Remarks made at the pecan tree ceremony. May 12, 2007
Karlene's remarks:
From his earliest years our son Jonathan delighted in the natural world. Before he could walk, we took long rambles along the Charles River in Cambridge with his basset hound Charlemagne, "Charlie. "
He climbed his first mountain, Mt. Monadnock in southern NH with Montessori School classmates. Some days, he came to college with me and perched on his blanket watching film loops - "Life of the Frog " and "A Chick Hatches " - while I taught.
His bedroom bookshelves overflowed with natural history magazines and books. Drawings of fantastic and realistic animals and plants covered his bedroom walls. When Ranger Rick magazine arrived in the mail, he read it immediately. His interest in plants extended to foods, as you may have observed. Julia Child's was one of his favorite TV programs.
On weekends and summers at our cabin on Lake Kanasatka, in central NH, we swam, fished, sailed, explored the woods, and walked country roads. In wild blueberry season our family climbed the small mountain across our lake. At least as many berries popped into his mouth as into his berry bucket. At night we cooked jam of wild raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. Foods we gathered from the wild often ended on our dinner plates: fern fiddleheads, wintergreen berry muffins, wild mushroom omelet, juneberry sauce.
One night we waited on our cabin porch for raccoons. To our amazement, when the camera flashed, the raccoon tucked the heavy feeding dish under one arm and walked off into the woods. We never did recover that dish.
When he was in first grade in 1971 we lived right at the edge of Rock Creek Park in Kensington, Maryland. He learned southern spring flowers, birds, and turtles. On a camping trip to the Blue Ridge he and his dad learned to call owls. He got to know the National Zoo and Smithsonian, never guessing that he would return to both the zoo and Smithsonian decades later.
Each fall our family picked apples in New England orchards. We filled jars with homemade applesauce and chutney, baked apple pies and cakes. One year we read how to dry apple slices in Foxfire. Strings of dried apple slices soon draped our kitchen window. One day we sampled the slices; the apples tasted of soap. Such a mystery! Eventually, the story emerged. Our big tiger cat, Lionel and Jonathan were playing Cat and Cowboy, a game in which they chased up the front stairs and down the back stairs of our home. To enliven the chase, our son grabbed a bottle of dish soap to squirt at Lionel. He succeeded in washing the soap from Lionel but hadn't noticed that soap squirted also on the apples. We heaved the apples into the compost.
In 1979 when he was in middle school we spent a sabbatical year in Honolulu. Our son hiked with Sierra Club and joined their trail work days. The three of us circled the Big Island, Hawaii, in a camper and stayed overnight in Volcano National Park beside a sign "AFTER DARK STAY ON THE TRAIL. YOU COULD FALL INTO A FISSURE. " We didn't hike after dark.
In the early 1980's during his vacations from New College, our family camped in Florida state parks. We tented under Kissimee pines where we heard our first pileated woodpeckers. We spotted carnivorous sundews at Chasahowitzka State Park. We hiked boardwalks through the Everglades.
After the Peace Corps trained him as an agro-forester, he worked with a Filipino rice farming community in the remote mountains of the island Bohol. Together, they planted mango trees, built composting bins, gathered vines for basket making and erected an elementary school. These farms were subsistence farms and so the farmers rejected hybrid rice; they saved seed rather than purchasing seed each season. Jonathan learned from them what is means to be totally dependent on growing your own food.
Lowell's remarks:
During the 1970's the population in New Hampshire of common loons, those iconic water birds, was steadily decreasing to levels that threatened their viability on New Hampshire's lakes. In response to this crisis concerned residents and visitors organized the Loon Preservation Committee (LPC), a private organization that undertook to reduce the dangers which threatened the remaining loons and to facilitate the propagation of loons by providing safe nesting sites and protecting the newly hatched chicks. This Committee eventually became associated with the New Hampshire Audubon Society.
For those who are not familiar with loons, I have an image of one here on my t-shirt.
Each summer the LPC hired some 10 to 15 young people to undertake the job of protecting loons and monitoring their nesting activities around the state. Most of these people were assigned to monitor several small lakes and ponds. They would circulate around to these sites with canoe atop their cars. Jonathan applied for such a position and was hired for the summer of 1992. His assignment was to monitor the loons exclusively on Squam Lake, New Hampshire's second largest. He was provided an outboard motor boat to circulate around to the 19 loon nesting sites on that lake.
He began work in early June by setting out nesting rafts. Loons tended to build nests on land right on the shore and lay eggs there. These eggs were easy picking for raccoons because loons were helpless to defend their nests on land. So the LPC built nesting rafts consisting of plastic netting strung between four heavy logs. By placing these rafts off-shore, the nests were safe from egg-poaching raccoons who preferred not to swim out there. Jonathan's job was to anchor these rafts in selected off-shore positions and to set out floating signs on ropes warning boaters to keep away from the enclosed loon nesting areas. Usually he had to do this work wading in shallow, marshy waters and would find leeches attached to his legs.
Then during the nesting season his job was to visit each nest every day and record how many eggs were laid and how many hatched. He retrieved all eggs that did not hatch so they could be examined in a laboratory seeking the reason for the failure.
The newly hatched chicks were able to swim along with their parents, but were unable to dive underwater to escape being run down by speeding boaters. Jonathan was charged with recruiting volunteers who would be stationed in their boats in areas where the vulnerable chicks were swimming to warn approaching boats to slow down and keep away.
Because of the efforts of the LPC workers on Squam, the summer population of loons has grown in recent years to around 50 birds, and because nesting loons are territorial, that is about the maximum number that can be safely accommodated on this lake.
Eric's comment:
These LPC summer workers are known as Loon Rangers.