Many people have strung their Christmas trees with lights, and the trees will hold their attention for a few weeks. But in Yellow Springs, there is a high school group called School Forest that grows and nurtures pine trees all year long. And they have been doing it for 75 years. Culture Couch producer David Seitz visited the Glen Helen Forest preserve to bring us the story.
In a field, teens take turns with a sledgehammer driving down a wedge to split large logs. That’s the prized job, said John Day, a teacher who has been leading School Forest for 30 years.
“And I have kids, actually, almost fighting to be the next one to split wood,” Day said.
School Forest started in 1948 when a graduate student in forestry persuaded Antioch College to lend land from the Glen Helen preserve to the high school to grow Christmas trees. For decades, it was a real money maker.
Simona DeMarzi was a school forester in the early 1970’s.
“So we would plant something like a thousand trees, I mean a lot of trees,” DeMarzi said. “So we had, like maybe seven different fields that we grew trees in and rotated them.”
“You felt like you owned the place," DeMarzi remarked. “You know you felt responsible for all those trees and the land. It was magical."
Now School Forest plants far fewer trees and they face effects of climate change that can reduce the number of trees. It’s a lot of work. Throughout the school year, the foresters whack at weeds with a tool like a scythe and a rake. They don rubber gloves to remove invasive caterpillars. And they prune and shape branches.
Elliot Cromer was a school forester 12 years ago. His group had a motto.
“Hurly is our name and burly is our game,” Cromer recalled. “Sawing down a big tree that was like, “Oh, let me handle the huge saw. Squishing bugs was just like, “Okay, this is my reality for the day.”
Some of the tools can be dangerous. They used to use a large augur, a drill bit, attached to the back of a tractor to dig holes for planting the trees. One afternoon John Day drove the tractor while a teen helped guide the augur. Day heard a scream and jumped out of the tractor.
Day recounts what happened next: “And before we knew it had caught his shorts, but it had wound up so tight that his shorts, he couldn’t get out of them. We literally had to take a Swiss army knife and cut him out of his shorts.”
Decades later, the shorts still hang in the School Forest shed to remind everyone to wield the axes and saws with care. The students’ work hours earn them camp outs and a year-end trip where they might go rafting, caving, or zip-lining.
There is a halloween camp out where new kids are initiated into School Forest with a prank in the night. Day’s rule is that the pranks should not hurt or upset anyone. Elliot Cromer’s group led the newbies to sit on a patch of leaves under a tree to hear a poem he wrote for the occasion.
“And underneath the pile of leaves was a ramshackle net and pulley system,” Cromer explained. “So at the end of this poem, it ends with the line, ‘And they’ll never forget how they were all captured in the school forest net.’ And we pulled the pulley, and they were all bundled together in a beautiful net, which truly they had to do some teamwork to get out of that thing because we all ran off.”
No matter how cold in December, the foresters always camp out the weekend of the School Forest festival. Cromer said some of them wake up at sunrise, while the adults still sleep, for another ritual, the fun run.
“And you go and strip down to your underwear, bras and underwear or just underwear, usually leave boots on,” Cromer remembered. “I did it with a hat and gloves. And you do a nice jog to the pine forest and back. And it’s just really a further embracing of the freedom one finds in mother nature.”
John Day says memories of School Forest stick with students for decades after.
“And I know that they go on connected to nature and caring about the world and wanting to make the natural world a better place. That is what our planet needs now.”
Support for Culture Couch comes from the Ohio Arts Council.