A Reflection on Community
The St. Johnsbury Academy Faculty and Staff gathered for an In-Service on August 22nd, 2024, in preparation for the school year that has just begun. We had asked Science Department Faculty member and Field Semester teacher Mitchell Jones to offer a reflection on community to start our year in the right spirit, especially given the stresses of the summer of 2024. Mitchell’s reflection, looking back on the “best, worst summer [he] ever had,” managed to find a balance of honesty, wisdom, humor and sincerity that moved us all.
Our theme for the year—which we’ll explore in the coming months—is “Face the World and Make it Better.” As a way to welcome our community back for the 2024-2025 school year, I thought it was worth sharing what Mitchell offered to us–a meditation on the lessons community has to teach us. The sum of these lessons is in some ways how to face the world together—and how even in itself, that simple act of facing the world begins to make it better.
All the best for the new school year,
Dr. Howell
A Reflection on Community
It’s late July of 2023, and the Gazebo kit I ordered from Ocean State Job Lot has been sitting in its box unbuilt in our barn for months. My wife Diantha and I decide it’s got to be built before school starts, or it will never happen.
I dust off my geometry skills and design and build a hexagonal deck to put the Gazebo on. I mostly finish the deck (I am who I am), then open the box containing the Gazebo kit, which I lay out on the deck and discover is an octagon, not a hexagon. But it’s far too late to do anything about that, so we proceed as if we always meant it to be that way.
Once the gazebo was built, we started inviting people in, and kept inviting people in. It became a thing I look forward to every week, and it fills my cup heading into the weekend. Sometimes there are 5 people, sometimes 30. We eat, we drink, and we talk. In this imperfect space, an octagonal Gazebo on a hexagonal deck, we have built one of the most special communities I have ever been a part of. I was riding the high of this community as we entered into the Summer of 2024.
This is my first lesson: If the community you want isn’t there, build it even if it’s built imperfectly.
Diantha and I were sitting in the gazebo when I got the call that Chip [Langmaid]* had died. We were stunned, and heartbroken. We sat with each other for a while until I felt the pull to school. I needed to come in, to be held and to process in this place. Binaca [Hanson, Assistant Headmaster] with her characteristic generosity was bringing food and water to those who had not thought to eat. She sat with me and asked me what I needed. When I replied “nothing that we can have,” she responded: “We have each other.”
We opened the Gazebo up the next night and cooked bean burritos (in honor of the microwave burritos Chip ate for lunch for years). We gathered with people in the Gazebo several more times in the following week, just to be in a space together. And Binaca was right; what I needed was my community.
This is lesson 2: Strong community allows us to bear weights we could not bear alone.
Aidan [Demsky, English faculty] stood here last spring and reflected on feedback and communication. I won’t repeat his message. But I will say, while co-teaching [the “Field Semester” course on the Academy’s Field Campus] with him, we put in work and time improving our communication and feedback practices. It was hard, but I am glad we did it to maintain our relationship and improve our course. What I did not expect was how those lessons have improved every relationship I have. My family traveled a bit this summer, a week in Canada with Diantha’s folks and a week in Virginia with mine. As I am sure many of you can relate to, a week can be a long time with extended family. However, using the communication skills I learned from and practiced with Aidan, I was able to truly enjoy that time in a way that I haven’t always been able to in the past.
This is lesson 3: Community maintenance takes work, open communication, and constructive feedback.
When we returned, it rained and it rained a lot. On July 11th we experienced our second catastrophic July 11th flood in 366 days. We woke up that morning to the news that Peacham and Lyndonville had been devastated, Dylan Kempton [SJA ‘09] had drowned, and the MacKenzies [John and Jennifer, Academy faculty] had lost their home. I sent Rose Dedam [Science faculty] a text to check in. This was her response:
Thanks Mitchell, Yeah, it’s really bad. Not sure who’s around the area,
but we are trying to salvage whatever we can from the MacKenzie’s house
tomorrow. If you could send something out to those young folks
you associated with it would be helpful. South Peacham, starting in the
morning and working all day, I expect…
The “young folks” are the ones in the Gazebo, and those who were still home rallied to help. Now to be clear, this is a story about Rose Dedam, who is by all accounts a giant in Peacham and the surrounding communities. Her work in Peacham and beyond, the way she communicated, mobilized, organized, and accomplished was deeply inspiring to me and life altering for many.
This is lesson 4: Amazing role models are out there. Learn from them.
We drove out to Acadia National Park where we spent 5 days camping with Sarah Vorhies [Science faculty] and her family. My children have had a lot of exposure to camping–they’ve done it for weeks at a time, in fact–but they hadn’t really leaned into activities like hiking or running around the campground without their parents. For them, having their friends, their community, with them opened so many doors. We hiked daily, including Cadillac Mountain; they played, raced to see who was most tired, completed scavenger hunts, and when we were at the campground, we hardly ever saw them. They both cried when we left, and Diantha and I reflected on how much growth we had seen in them on the trip.
This is lesson 5: Being in a community allows us to grow and experience things we wouldn’t alone.
It’s 1 AM on July 30 and I am lying awake in a very small tent at Tillitson’s camp on the long trail with Aidan. The thunder is loud, it’s pouring outside, and raining lightly inside our tent.
It goes on like this for hours, and in the morning the camp is wildly different than the one from the night before, the paths had washed out, and the quiet high mountain creek is now brimming its bank. Picking our way over the trail, which was soaked in some places and gone in others, we came to a place with cell service… 78 messages from a dozen or more people pinged off at once. All folks wondering if we were okay.
We learned St Johnsbury had received 8 inches of rain in 4 hours, and the photos were devastating. I had planned to finish the trail with Aidan but knew, in that moment, I needed to go home. With broken cell service we coordinated with Ethan Lipson [English faculty] who determined that enough roads were open for me to get home. The only trouble would be getting back to the van.
I decided hitching a ride from the next road crossing was my best option. Once we reached Route 118, we wished each other good luck and I walked, then jogged. After two and a half miles, a dilapitated blue truck, belching smoke out the windows, pulled over. The driver introduced himself and began moving crates of tools and assorted other junk to make room for me in the front of his truck. As he rearranged, he said “Don’t worry, I’m not gunna kill ya,” handed me a gallon of water, and told me to drink. I took a sip.
He told me he would take me all the way back to my van, but he wanted to let his dogs out on the way. As he unlocked the gate to the four mile long private road, with SOS reading where bars of service should have been on my iphone, he assured me again that he wouldn’t kill me, and this time added “Or eat ya.” I had another sip of water.
We left and he talked almost nonstop the entire ride. He was lonely, and happy to have someone’s time. I was so deeply grateful to him for his time and generosity.
This is my final lesson for you: be open to new community, seek it out, and ask for help.
Now, I am not sure whether entering an unknown situation like the one I just described is always advisable. However, what I do know is this: entering into or building new community involves risk; maintaining it requires communication; and being in it allows for growth, joy, and support through terrible times. At the end of the day we all have things we need and we all have things to offer. Being in community requires us to embrace both.
* Chip Langmaid, beloved SJA Science teacher and coach, passed away unexpectedly on June 11th, 2024.
