A Gift of Students

What turns the world?
The only answer is the wing of wind, a wildness
veering through the treetops, bending the birches.

—Cleopatra Mathis

On my desk, I have a scattering of damp leaves and needles newly exposed from the snow: birch, beech, sugar maple, red oak, white pine, and sumac. These are not from the branches of western trees, but eastern ones, as I have spent the last three months in New Hampshire teaching at Dartmouth College. The spring songs of tufted titmice and chickadees touch me with their strength and velocity emanating from such small feathered bodies. And I find the woods of New England deeply reassuring as one season passes into the next.

These particular woods are in Hanover and known as the Landmark Tract: 2,500 acres of wildness that are part of Dartmouth’s real estate holdings. My guide is a graduating senior named Daniel Susman, one of my writing students in the environmental studies program. He is tall and relaxed, but there is an intensity that burns through him in spite of his casual appearance. He is also an active member of the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC), the oldest and largest collegiate outing club in the country, formed in 1909. I have learned the DOC maintains more than seventy miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and is the first introduction to the college for most of the incoming students. Dan organizes the five-day “First Year Trips” to Mount Moosilauke in the White Mountains for 1,000 new co-eds and 350 student volunteers. This is part of the Dartmouth tradition, and an alum who held his position in 1955 told him, “It is one of the most underpaid and underappreciated jobs you’ll ever have. It’s closer to organizing military operations in Afghanistan than recreational camping for individuals.”

With the map in hand, Dan shows me the trail we will be walking and exactly where we will leave the path and walk directly in the woods to the vernal pools. Hopefully, most of the snow will have melted. In the American West, as well as in the Northeast, March through April is known as “the mud season,” for good reason. We begin just across the road from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Just to be out walking in the midst of birdsong is such a gift after the gray days of winter. This blue, cloudless day of overwhelming light is an embrace of optimism: Call it geographic relief from the depressing news pouring out of Washington, be it stalemates in Congress or our two wars, pick your choice, that carry on as though perpetual paralysis and conflict are the norm inside or outside our country.

What turns the world?

My response is wildness and imagination. Wildness as ex pressed through Thor eau’s wisdom, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” And wildness expressed in the imagination that fuels these extraordinary students who have become my mentors. Their leadership is both practical and visionary, at once.

Dan and two friends, Margi Dashevsky and Jonathan Wachter, met as freshmen through the DOC and their shared love of all things wild. They were environmental studies majors focusing on some of the critical issues of our time, such as sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, and climate change. They understood these as global issues with great complexities as they investigated them through scientific models and data, but they wanted more. They wanted to find the connection between their own lives and what they were learning in the academy.

“You can talk about these things ad nauseam,” Dan tells me as we are walking over snow patches melting into leaf litter. “But what are we actually doing to change how we live, to specifically reduce our carbon footprint, to grow our own food, and to protect these wild lands that remain?”

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of “ The Open Space of Democracy” and, most recently, “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” She is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.

This is a short excerpt of the piece by Terry Tempest Williams that is in the May issue of The Progressive. To read the entire piece, subscribe now for $14.97.