NHVSP 2010 Update 11

Dear Friends and Family,

I write to you briefly today, the 23rd of April, to tell you that tomorrow will be the day of our departure from Northwoods Stewardship Center. We will meet Kevin Slater, Maine Guide and co-owner of Mahoosuc Guide Service, down by the Clyde River, where we will get into our canoes for the first time on our expedition. Bill Manning, the founder of Northwoods, has watched every semester so far enter the river from his property and we expect him to do the same tomorrow. Camp is almost completely dismantled in preparation for the river. But I am getting ahead of myself - this past week has been full.

On April 17th Lisl came back to us. We had not seen her since our stay at Heartbeet on the winter trail, and it was wonderful that she was able to visit. She had recently come back from Austria after being there for a few weeks while her father passed away. There were hugs all around and mail for us from home. We had a great dinner with Lisl and Jayson Benoit, the director of Northwoods, who later showed us around the nearby area and told us about the foundations of several old round barns and showed us where to pick wild leeks. The next day we rested and took a second nutrition class from Eva Cahill. We spent the morning in the kitchen learning about fermentation. We made mozzarella and ricotta cheese, fermented apples and other things in a salt mixture, and made a gingerbug (a fermented ginger/water/sugar mixture which if put in tea or water creates a sweet gingery drink). We all got to taste some fermented food - sausage, bean sprouts, miso soup, blue cheese, sauerkraut and sourdough bread. We learned about Weston Price’s research as well as the history of fermentation in different parts of the world. Anne remarked that it was one of the best classes she had ever taken, and it really was. The milk samples we had put away twenty days ago were, by the way, fairly universally unappetizing. Especially colorful was the organic soymilk, and the raw goats’ and cows’ milk had turned into cheese. They were all quite pungent. I know when I get home I plan on trying to ferment some of my own food - it’s fascinating.

Well, we liked the gingerbug brew so much, we decided to name our canoe after it! The Gingerbug is going to carry us down the river as one of our fleet. To complete the gear we will need on the river, we began to make paddles on the 19th. For this project we had a very special teacher, Ray Rietze. Ray has lived most of his life very close to the land and was taught by a Native American man he calls Grandfather. He talked to us in the evenings about what he learned from his teacher, his lifetime of experience in the bush, and about his outlook on life. Ray took us all out on a walk during which he taught us basic medicinal uses of some of the plants around our campsite. He talked about cayenne pepper and powdered dandelion root, gave us the recipe for a healing pine pitch solution, and showed us yarrow and Balm of Gilead (he calls it “sticky willow”), among other things. For the two days he was with us we worked on paddles in shifts, and right now they are sitting in the workshop, their last coats of shellac and varnish drying.




We began taking down camp a few days ago. First a few tents came down and then a few more, and finally the big cook tent and stove disappeared. Some of us cleaned up the woods and the field, some gathered green wood for next year’s students, and some have been scraping, soaking, and wringing out the deer hides that will be material for moccasins, which we will sew on the river once we have finished tanning the hides. These last days have been magnificent; when the sun comes out it is warm, the paddles are turning out well, and we have been eating some of the best meals we have had yet on this semester—good food goes a long way towards a good group attitude. A somewhat unexpected visitor, a friend of Anne’s named Mike DeLoose, came to visit and brought with him a large amount of mushrooms he had gathered and dried. He cooked us a delicious meal with them and stayed a few days with us, working on paddles. Ever since then, it seems there has been a feast for every meal, and at the rate this is going we will all be waddling down to the canoes tomorrow morning.


In the tradition of past semesters, part of our group climbed Bald Mountain this morning to see the sun rise. We did not see it rise because the sky was not clear, but we did get a beautiful view from the top before the mist obscured our vision. This last day has been a long one, and tomorrow is the highly anticipated river…. Goodbye for now.






Anna Soltys Morse