For all of you who are somewhere warmer and drier, which is just about anywhere else, winter is a stone’s throw away up here on Potash Hill. I mean, the last apples are freezing on the trees, the days feel shorter than a feature-length movie and the fog is so thick it’s basically rain doing an interpretive dance of snow in slow motion. Here at Marlboro, that means it’s just the right time for building projects that we should have done last summer. I’m speaking, of course, about the Outdoor Program addition, affectionately known as the “barn,” slowly growing in the center of campus.
You might be wondering why a program called the Outdoor Program needs so much space indoors. Like, isn’t it supposed to be all outdoorsy and in the woods and crashing down whitewater streams and eating bark and stuff? Well, sure, but where do you think all the tents and kayaks and bark-boiling stoves are when they aren’t out on the trail? Think of the barn as a cozy home away from home for all this vital outdoor equipment, which up until now has been stashed in dark sheds and cellars and other places only fit for mushrooms, trolls and earwigs.
Never one to miss an opportunity for a teachable, group-building moment in the freezing cold, OP Director Randy Knaggs is out there pretty much every afternoon, banging away like Thor at the gates of Niflheim (“mist world” of Norse mythology, also known as hell). Randy has this irresistible Tom Sawyer-esque ability of making it look like he’s having a great time. I mean, he’s roping in all kinds of help from students, faculty and staff who just wander by, wondering what the heck all the noise is, like I did. The next thing I knew I had a nail apron around me and was swinging a hammer in my own un-Thor-like manner (more like Hodur, the Norse god of blindness, I think) until my fingers were about frozen off. But like any other Outdoor Program adventure, I felt strangely bonded to the many other innocent nail-pounders and gratified to be outdoors in the fresh air.