Back in 1967 I graduated from a high school with 25 other students. We attended a most unique institution in Craftsbury Common, VT. This place is within what is popularly known as the Northeast Kingdom. Cabot Cheese comes from that area, approximately 25 miles south of Canada. Some of us were in the precarious position for not being accepted to high school because of extraordinarily poor grades, complete boredom with the typical classroom experience or unacceptable rebellious behaviors. What if Sterling School, now Sterling College, in Vermont never existed?
Fifty seven years ago, Sterling began a unique yearly event, and it was a life changer for me. This was the Bounder experience, from Outward Bound USA survival training. I have five impressionable memories since 1965 which characterize Sterling's ability to successfully experiment with learning situations outside the norm. When I attended my first Sterling School reunion in 2008,1 it reinforced for me the school's continuing vision to challenge its own to excel in reaching their personal potentials and learn to thrive regardless of circumstances. Sterling's plan reinforces this line. "Count it all joy,... when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance." (James 1:2-3)
My five Sterling experiences, all borrowed from Outward Bound established us to be beneficiaries for surviving well. I remember Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, with his grizzled face, leaning down in a wet bog showing us plants side by side, safe and unsafe to eat. We all had to learn how to carry out an injured person in a heavy forest. I held one corner of a stretcher, struggling to walk over dead tree trunks without losing balance and dumping the student volunteer. Like the US Army's boot camp, we had to learn to scale a wooden wall 15+ feet high and get over it as a team. The fall portion of the Bounder experience culminated in a three-day December trek, not far from the Canadian border for 100 students and 15 teaching staff, bussed into a desolate region. My memories and Sterling yearbook photos chronicle the rigors we endured. I did three years of slogging through one to two feet of snow for hours each day, enduring uncomfortable basic backpacks, making camp for two really cold nights with no tents, just self-made lean-tos, sleeping bagged and fully dressed on hard packed snow. In the late spring of the new year, every senior had to experience a three-day solo bivouac in order to graduate. Each of us were dropped off a mile apart, left with little: a six foot square plastic sheet, six feet of heavy-duty string, six matches, sharp jack knife, sleeping bag - all in one of the winter's backpacks with extra dry clothes. As soon-to-be graduating seniors, most of us didn't eat anything as it snowed that first night, kindling was wet and campfires were next to impossible.
As I ponder the effect Sterling played in my development of becoming an engaged young adult, an empty plot of ground comes to mind. Our lives are like that. But what will you do with your life, that empty plot? Picture a fallow field and a tilled garden. The purpose for that plot, our lives, is of the utmost importance. Fallow fields do feed on a daily basis by the wild grasses’ endemic to them. But, if we want to feed for a lifetime, the field needs tilling for planting to harvest crops. To have a producing garden demands the care of purposeful intentions. Sterling's sowing of its good seed upon the field of my learning capacity did that for me then, and Sterling does that now. Never would I have guessed the seeds sown by this unique school would flourish after I graduated.
" A man took a mustard seed. It's the smallest of all the seeds, but when grown, it's taller than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and nest in its branches."
Be Well,
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