Find Your Own Pond: Stags, Phi Taus, Ulster, MACE, and Football players

Welcome

This blog is a chronicle of life and the seasons at the New Concord Reservoir. The manmade reservoir lies about a mile and a half outside the village of New Concord toward the end of a country road lined with small farms and homes. A half mile long and about 150 yards wide at its widest point, it is bordered by forests on its eastern, western and northern shores. New Concord is a village in Southeastern Ohio, which, like its New England namesake, originally served a hinterland of small farms. Today, life in the village is shaped primarily by the presence of Muskingum College, a private, residential liberal arts college founded by Scots-Irish Presbyterians in 1837. The New Concord reservoir lies about the same distance from the village of New Concord as Walden pond lies from the village of Concord, Massachusetts. It is only about one quarter of the size of Walden, and no great works have celebrated it. While Walden is a natural pond, carved by receding glacial moraines, the New Concord reservoir required human intervention to emerge. It only came into existence a few decades ago, when the village created an earthen dam near the headwaters of Fox Creek, and its first function was to ensure a dependable source of water for the village. Neither Walden, nor our reservoir are notable for their extraordinary majesty or wildness; both exist in the midst of civilization rather than remote from it. In chronicling the days of Walden Pond, Thoreau sought to encourage us all to appreciate the ordinary natural world we live in rather than only valuing that which is remote and seemingly untouched by human hands. This blog is intended to encourage you to find your own Walden in your own neighborhood. Visit it frequently, learn from it, find peace and inspiration there, share it, cherish it, and protect it.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Stags, Phi Taus, Ulster, MACE, and Football players

It has been a hectic few weeks, with lots of crummy weather getting in the way of completing the bridge building around the reservoir. Last Thursday the Phi Taus came through with ten volunteers, but the bridges weren't ready, so instead we did some trail benching in the rain. Last Friday the Village crew told me that they had completed two of the small bridges and wanted me to go with them to drop them as close to their final resting places as possible. I had a two hour window between a meeting with the Ohio Humanities Council and our annual scholarship day ceremony, dashed home, threw on some muddy jeans, a t-shirt and my muddy boots, and met the crew out at Carol Emerson's house. We dropped the smaller of the two bridges in her backyard, then drove across McCall's farm fields and left the larger one on the edge of his field about 100 yards up hill from its final resting place. Then it was back to the house, back into respectable clothes, an on with the doctoral robe to line up for the scholarship ceremony. Scholarship day is one of my favorite Muskingum College traditions, because every year after we process in, we sing the "God of" song. The song's real title is "God of Wisdom, Truth and Beauty," sung to Beethoven's Ode to Joy, but we like to call it the "God of" song because those words are repeated so many times throughout the song:

God of wisdom, truth, and beauty, God of spirit, fire, and soul,
God of order, love, and duty, God of purpose, plan, and goal:
Grant us visions ever growing, breath of life, eternal strength,
Mystic spirit, moving, fl owing, fi lling height and depth and length.

God of drama, music, dancing, God of story, sculpture, art,
God of wit, all life enhancing, God of every yearning heart:
Challenge us with quests of spirit, truth revealed in myriad ways,
Word or song for hearts that hear it, sketch and model – forms of praise.

God of atom’s smallest feature, God of galaxies in space,
God of every living creature, God of all the human race:
May our knowledge be extended, for the whole creation’s good,
Hunger banished, warfare ended, all the earth a neighborhood.

God of science, history, teaching, God of futures yet unknown,
God of holding, God of reaching, God of power beyond each throne:
Take the fragments of our living, fi t us to your finest scheme,
Now forgiven and forgiving, make us free to dare and dream.

It is little traditions like this one that make me feel connected to this place.

We had miserable weather all weekend, but on Monday eight members of the Stag club came through and carried the bridges and put them in place. It was indeed a chore, but the Stags embraced the challenge. Tuesdy morning six football players arrived at the reservoir promptly at 8 AM, and hauled lumber, tools, and a generator out to the last bridge build site. Corey and Matt worked all day on the bridge, and at the end of the day the heavy generator needed to be hauled out of the woods. I managed to recruit two strapping members of the MACE club, who took turns pretending they were in a strong man contest, hauling it about a 100 yards a turn until we got it to their jeep.

On the way back to town, we passed the track team out for their afternoon run, and told them the bridges were done. They added a lap around the trail to their run. This project has consumed most of my free time for the last month, required the help of village workers, football players and four different fraternities, but it is done at last. Katie and I celebrated later that evening by taking a walk around the reservoir with the dogs, coming home and popping open a beer.