By now you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about Work Day, about how everyone works together and all, lugging, sweeping, raking, digging and generally getting more dirty and sweaty than they do in art history class. But I swear, this week’s Work Day was different. Maybe it was the beautiful sunny day, or the fresh composted manure delivered to fill new raised garden beds, or the phalanx of students who moved materials around the library like a well-oiled ant colony, or the volunteers stuffing bags with holy cedar (Batman) to raise scads of money for the Cross-Cultural Collaborative Service-Learning with the Diné and Lakota Peoples class. Whatever it was, by all accounts this Work Day was the best since they built the Pyramid of Khufu.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Dan MacArthur (son of John MacArthur, retired physics professor) and his crew were there, raising the timber frame of the new greenhouse across the road from Persons Auditorium. It was very gratifying for everyone to see this project get beyond the foundation-as-conceptual-art-installation stage, and Dan’s hard-working and amazingly noisy and waggish crew set the pace for other projects nearby, such as building stone retaining walls for the greenhouse, building raised beds, cultivating soil and turning over the compost. I mean, if an alien happened to land there, he or she would probably think it was a chaotic rite-of-passage ritual or something, but to those of us caught up in the groove it was better than chocolate.

Before embarking on Work Day, students, staff and faculty participated in the chaotic right-of-passage ritual we have all come to love, known as “community photo.” As always, this is everybody and their brother’s excuse for pulling out their favorite costumes, flags, obstreperous banners and rowdy hand signals, as demonstrated in the video clip below.

Well, if I had any doubt that Marlboro students were smarter than me on B vitamins, that doubt was blown clean out of the water on Saturday. That’s when Marlboro was the site of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences Spring Student Symposium, an annual jamboree of hard-thinking students from across the state. I mean, there were more than 40 great minds from University of Vermont, St. Michael’s, Norwich, Castleton State College, Green Mountain College and Marlboro, presenting work in a whole bunch of areas of study. With all these delegations coming from every corner of the kingdom, it felt kind of like a gathering of the Fellowship of the Ring to conquer the evil forces of ignorance and illiteracy in Vermont.

Like, take junior Sam Grayck’s discussion of “Dialogism in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince,” for instance. I didn’t even know that dialogism was a word, or heteroglossia, for that matter, another word Sam like to use a lot. While my idea of a literary weekend might be reading the Sunday comics, she is busily doing her own translation of The Little Prince from French. Her talk helped me understand that translating is much more than just finding the right words; it is about finding the right meaning, and that can depend on the meanings attached to words by different social groups and in different contexts. In other words, it’s darn complicated, even in a book so apparently simple as The Little Prince. I considered telling Sam that the book had already been translated into English, along with Chinese and Latin and Sardinian and more than 250 other languages, but I did not want to spoil her enthusiasm for the project.

Or take senior Alex Tolstoi’s talk about “Charles Phelps and the politics of internal dissent in revolutionary Vermont,” or senior Brandon Willits “Wilderness themes in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.” These are not the kinds of subjects you pick up on YouTube or the inside of bottle caps. I mean, I need to take Dramamine just to get through a couple of sentences of Faulkner, and Go Down, Moses is like 360 pages. Probably the most accessible bit of scholarly work for me was freshman Haley Peters’ paper about “The legend of Bigfoot in the American mythic consciousness,” because who doesn’t love a Yeti? Of course I’m used to this kind of thing, but I think a lot of other participants at the symposium found they still had lots to learn.

We were on the final pitch of the challenging East Face, just before the knife-edge traverse known as the Devil’s Shinbone, when our seasoned climbing guide Kyhl Lyndgaard turned to the rest of us roped up below him like teabags in the wind and asked, “Who’s got poetry?” Just kidding. Actually we were climbing Mount Olga from where Route 9 passes the snack bar of the former Hogback Mountain ski area, which does happen to be on the east face, and my imagination was getting away with me. It was last weekend’s field trip for Kyhl’s class called Writing Like a Mountain.

A nice thing about mountains is that they’ve been around practically forever and they can be found practically everywhere except Kansas, so lots of people have had thoughts about them. In Kyhl’s writing seminar students have been reading a whole bunch of perspectives on mountains, from 13th-century Japanese Zen Buddhist Dōgen to Beat poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder. I mean all the way from Petrarch, the Italian Renaissance scholar who apparently coined the term “Dark Ages,” to Miriam Underhill, the American mountaineer and feminist known for the concept of “manless climbing.” But what the students are doing more than anything is writing their own essays about mountains, with the object of having a portfolio of high-quality written material sufficient to climb the summit of Marlboro’s renowned writing requirement.

