COLLECTED WRITING AND ART

MONHEGAN SENIOR PROJECT TRIP 2010

Sojourning in Nature

COLLECTED WRITING AND ART MONHEGAN 2010

Pingree School 2010

Photo by: Lyndsey Shepard

Ali Perkins Home

Looking out I can’t see a single face. Intense, concentrated heat forces individual beads of sweat to roll out onto my forehead while I stand blind. Words that aren’t mine, etched into my mind, pour out of me while I lose track of my surroundings. Content in another world, on display for all to see, we are a distant memory, a forgotten dream, a biggest fear. Our carefully memorized movements slowly become organic, and I don’t have to rack my brain for what comes next because my body just knows. Up here I can do anything, be anything, say anything. I personally never have to take full responsibility for any of my actions and I feel free. Liberated, and you can see straight through me, peer into the inner working of my brain, and watch my soul in Technicolor. Being up here I give you permission to do this, and it feels good. It feels so good I can’t help but think this is where I want to be for the rest of my life. Because up here, we could change the world completely honestly and unafraid. The lights finally relax and looking around we’re all more connected than we’ve ever been before. Witnesses to each other’s lives, we’re spiritually inseparable.

Every muscle in my exhausted body works overtime. Running on love, my heart pumps inspiration, my brain stretches in thirty directions, my voice cracks, my whole body begins to shake, and then: applause.

Sisterhood Whispering as our laughter went up in smoke, Our thoughts like wildfire we danced unafraid over the glistening embers until our hearts felt light enough to fly, until tears poured out of our eyes, and our souls felt stirred enough to soar. extinguishing the flames we’d been stoking for years. Into the night sky we flew, you and I. With our arms extended like warriors and our hair wild like goddesses, we called upon our former selves for guidance in our reckless lives, collapsing into a heap of ashes.

Lily Gabaree Maine Evening

The stuffed-animal moose head gazes fondly upon the cabin’s main room, where dinner preparations are at a full boil.

Grandpa races between microwave and stove, stony determination setting his Gallic features as he bats away any obstructive persons in pursuit of a perfect meal. His dinner list, nearly illegible with creative spellings, is ripped with robust checks as the products of his frenzy reach the table. Self-taught, he serves culinary masterpieces on a picnic table, nearly all involving unexpected ingredients and buckets of butter. Tonight, the succulent chicken is breaded with ground Ritz crackers. I sit on a battered brown leather couch with my feet on the rhinoceros ottoman, also leather and missing a tail from vigorous child play. I drop my pen and begin to search for it in the carpet, a shag affair of yarn at least three inches long selected straight from the seventies and colored to look like water. I don’t find the pen in the yarn forest, but I do dig up a bottle cap ring, decorated with a Sharpie smiley face for my three-year-old self. I only need to look to the stone fireplace and chimney which centers the cabin to see further evidence of my past years here: the spaces between the stones are inhabited with more bottle caps and small rocks, my old chimney toy inhabitants. I look up farther to the wide beams covered with Grandpa’s sculptures and the loft with its perpetually shedding reindeer hide rug. My grandfather built the house from a kit, blown up Lincoln logs and big round stones. We call it “the Camp,” but the sign by the door designates it “The Love Nest.” Grandpa has superglued a nest to the sign and filled it with two of his carved birds and three eggs, representing himself, Grandma and their three daughters. He is hopelessly romantic and is now serenading Grandma as she sets the table. His selection is limited – he only does first lines – but he makes up for it with volume. He spies me and alights with joy. “SWEETHEART!” he bellows. “Chow time!” Dinner is served on the screen porch, overlooking the Maine woods and Loon Pond. The bugs hum in the birches and a loon echoes. Me, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa hush reverently around the feast for the first bite, and then conversations explode, overlapping interjections and cynical political jokes and a brief discussion of string theory, all coming back to “the food is delicious” and “hear that bird” and my grandfather booming “LA FAMILIA!” even though we’ve not one drop of Italian blood.

Age 13 Summer night gathering around a beach fire, sparks bouncing off reverent song. Skin and sand run into each other feet covered with glowing white burial mounds and fingers, sifting the ground rock, the waves of eons. 18 I relinquish my lower body to the bank, midnight, my heart bucking against slow-drying dread. The water keeps coming, each small crest further eroding my island and childlike hero complex. I could not save her. I am awaiting a corpse, but even that does not come, each tidal rush brings nothing but salt and darkness.

6 My feet absorbed by the soft tidal zone. Waves came teasingly close to my small child’s frame, and I wrote wishes in the wet sand, waited for the waves to wash them away and deliver them to this great power the ocean, who lapped my feet and stung my eyes, I called him Po and later that night when he took away the girl, I almost leaned down and wrote again to ask for her back.

