September 2010
Dear Families,
The nest was perched under the overhang. There were three baby swallows with their mouths wide open awaiting a constant supply of bugs from their parents. Swallows were out in full force. The early sun was quickly evaporating the morning dew, and gnats, flies, and “noseeums” were filling the air. The swallows were having a busy morning feeding on breakfast, and regularly, even non-related swallows would fly by the three babies and feed them and call to them. While human minds were waking up with coffee, admiring the new day, and watching the birds, something remarkable happened. One of the babies approached the edge of the nest. Actually, the mother was behind her baby pushing him up when suddenly the other swallows responded with cries and calls as if they were cheering him on. For the next 30 minutes the baby swallow crawled up to the edge, looked around and down, and crawled back into the safe nest. Still, his fellow swallows never stopped encouraging him. They flew by and squawked as if to say, “You can do this! Just jump and fly!” At last the little fledgling crawled up to the edge of the nest one more time, and with a little nudge from his mother and cheers from other birds, leapt, fell about two thirds of the way to the ground, and began to flap his wings and fly with a fury. The place erupted with the cacophony of swallows squawking in unison until the baby bird flew around and joined his companions on the telephone wire.
Summer to me is an ideal time for parents to push children out of the nest. I recently read an article in The New York Times about happiness. Scientists are trying to discover what makes people happy and research consistently points to the fact that experiences rather than material objects make us happy. Money makes people happy, but only to the extent that it provides shelter, food, safety, and other basic needs. Having an abundance of stuff does not bring happiness, but having rewarding experiences does. This has rung true with Erin and me for years, and we have put a major emphasis on finding and providing our children with these experiences.
A Mountain Education
A perfect example of a rich experience for our family is a tradition started by Erin’s parents for their grandchildren six years ago. Living just outside of Manhattan in New Jersey, Erin’s sister, Jenna, felt her boys needed to understand their roots. Erin’s family, until she reached 8th grade, lived on a farm in the mountains of Graham County, North Carolina. Robbinsville is the closest small town and is located two hours west of Asheville. To put the remote nature of Graham County into perspective, all I need to tell you is that this is where Eric Rudolph, the man who bombed the Atlanta Olympics and evaded the FBI for five years, hid in the woods. Also, it is not far from Joyce Kilmer National Forest, which is considered some of the oldest forest not only in the United States but the world.
To hear Erin and her sisters depict their childhood in the North Carolina Mountains, one would think they were describing nirvana. Erin describes romping for hours through the woods with her friends. The land was wild, untamed, and remote just like the people who have inhabited it for generations. Physically and mentally Graham County is about as far away from Manhattan as one can get. Erin’s folks agreed with Jenna’s idea to get her boys into the North Carolina wilderness, and for the past five years Erin’s parents have formed a summer home they’ve named Camp TommyCade. Their grandchildren live in a cabin on a mountainside and learn by playing in Little Snowbird Creek, picking wild berries, swimming in natural pools in water cold enough to leave you gasping, fishing, listening to old time music, and sleeping under the stars. At Camp Tommycade, if a mountain education is what you want, a mountain education is what you get.
The City Boy Turns Cowboy
I think I may have bent a child labor law when I offered a reward to the kid who would retrieve our boomerang that, due to my poor pitch, landed in the cow field (not well tended enough to be called a pasture). Within seconds, six children ranging in age from 3 to 11 scampered down the hillside and lithely maneuvered themselves past the electric fence into the field. The two cows, named by my daughter Cade, Blackie and Brownie, were nowhere to be found, or so we thought. Since the children had fed them some leftover cornhusks the night before, though, the cows, equating the kids with food, made their hungry presence known in a matter of minutes. More frighteningly, Blackie and Brownie were snorting, stamping their feet, and moving menacingly toward the children. As I watched from the other side of the fence, I started to panic thinking the kids were going to get stampeded (I am sure some family from Texas is laughing about a stampede of two). Who would have thought the city boy, my nine-year- old nephew Julian, was going to save the day? Bravely, Julian held his ground, extended both palms, and started talking to the cows. The cows slowed and snorted, then stopped. This was all the time his younger cousins needed to scurry around the fence to safety and for him to calmly follow. The boomerang was lost, but the experience was one that he and the rest of us will remember for a lifetime.
Metaphorically, I see that same process taking place at The Lexington School all the time, and it is just as thrilling, albeit in an intellectual way. I hope all of you got a “push” out of the nest this summer or your own “mountain” education. Our summer adventures have a way of recharging and preparing us for a great new school year.
With gratitude for a job I love,
Charles D. Baldecchi
Head of School