A Fallow Year at Bear Creek

I’m sitting at the picnic table at Bear Creek, finishing the final sips of my lukewarm coffee, having just returned from a walk through the land. The mushrooms are up early this year, and a ring of Amanitas has appeared in a new location. There was half an inch of rain in the rain gauge, and the soil temperature is 13 degrees C, unchanged from last week. Today is September 30th, the advertised start date of Bear Creek Explorers and what would have been the beginning of year seven with the third generation of young explorers.

But instead, I am here alone. The Ruby Rhino (our beloved 2015 Toyota Sienna minivan) is configured for only two passengers, instead of the six or seven students it carried out here on Wednesdays in previous years.

Last spring, as BCE was wrapping up and most of our students were graduating, many things about the program came into focus. I had tested and refined many activities over the last two years: morning science and sit spots, forest science projects, skill mastery levels, field notebooks, fire feast days, the annual trip to our adopted beach mile, and more. I felt ready to offer the next group an even more enriching and enjoyable educational experience. I love the way BCE empowers students at a key developmental window in a way our modern society often does not.

Through years of experience and countless teacher trainings, I’ve learned how to connect science and nature in a way that’s both rigorous and approachable, meaningful and contextual. I’ve seen kids struggle through hard challenges, connect with each other and nature, and beg me to have class during the week we were supposed to be on break. (We did, BTW, and it turned into an epic fire feast day in the snow.)

When a new BCE crew failed to manifest last spring, I pivoted away from my long list of summer program development ideas. (A field guide to all the plants and trees at BC, illustrated by students! New morning science protocols for soil moisture and phenology! A skill mastery wall to inspire future explorers! A covered backpack holder to keep the clutter off the science table! I could go on. I have lots of ideas.) Instead, I remade the website, hired a social media manager, and reached out to all my communities and connections in hopes that someone knew the families who would be the right fit for this unique program. I paused all program development projects and spent the summer focusing on my least favorite part of this job: marketing. I had a few families signed up, and they worked alongside me to find other students so we could run the program this year.

Meanwhile, my family was preparing for a big move. With its seats out, the Ruby Rhino has made a fine substitute for a pickup truck, handy this month for hauling all my worldly possessions across town. For 22 years, my family lived in our cozy treehouse in SE Eugene, perched on the hillside with a westerly view of the town and mountains. Both my babies were born in that house, and it was our shelter and beloved home for their childhoods.

By the second week of September, public school kids had completed their first week of classes, and my life was moving boxes and an endless to-do list. I carved out a morning to visit Bear Creek to drop off some firewood. After unloading the van, I decided to sacrifice a precious hour of productivity and instead spend time on the land. No doing anything, just relaxed, aimless wandering. Once I quieted my mind and started to listen, I heard the answer loud and clear: you don’t have enough students, and there will be no BCE this year.

Looking back on that moment a couple weeks later, I can see the anxious attachment I had to keeping the program going. Like my recent fire quest, where I sat alone in the forest and kept a flame alive all night by giving it my sustained attention and always adding fuel at the right intervals, I did not want to let the flame of BCE go out. From a financial perspective my little business is still in break-even territory, if I don’t pay myself, so the change won’t affect our household income. But BCE gives me a sense of purpose, the feeling that I am making a difference in the world, and it adds structure and challenge to my life. More than that, it’s a big-picture creative project that I believe in deeply, and I love imagining what it might become.

How could something that felt so right and good, that I had put so many years of my life into developing, just fizzle and disappear?

It is not lost on me that this is the seventh year of the program. In academia, professors sometimes take a year off from their usual tasks to travel or live abroad and engage in other activities. I’ve always thought that in an ideal world, we might all get this opportunity. Over the arc of a lifetime, my guess is it would lead to a more productive and satisfying career, the way a walk on the beach after hours of intense problem solving often reveals the answer. In the Jewish tradition, the seventh year is called shmita (“release”), and farmers leave their fields fallow; whatever grows on the land becomes available for anyone to take. So there is precedent for a break after six years. I like both halves of that tradition as a model for my own year: the land rests and gets my full attention, and what grows here is offered to whoever comes.

As I sit here today, the first day of BCE, surrounded not by curious young faces and joyful chatter but by my own thoughts and the sounds of birds and crickets, I feel what a gift it is to have a year off to focus on the land. My family is settling into our new home, becoming a multi-gen house that includes my mother, and this spring I’m planning a major thinning project for the Bear Creek Wilderness, which I’ll be writing about here as it takes shape. There will be plenty to keep me occupied this year without an ongoing teaching commitment. And right now, I feel deeply grateful that I did not get what I thought I needed.

I find it amusing, because when I connected with this land 11 years ago, I thought the purpose was to keep it locked up and protected from destructive humans who cut down trees and spread invasive plants, to cultivate a place only for native plants and wildlife. Human needs and comfort were at the bottom of the priority list. Then, after years of connection, the land suggested I bring children to experience nature, and that I need not fear for the delicate flowers they might trample or the animals their noisy chatter would startle. Then, this year, the land was like: nope. No kids this year. Focus on me!

With the space that opens up in my life by letting go of the commitment and heavy responsibility of guiding young folks as they collect data and use knives and hatchets, I plan to double down on my commitment to the project of Wild Alive Outside. I will keep collecting data weekly in our research forest, establishing plots, tending the land, and dreaming of the days when people visit again. I will search for partnerships this year, both for bringing nature connection and field science to young people, and for sharing ancestral crafts and folk knowledge with adults. I will invite people to Bear Creek so they can meet the land and me, and perhaps, when the time is right, there will be a group of young humans howling like wolves from the treetops once again.