Gabe Wallis

Fly

After years of wanting to fly the soul is granted its wish. Hello Sky, goodbye body.

Something new, something worth waiting for. Untied from the anchor of physics.

A door opens, a new dimension ready for exploration. Infinite sense, no longer restricted to five.

Kyle Lange

Away

The smoke reaches for the sky like a baby for its mother.

It has been raised, shaped, and groomed for the world. The time has come –

four years to start a new life, far away

where I can encounter new things without the presence of family.

Smoke separates and untangles, bidding farewell, dances in the night sky.

Step, Step, Spin. Step, Step, Spin. I bid farewell to brothers, sisters, ma and pa –

my family will stay in my mind, and at times I will yearn for them.

But for now the smoke and I must embark into the night.

Step, Step, Spin. Step, Step, Spin.

Sam Bachelder

Gull Rock

Jagged peaks of dripping algae define the surface of the unreachable. The angry surf rolls back and forth among the enclaves, while I feel swift bursts and breezes of wind against. This pool, with the rustic remains of our ocean dangerous and spewing, holds the brown and green of several centuries. Trapped rocks are my safety, my protection from this verdant fungal arena and nipping crests. Here forms a tunnel, a focal point into the salty, immense Atlantic where seals and whales breach and Kent’s pleas truly ring.

Lyndsey Shepard Home Landscape

A place of early mornings and long days. A place to forget about school and leave home behind. Where friendships are discovered and relationships are give and take. Where shoes are not just worn by humans. What used to be six days a week, is one if I’m lucky.

The long gravel driveway I know like the back of my hand, winding along the fence line, past the upper barn where the foals live in the spring and down to the parking lot of the main barn. Its big red doors, only closed during the winter provide an entry way into the isle. A flood of smells fills my car as I drive in. Freshly cut grass, hay, grain, and of course horses. Steel shoes walking down the cement isle fill my ears as I walk through the red doors. The muffled sound of my trainer giving a lesson in the indoor adjacent to the barn lets me know that the day is well under way. A few horses stick their heads out as I walk; a winnie and some snorts greet me as I pass by. A broom slowly sweeping the shaving covered cement while someone tosses fork loads of manure into a wheelbarrow. The jingling of bits and tack as I walk by someone getting ready to ride. Desie pushes the squeaky wheelbarrow down the isle to be dumped outside, creaking under the weight each time the wheel turns. A hug and a welcoming yelp as I am greeted by a friend, walking into the tack room. Golden brown cubbies line all it’s sides. Top row, last one on the right. I need a bucket to see in the back. After shuffling through cotton saddle pads and misplaced pieces of leather I find my boots. Like so many days before, sitting on the mahogany bench and slipping on the subtle rich leather over my socks. They contour perfectly to my feet and show the wear and memories of many years of use.

It is different now, not having my own horse, but even still I keep coming back. Each time is different, a new horse, some work here and there, or just re-connecting with old friends. Sitting in the field in the afternoon, lead rope in hand, watching my horse devour the clovers at her nose. Occasionally lifting her head, perking her ears, attentively listening. After all these years I still don’t understand them and maybe that’s a part of why I can’t give it up.

Hank Brakeley Home

The solidity of a wanderer’s passion stems from man’s need to seek truth and relevance in a world seemingly devoid of any infinite. And so it is his goal to breach the wall of nihilism and deceit. It is in a traveler’s mind that nature, intellect, and politics converge to inspire a sort of eternal reality.

I have hardly discovered even the scent of this reality, let alone set a course and found myself ready to embark with sails ablaze. However, in my murky mind I have found certainties, and this I know – the road is my home.

I raise my young, naïve visage into the wind and don’t look back. There’s a solace I find in my pack, my pen, my eyes. There is a solace in having no retreat, bound to nothing, no one, reliant only to my callused hands.

Confined to the limits of education, to family, this ideal has been somewhat smothered and denied, leaving me to seize the few opportunities presented. But as graduation nears – and I shed the limits of adolescence – the world appears at my feet.

Man is taught he is limited. Man may be told to follow any path he may wish – but at the end of the line all that he sees are careers. And if he can see beyond these careers, he often chooses the life of security and conformity. How revolting and confining this life seems! I will live and I will die – and like Thoreau I wish not to die having never lived.

The earth is blessed in creation – its opportunity and potential is far beyond the reaches of a lifetime. Yet I wish to fill my heart and mind to their fullest capacity – and carry it to the brink of insanity – to walk the line between the mundane and the overzealous.

