Dearest fingerling potatoes,

“You soar off to another world, deep in your mind. But people seem to take that, as being unkind”

Here are your minutes.

Announcements

Sasha – Katie cannot be here, but she will find you if you email her, and should be around Friday. Too late because I’m a bum. But email her!

Judy (!) –  TP Wright, used to be a BOC advisor, got a card for him, faculty advisor celebrating his 90th (hell yeah!) birthday. Card circulated, was signed with love. Meant to be a meaningful, powerful token of the continuity (since ’20) of this venerable institution, alive and well.

Also Judy – Goodspeed Sawyer Awards! Will need to vote on these next week, possibly electronically. List of señors and señoritas to be sent out. WTF is a Goodspeed Sawyer? To quote Judy from an email last year:

“Each year the William Hayes Sawyer Jr. ’13 Award is for the senior woman and the Harold Norris Goodspeed Jr. ’40 Award is for the senior man, who, in the opinion of the Council, has rendered the greatest amount of service to the Outing Club and its activities”

A senior woman and senior man will be selected for the Sawyer and Goodspeed awards respectively. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Please take a little bit of time to think of the seniors you would like to publicly recognize as selfless members who put in their dues to make this club what is it. The club doesn’t run itself. Vote next week!

Trips

Nate Slipfrock – Saturday Shell Pond, climbing spot, leaving early. Also perhaps a half-day Sunday trip to Tumbledown Dick, which is a mountain, not a dick, because Nate is sick of dick jokes.

Jordan – Reminder about open pad at Libbey Rd over April Break. Bountiful, proximal outdoor opportunities. Tree smelling. Quaint, Sandwich, NH. A bidet. Friends. Plenty of people signed up to head there, so it won’t just be you and Jordan, don’t worry.

Hannah – Sunday Rivah to squeeze the last drops of enjoiment out of this winter that no one has anything nice to say about.

Squincha – Tuesday, going to lean-to! You’ll probably be surrounded by several freshly finished honors thesis students that almost didn’t crack but they cracked. Also might ptfo in the middle of a conversation.

Gear

Climbing Dan – We kinda need new ropes. No, we really need new ropes. Got a considerable discount w/ pro-deal. Also rope-bags. Sterling. $700 for new ropes. Passed umaminously, but on the condition that we have retired rope craft night in E-room (climbing rope carpets, climbing rope sock knitting, soap-on-a-climbing-rope, etc.)

Safety Miles – Got a good deal on WFR tuition, but we do have to cover her gas and lodging, years past, been around $350-$500. WFR cert people are massive asset to the club, because less broken people = more fun. Proposed on the condition that cosponsorship is looked into. People in course are already paying course fee out of pocket, not going to cutting their tuition.

Dana – BOC interested in Bates Earth Day Wind Down cosponsorship? Question arises about co-operation between “student org” as defined by BCSG (BOC) and non-student org. (EcoReps). Will investigate, return with rules on matter.

Stories

Miles and friends – Tooling around on Mt. D outcrop, some bouldering problems. Went for some tasteful nudes on summit to round out afternoon, some Lewiston folks up there. May or may not have caught a glimpse of some side-peen.

Dana – Garcelon Bog? Found it by accident but didn’t explore. Anyone know anything? Some people “yes! It is a bog.” “Is it cool?”. Decidedly “yes”.

Sasha – She and George saw two meese at Tumbledown!  Were not aware that it is best to ride them so they cannot charge you. Looked “like weird horse cows”. Word.

Dana – Mt. David Project humming along, met with nice, important seeming man in a suit who was enthusiastic, though slightly apprehensive about liability involved with trails (and possibly rusty barbed wire). Fun fact, Mt. D is mostly owned by the Bates. I appeal to BOC to turnout on May 21st for EcoService Day, because Mt. David and the nature in L-A and on campus is more important than we act like it is.

(TL;DR)

Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or a saw—even though the tree in the forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships. The tree in the garden could easily have sprung from the same seed as the tree in the forest, and we can claim only its location and perhaps its form as our own. Both trees stand apart from us; both share our common world. The special power of the tree in the wilderness is to remind us of this fact. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this—if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural—then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.

 

This will only happen, however, if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away—a lesson that applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things. In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.” Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on what is best in it (and in ourselves) to our children.

– Bill Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness”

Julia – Clambake tentatively set to by May 22nd.

Sasha – Conversation about spring clambake. Thoughts are generally that clambake is a good thing, perhaps could be done on a different scale. Spitballs fly around other activities that could supplement/supplant clambake. Someone mentioned Range Pond. Range offers range (lol) of activities available.Tentatively save the 22nd. for something. Conversation to continue.

Watch for upcoming, “We Can Come Here Now” tour near you!

Looking to fill your April Break?

Nos vemos,

Rick Scott’s martian gerbil father