Leading a dozen well-brunched students up the twisting trails, Kyhl was also hiking for two because he had his two-month-old baby mountaineer, Lars, strapped to his front. Incongruously, he was also carrying a briefcase, which apparently held one poem by Gary Snyder. We found this out once we reached the lofty pinnacle of Mount Olga, 2450 feet, and climbed the old fire tower in groups of four. The windows of the tower were all gone, and the howling wind made the old structure shake like a tuning fork. But there was a great view to enjoy while listening to the poem by our man Gary, who spent his share of time in lonely fire towers, writing poems. Lots of high-elevation food for thought, and hopefully for writing.

Here is my recipe for world peace. Send Becky Graber to the United Nations to get a rousing four-way round of “Row, Row, Row your Boat” going among member states. I’m not kidding, last night Becky, a local music educator and director of Brattleboro Women’s Chorus, had people from all around the world crowded onto the Serkin dance studio bleachers, singing songs in three-part harmony and feeling pretty damn euphoric about it. The event was dubbed a “Global Sing-in,” sponsored by the world studies office, and it coincided with a visit from students at Harare International School, in Zimbabwe.

Okay, when I heard that a group of 30 high school students from Zimbabwe were coming to sing with us, and visit Marlboro as part of a tour of northeastern colleges, I very reasonably pictured them to be of Zimbabwean nationality. But, being at an international school, these students were from all over, including Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Africa, China, South Korea, Great Britain and the United States. To top things off, we had visitors from the SIT Graduate Institute who came from Rwanda, Mongolia, India and elsewhere, as well as students and local neighbors from as far away as Queens and Columbia. When Becky had everyone say where they were from, the mutual sense of jaw-dropping awe at our national diversity was palpable. Marlboro’s Fulbright Arabic Fellow, Mohamed Jalal from Morocco, even earned an “ooooooooh.”

But getting us all into one room was only part of the undertaking, as the United Nations General Assembly frequently demonstrates. Becky, with her radiant smile and startling ability to sing three parts simultaneously and in perfect pitch, despite an out-of-tune piano, got us all on our feet and singing together beautifully. This is all the more impressive in my case, as I have a voice that sounds like the mating call of Sasquatch and is perfectly in tune with the piano. Remember we’re talking about high school students, who might easily have been too cool for anything other than texting four friends simultaneously. Au contraire, Voltaire, these kids were up and clapping like peace-loving maniacs with the rest of us. The highlight was when a group of them got up with Becky to lead “Shosholoza,” a popular Zulu song once sung by laborers far from home, which means literally “Go Forward.” The visiting students did just that after the event, moving on to visit colleges in New York State, but they will not be forgotten soon.

Here’s one of the things I love about Marlboro. It has been around long enough (65 years) that a tree that was just a spindly sapling when the college was founded is now old enough to start rotting and dropping branches on innocent squirrels, necessitating its removal. That’s right, the stately red maple that grew on the north side of the admissions building has finally graduated and gone where all the most highly regarded trees go: to the OP wood pile. Seen here being practically held up by renowned ecologist Robert MacArthur ’51 and his renowned brother, retired physics professor John MacArthur, (the two of them had probably just finished documenting niche division by wood warblers in its branches) the red maple barely cast enough shadow for an egg salad sandwich. In recent years, it has provided broad shade and leafy atmosphere for picnic tables, blankets, sprawling pastoral feasts, early morning bucolic kaffeeklatsches and, of course, the previously mentioned innocent squirrels. That’s 65 years of leafy atmosphere, folks.

Here is another thing that I love about Marlboro: students who give a damn about anything so intangible as leafy atmosphere that they will do something to honor it. I’m talking about Clare Riley, a senior studying urban ecology and sculpture who made a beautiful wire “cast” of the red maple before it became firewood. I guess it could be called conceptual art, but for once it’s a concept I think I understand. Clare actually spent a good deal of the fall out there twisting wires like a wire-twisting maniac, I mean so much time that I wondered how she was getting the rest of her work done, or if she was eating anything other than peanut butter sandwiches.

The completed sculpture then spent most of the winter next to the tree, and it is now placed prominently around the stump. It stands as a twisty testament to one student’s labor of love, but also to the same kind of labor I see all around as other students sink their teeth into their own chosen subjects, twist their own wires around an idea and leave their marks on Marlboro’s intellectual landscape. Maybe I’m waxing kind of poetic, but you know what I mean. Everyone will miss the tree, of course, but there are plans to plant another spindly one in its place, to cast leafy shadows for the next 65 years of picnics and kaffeeklatsches and conceptual art.