I wish to find the true boundaries of man and I wish to push, probe, and prod these limits. And in this search find peace of mind. A mind adrift yet at ease with the world and the mind’s self will find solace, comfort, and a home – on whichever shore it may wash up. In a sense – I’m on my way home.

Cat Dioli Maine Adventures

Great Pond. Belgrade Lakes, Maine. This has been my home for more summers than I can remember. Before we had a house of our own, we would camp every summer with our close friends on an island we called Dig and Bury. No electricity, running water or bathrooms (hence the name), but they were the best summers. This is where I grew up. Where I learned to eat s’mores and catch fish. Memories of tubing and family style dinners line the pages of photo books in my house. The routine was the same and every summer we would pack up and head to Maine for the next set of adventures. Soon enough one of our friends bought a house and we moved from islands to land.

An old hunting lodge filled with heads of deer, moose, and bear fur. It was lined with old books dusted with the history of the past family and every summer would bring a new surprise hidden with in the walls. Eventually, we became owners of our own house. Ugly brown shingles layer the outside with accented green shutters. Cheesy pine paneling cover the inside, while balloon themed ceiling fans cut through the thick air. This was my dad’s kind of house. Ugly but fixable. Now my summers consist of driving the same road every weekend to Maine, leaving my hectic life at home and relaxing on the dock,

watching the sun set over the trees. At the lake I spend more time in the water than on land. Spending mornings

catching turtles in the cove, and picking blueberries along the shore for homemade pancakes. Afternoons mastering back flips off the water trampoline and rope swing, while becoming the champion at tubing and surviving the circle of death.

Being in Maine allows me to not only appreciate the moments but the people whom I share them with. Maine is the only place where we eat dinner as a family. In Ipswich, our lives are pulling us each in a separate direction, where we don’t have time to sit together anymore. Now we are able to pull ourselves out of our own lives to make time for each other. Maine

has allowed my home to feel more relevant, more important. It is where we wake up and say good morning, where we ask if someone needs help without being asked to, where spending time together is better than texting friends. It is where family game nights are epic because I always win and dancing to country music is always an after dinner ritual, though it isn’t always pretty to see. My lake house is a bubble in time, where I don’t care about what is happening back home and where I don’t have to be good at anything but sitting in a lawn chair. Though I love my home in Ipswich, being in Maine allow me to create my days on moment and impulse, not schedule and order. Creating a place where my dad is home before six, my mom isn’t stressed about work and my brother is actually in my daily life makes the feeling of home easier to believe.

Cara Blackman A Memory Box of What Was Once Home

An easy walk from anywhere, I could find my way blindfolded. Past the curve in the road to the lighthouse with the sign blocking the path that read, “Do not enter/Risk of death/Dangerous cliffs.” We would always giggle as we walked by it, pitying the tourists that would miss the best walk in all of Ireland. Immediately prickly bushes with bright yellow flowers would line the way, climbing the cliff and filling up any gaps between rock and brush so only the path remained. Soon we’d reach the first visible drop off, where there was a small bird nest and someone had carefully pulled some of the bushes to make room for people to sit and watch the waves crash far below them. “Did you know that there’s two different ways of being afraid of heights? One yer afraid you’ll fall, and one you’re afraid you’ll jump. It’s not all suicide-like though. Just a different way.” “Yeah, I get that. Like you’re so curious how it would feel to let go and fly, even if it would only be for a second, you’re scared you just might do it one day, just to see what happens. I think that’s how I am.” “Me too.” The path continues to curve upward, but now with little separating us from the sheer drop. As we come around the next corner the magic starts. In the rock are little stairs, just the right size for use, carved into the cliff. But it didn’t interrupt the picture, like so many attempts at something like it do. The stairs were a part of it, like they had always been there. As if the cliff was made for walking, made for us to learn to trust and be honest, made for us to be able to think, on the edge of life and death so we could let go of things we no longer needed to carry. “I think I have a boyfriend.” “Really? Who?” “Rob, he kissed me when we were on the scout’s hike.” “Was it nice?” “Horrible…I dunno how to snog properly and I don’t think he did either.” We shrugged our shoulders as the last of the peach rings were tossed into our mouths and thoughts were mulled over as we sucked the sugar coating off. The stairs led up to a winding path, under blankets of rhododendron bushes and circling upward. Finally, at the top was a flatter, bare green spot for sitting, watching, and thinking, with just a few flowers and the occasional lonely dogs that waited for someone to walk back to town with.

