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“Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God’s residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.”
– EMILY DICKINSON
MAUSER ISLAND – Chesuncook Lake shimmered beckoningly in the late afternoon sunlight. The water was warm, the canoes empty, the waves slight and the campground pristine as eight black and Hispanic teenagers from New York City sat in a circle on Thursday discussing … transcendentalism.
Amid the glory of a Maine summer day, how much meaning could inner-city high schoolers glean from an early 19th century literary movement that found keys to spirituality within man’s relationship to nature?
English teacher Tim Ignaffo wanted to know. He started with Dickinson’s poem.
“It’s very, very short,” Ignaffo said. “Four lines. A cute little rhyme, right? But what does it mean?”
Several seconds passed.
“Cherish what you get,” said Elijah Shabazz, 15, of the South Bronx.
“Any other sentiments?”
Shabazz frowned as if about to say something, then stopped.
“Cherish what you get,” he said.
More silence.
“I think [it means] if you haven’t recognized your destiny on earth, you won’t in heaven,” said Shakira Jones, 16, of Harlem. “If you don’t live your life out full, you won’t know what it is to be in heaven.
“Everybody goes through problems,” she added. “You have to go through bad to know what good is.”
The journey the teenagers took could be adequately defined with a headline: “Troubled Inner-City Teens Discover The Outdoors.” But the truth of the trip taken this week by students from Emily N. Carey Harbor School of East Harlem was far more elusive.
The students and their chaperones met Sunday in Millinocket with guides from Adventure Bound, a white-water rafting and overnight camping business based in Caratunk.
They spent the week canoeing and camping on Caribou and Chesuncook lakes west of Baxter State Park, hitting several points before spending their last night on Mauser Island. They will finish their trip today with some white-water rafting on the Kennebec River.
This wasn’t the first trip for some students who had visited Senegal and the Boulder Outdoor Survival School in Utah with the privately funded, independent high school. Also, “troubled” might account for some but not all of the students, who are college bound.
And to ride a canoe or camp under the stars, the students could have stayed in New York City, which has 28,000 acres of recreational space within 1,700 parks and waters in the city’s five boroughs. Visit Manhattan’s Central Park to ride a canoe and you might see a thousand people in a day and you can quit at any time without a problem.
Yet “once you get started in a canoe out here [on Chesuncook], you have to keep going,” said Ian Cameron, an Adventure Bound river guide. “You can’t just quit.”
“It’s a great way to get school kids to trust each other,” Adventure Bound owner Chris Russell said. “They are traveling with each other for five or six days. They go through some trying times. … You have to learn a sense of community if you’re going to get through it.”
Ignaffo hoped that having students trace one of the canoe routes that 19th century writer Henry David Thoreau took through Maine would inspire them to experience the profound solitude and quiet that inspired Thoreau’s deepest thoughts.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
– Henry David Thoreau
“It’s very different here than from the city,” Ignaffo said. “You have to be just silent and listen. It’s gorgeous here, but it’s also terrifying to them.”
The trip almost began with the kind of adventure no guide service advertises. The students’ caravan was on the Golden Road on Monday when a logging truck coming at them lost a log. The three vehicles and a white-water rafting guide service’s bus narrowly avoided the flying log.
Whether by accident or deliberate omission, the students had no idea that they would be canoeing the river or paddling by themselves on 45 miles worth of lake and river. None had ever been in a canoe before. A near-mutiny, foul language, threats of violence, heavy stress, bellyaching and intense standoffishness followed that discovery.
“One of them thought we were there to paddle for them,” guide Erika Hoddinott of Wayne said.
“They said, ‘What, we gotta paddle?'” guide Angela Merrill of Calais recalled. “We had so many hissy fits and paddles thrown.”
Homesickness, low self-esteem, bad eating habits, anti-white racial stereotyping and bad manners were among the problems the guides said they saw in the students. But the guides realized that the students were acting up because they had been ripped from their comfort zones – something Merrill said she would have felt herself had she been forced to wade through the Bronx.
“The entire dynamic we ran them through clashed with their lifestyle in so many ways,” Merrill said. “One student said to me, ‘Do we get to drop you off in the middle of Harlem and let you find your way around.'”
“They had no control of their environment,” Hoddinott said, “and that brought out so many emotions that they didn’t know they had.”
The worst day came midweek when crowded campgrounds forced the adventure party to paddle 16 miles before they found a spot inhabited by the Rabe family. The Rabes graciously moved their camp to create space enough to accommodate the adventure party.
“They were just so wiped,” Joel Rabe, 27, of Columbus, Ohio, said of the adventurers. “I could not believe how exhausted they were.”
By then, crisis had created bonding and leaders within the group. Rakim Valdez, 16, of Harlem was a steadying influence, doing all his chores and helping classmates get over disagreements. One of the most difficult students, Reggie Walker, 18, of Harlem displayed the humility and grace that alternated with his bad behavior.
Valdez got the students and guides together for a group hug, and Walker charmed the Rabes when he personally thanked the family, Rabe said.
“He was really very good about it,” Rabe said.
By week’s end, the group had mellowed, found affection and camaraderie and created the insider code words – “celery” and “JMLB” being the biggest – that make group camping special to those who do it. So few attitude problems surfaced that Merrill, who volunteered the week for Adventure, and Hoddinott wept when saying goodbye to the teens.
Chaperone Ed Buran, a basketball coach and history teacher at the school, told the students that the trip had validated his recent decision to leave the business world to teach.
The students, too, had changed.
“We’re used to TV and fast life and music and cell phones, and all that’s been taken away here,” said Jianca Reyes, 15, of Harlem. “It makes you realize how little you need those things, how much fun you can have without that stuff. I’ll be a lot more chillin’, now.”
They had one request, though: Next time, they said, they would rather not have to do so much paddling.
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