise run the next day, the snow giving the sky back its light and more. I saw overlapping animal tracks, rabbits and deer and others I was unable to identify. I heard birdsong, prevailing even through the music in my ears. I ran up a winding road and paused at the top to breathe. Even with the chains I stuck onto my shoes, snow-blanketed ground intensifies the workout.
Other fellows embarked upon the prairie with their cross-country skis, people went sledding before work, wrestled outside in the snow after it. The preschoolers went sledding this morning, bundled in their tiny snowsuits, the middle schoolers condensed snow into ice by pressing it in their palms, they chucked snowballs at each other, built fires regardless of the ice crystals all around, shoved snow in their mouths, inquired about making snow angels.
Today’s visiting school group left early due to another impending snowstorm, tomorrow’s group postponed. We joked about being snowed-in to Eagle Bluff for the weekend, a real possibility. There’s something so grounding to me about weather changing plans. I will be feeling so rushed to crease all my pages, to do so in “good time”- whatever that is supposed to mean. And then a storm hits, and the reconciliation with humility that accumulates on the roads leaves me rooted. I find myself wiping my windshield as if reminded of a fundamental niche of aliveness- slowing down.
What I am trying to do is release to the changing pace of change itself, to the weirdness of it all. Sometimes it is 90 degrees in Minnesota in October. Sometimes it doesn’t snow until mid-January. And I feel the dissonance of that in my bones. I see it draped over the limbs of humans and trees, I feel it roiling in my bare stomach on a winter run. It is strange to grow up, even stranger when you find the familiar signposts battered and halfway down muddy roads, when it is blazing and frigid at bizarre intervals. Maybe our project is to accept that the jubilation and alarm need not cancel each other out. As has always been true, the light’s inevitable leaving only brightens its presence; we are alive. Maybe our project is to be still in the woods with the people we love, giving up our fight to one-up time, and waiting for birds.
Learn more about the Eagle Bluff fellowship here!