“I think I’m moving.” There was a long pause; a realization that what we both knew was inevitable had finally come. “But you can’t. You can’t. This is your home. I’ve already lost one friend. This is your home. They don’t do things like we do in America. They don’t have party biscuits or the temple bar waffles. And then you’ll loose your accent. It won’t be the same.” “I know.” Looking down she picked the head off a flower, tossing it over the rocks and out of sight. “It’ll be okay,” she said, standing and brushing off the dust she had acquired along the way, before walking closer to the edge to watch the water crash and spin, hug the curves of the rock and pause, pause with what seemed like and impossible strength before rolling back under itself and becoming a part of the cycle.

Emma Shorr

Something Like Home

The range rover bounces along the dirt road. Dust clings to the windshield. We leave a cloud of red dirt unsettled

behind us. Barefooted children balancing firewood on their heads wit on the side of thee road for us to pass. Women wrapped

in blue and yellow bend over coffee plants. They sift through, picking each red bean and leaving the green.

We make the final left. The shackled brick buildings of Campi Nairobi bulge in effort to hold the crowded population

together. Just beyond, the bougainvillea cloaks the fences around the Children’s Village. Inside its purple blanket, laughter

slices the dust.

Trust We drift on the wind towards the stars, light splashing our faces. I clasp your hand, jump blindly off the cliffs, sure you will catch me on the gales steaming from the tumbling sea.

Andrew Faulkner

Ochocinco

Swift as a tiger, his run became glide. His prey on the defensive. Fierce instincts propelled him through agile, horizontal strides. With power and finesse, he ran through one, and around the other. A lane opened, and he was through it toward green grass. The ones who chased were farther away. Now he was alone. Free. Closer to the end, then there. He spiked the pigskin while he gasped for air.

Peter Siegel

Casa Cortez

My green Saab putts into 192 Middle Street, West Newbury. I park in my spot, the grass immediately to the right of the driveway, so as to allow space for the in-and-out bustle of cards and people. As I stroll up the driveway past the beginning of the long, yellow house, I decide to enter through the red front door. Within a split-second of closing the door, Radley has approached with his overwhelming puppy excitement, and I can’t resist giving him a good ass-scratching. Around the corner comes droopy-eyed Finch, tail wagging to his mellow stride, and again, I can’t help but rub his enormous square head. This is the welcome I was expecting; the warmth that always comes after walking through the red threshold. A wholesome aroma surrounds me as I venture into the kitchen, dogs at my heels. There I find a woman whose strength rivals that of the Hulk, but she has a different kind of brawn. Ardy, my second mother. We share a warm hug, discuss the Celtics, among other things, and then she insists that I pile my plate full of homemade enchiladas, rice, beans, and salsa. She does this all on her own, as she has been doing for five or so years now, while her husband is dedicating himself to a cause that has brought him to the other side of the country. With a mountainous plate in hand, I walk through the dining room, through the living room where I give a quick hello to the two sisters, and then I cross the boundary into the loft; the Lion’s Den. Everything an adolescent boy could dream of lies in the confines of the loft. As I enter the Man Cave, I see Alex, my best friend of 12 years, sitting in his usual spot on the couch. Mikey, our other longtime buddy, sits confidently on the futon. More importantly, my favorite blue recliner invites me, and I fall into its cushions. After a short while of Mikey’s sophomoric humor and Alex’s incredible sports knowledge, we decide to head out back to the pool. In the heat of the sun, I recall thousands of memories I’ve had here since Alex and I were little squirts in pre-school. Only now do I truly appreciate my second home, and I reflect upon how much this place means to me. Before I can finish my thought, a strong pair of hands thrusts into my scrawny back. Suddenly, I am engulfed in refreshing water. My head pops out of the pool with a grin from ear-to-ear, and I see Mikey standing at the edge of the pool with an even bigger smirk than my own. If I was unsure before, now I know that this too, is my home.

Quotes from the Love Nest

“I didn’t think Monhegan was the place to write an apocalyptic novel.” –Lily

“Ants, ants, ants!” –Ali

“You have to cut things out ore you’ll never get to the figure.”

“You are what you are.”

“Don’t want to run over the tourists before they spend their money.” –Random Man

“I’m in more of a listening mood…” -Ben

“When in doubt, stretch it out!” -Ali

Ben: “I think it’s pretty light”… Andrew: “Actually, it’s pitch black.”

“What did one buoy say to the other buoy?..,What’s up buuoooyyy?” -Andrew

“Unreal” -Sam

“Speak of the devil…nope, wrong devil” -Cara

“Waaayyy to much vinegar.” -Hank

“She’s so scary but SO hot.” (on Lady Gaga) -Andrew

“Guys why if everyone being suck wet blankets?” -Ali

“It’s great, because when you vote someone off the island you can actually vote them off the island….get it?” -Cara

“GUILTY”