You probably think that Spring Break at Marlboro is a time for a little peace and quiet to contemplate the melting snow and muddy roads and Dostoevsky, but you are wrong. I mean, there is so much going on here it is hard to focus on the melting snow, and anyway there’s hardly any left. The maintenance folks are working like mad gnomes beefing up the insulation of Halfway dorm, installing new interior doors in Dalrymple and putting new lighting in the dining hall. The Movies from Marlboro crew is working straight through the break to be ready for shooting their first scenes of Northern Borders next week. Randy and his crew keep banging away at the OP barn to make it comfy enough for their fleet of kayaks and canoes and other gear. But the rite of spring that waits for no one, even Dostoevsky, is “sugaring.”

I’m referring of course to the ancient ritual of drilling holes into stately maple trees when they are not looking, and collecting their lifeblood to boil down into yummy syrup. The early Neolithic Marlboroite culture is thought to have originated this spring sacrament as a way to commune with nature and celebrate the end of winter, and because they did not have smart phones to fiddle with. In the 1950s, students and faculty tapped as many as 1,750 trees and worked around the clock to collect and boil hundreds of gallons of sap in the sugarhouse. I picture them discussing Dante’s Inferno over the steaming pan of sap, between taste testing.

Times have changed, of course. Students no longer use stone tools to drill holes in trees and the sugarhouse is now the pottery shed. Our neighbors Alan Dater and Lisa Merton, producers of an awesome film about Wangari Maathai called Taking Root, collect the sap from a mere hundred or so trees on campus and boil it in their sugarhouse down Moss Hollow Road. But dedicated students who evidently don’t have smart phones, such as Evan Sachs (left), continue to pitch in with the collecting and boiling and learning about the ancient ways. I don’t know whether they discuss Dante over the boiling pan. I do know that Alan and Lisa donate sweet, scrumptious syrup to a special pancake lunch each spring, so I can feel that third ring of hell (gluttony) already calling my name.

I know the Campus Center is usually a place for “social work,” meaning socializing and working while consuming massive quantities of coffee and quesadillas, but yesterday “social work” took on a whole new meaning. That’s because there was a panel of distinguished folks talking about their experience doing social work, mental health work, counseling, therapy and other helping professions. A good-sized gaggle of students turned out for the discussion, which was sponsored by the health center and the career center, and they weren’t there just for the vegan chocolate cookies because I think I ate most of them.

The illustrious panel included Max Foldeak, director of health services, Judy Katz, counselor, Jenny Karsted ’97, counselor at the Brattleboro Retreat, and Nels Kloster ’97, medical director for the Retreat’s co-occurring disorders program. I know—’97 must have been a very helpful graduating class, right? That’s not to mention cameo appearances by psychology professor Tom Toleno and Tony Parmenter, the coolest counseling intern since our man Carl Gustav Jung. These helpful folks all shared their experiences working in the mental health fields and with people with addictions.

They answered lots of questions from the students, many of whom said they were planning on going into this kind of work, either right out of college or after a graduate degree. One thing that really struck me is the importance of having good supervision and support, because you have to take care of your own mental health along with your clients, you know? Max even referred to it as a kind of pyramid scheme, how every mental health practitioner needs the services of several others to keep doing what they are doing. I mean, it got me thinking what a wonderful world it would be if we each gave ten people a little helpful hypnotherapy or transactional analysis or behavior modification or even a good neck rub: I’m talking world peace.

Okay, what sounds like popcorn and smells like green tea? What tastes like brownies and looks like the newsroom at the Beeville Bee-Picayune 50 years ago? What on earth is going on in the library reading room? That’s what lots of students were thinking yesterday as they followed the firecracker-popcorn sounds and discovered the first-ever letter writing social in full swing. This social was totally retro, with noisy old manual typewriters, jazzy music on scratchy 78 rpm vinyl, yummy baked goodies and tea served up in actual teacups with little saucers under them—what do you do with those saucers? There was even real, sugar-sweetened “soda-pop” bottled in antique 7-ounce bottles. I mean, maybe it comes from shelving books every day and all, but our beloved librarians know how to cut loose and have an old-fashioned, tappity-tapping good time.

Really, when was the last time you wrote a letter? For me I think it was a letter to my mother back in the Paleolithic Era, before they invented smart phones and Google docs and ipads and cloud clients, when I still had an attention span of more than 140 characters. I was totally impressed with the eagerness and soda-pop-inspired vigor with which students took to typing letters on old machines with names like Remington and Smith Corona and Olympia and…Johannes Gutenburg, practically. Students took to typing on these cranky old machines like they were testing the latest 3D Android. There were even quill pens and inkwells and sealing wax for those who were waiting their turns and wanted a real trip down collective memory lane. Maybe it was all the green tea I drank, you know, but this eardrum-jangling event brought a whole knew meaning to “writing requirement” for me.

You know those dreams where you are running like crazy and not getting anywhere and your voice is hoarse from yelling and you fall down in some impossibly contorted position and hell’s minions crowd around you and smite you with sticks while people chant and cheer incoherently? Well in my case it was not a dream, but actually the annual broomball tournament on the ice pond last weekend. Yup, 11 teams, with bodacious names like Anarkids and Hez-Balla and Walter Hendrix Experience and Iron Phallus, all competed in a slippery, sloppy, double-elimination tournament over two days.

In the end team Evil, actually a nice bunch of students well versed in irony, claimed the coveted golden broom after reaching the final round undefeated. They also won some very fashionable Marlboro “Dead Tree” medallions and gift certificates for the bowling alley. Another highly favored team, Chewbacca Flocka Flame, lost to Evil in the first round, and was eliminated in the third round. A surprise showing was made by the Movies from Marlboro crew, known as Jay Craven’s Chain Gang, which made it to the fourth round before falling to Tequila Mockingbird. This team chanted the 1958 pop hit “Tequila” so many times that fans longed for their demise, which finally came in the fifth round. The winner in the costume category was the Newsies, named after the Disney flop cult hit where everyone apparently wears vests, barely beating out the Climb’n Lobstahs.

But the real story was the staff/faculty team, Shiva and the Benevolent Destroyers, who won their first game against the Anarkids in quadruple overtime (apparently the first time that’s happened) and went all the way to the final, apocalyptic match against Evil. This is despite losing their co-captain and star “sweeper” William Edelglass, philosophy professor, who broke his wrist playing broomball earlier in the week to demonstrate the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, dukkha or “suffering.” William was there on the sidelines, taunting team Evil with such zingers as “You know that evil has no ontological existence, it’s just the absence of good!” Shiva and the Benevolent Destroyers mustered all the superhuman moves a Hindu deity could manage while sliding helplessly on the ice, with star performances by faculty members Kyhl Lyndgaard, Adam Franklin-Lyons and Martina Lantin. Evil prevailed this time, but beware. I mean, just wait until next year when Shiva dissolves the universe for the creation of the next cycle, and restores the balance of good and evil to free liberated souls from bondage with the physical world. Maybe it won’t be so slippery, too.

I used to think of libraries as dark rows of dusty old books that nobody looks at, where someone keeps saying “shhh.” Of course the Potash Hill o’ Books is something else again: Did you know that the number of books checked out of the Rice-Aron Library is 40 per student per year, five times the national average for small colleges? Here you’ll find well-lit bookshelves and comfy chairs where even a page-turner like the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata could not keep you awake. And I have never heard anyone say “shhh.”

Yesterday I had a crash course in doing library research, as part of the class called Finding Stuff: Research Methods in the Humanities, taught by history professor Adam Franklin-Lyons and Amber Hunt, reference and technology librarian. We sat around what I like to call the library latte bar, the marble counter in the main hall recently outfitted with comfy stools and a digital projector and, despite all my valuable advice, no espresso machine. We threw around some big words like “metadata” and “controlled vocabulary” and “keyword searches,” which Adam likened to a steamroller when compare to what he called “focused browsing.” Here’s the cool thing: the students used the library’s fleet of green netbooks (we nicknamed them the “turtles,” because they look pretty rugged) to share what tasty new books their particular focus browsed on.

Each student, or pair of students, followed a “subject field” search to a particular book of personal interest, sort of a mini field trip into the bowels of the Dewey decimal system. Then they browsed the group of adjacent books for other titles that struck their fancy, and took a photo of the shelf to share with the group back at the latte bar. There were some great finds out there in the areas of Indian history, ethnography, mushroom taxonomy, Mayan culture and appropriate technology. As Adam and Amber pointed out, we have all done this kind of browsing before, but we learned how to use the catalog to our best advantage and make our browsing less like a steamroller.

To learn more about what’s new at the library, check out the Rice-Aron Library Blog.