Z / \ / Summer 20IJ HELLO, MADAM PRESIDENT ^ ; Tag along as Laurie Patton enjoys her ' first day of school. P 23 MODERN LOVE Leah Fessier ’15 explores the relationship culture on a college campus. P. TALL TALE What really happened between Frost and Capote at Bread Loaf? P. 68 Lost fviiddlebury s ornithological' teaching collection is not only rare and beautiful — '-•VfV: it was nearly consigned to the dustbin of history. T hank You! Financial support from alumni like you makes every student's experience at Middlebury possible. Your gift to Middlebury helps exceptional students like Kendall become exceptional graduates. Visit go.middlebury.edu/thankyou to watch a short video of students giving thanks. To see your gift acknowledged, visit go.middlebury.edu/2015honorroll. Middlebury College COVER ESSAYI a College senior named Frank Knowlton came to their biology class to demonstrate skinning and mounting birds. The two were hooked and subsequently enlisted Knowlton to give them private tutorials. Over the next several years— Mead enrolled at Middlebury, while Parkhill stayed home to tend the family farm—they amassed a considerable collection. The skins were well preserved, and their labeling—the » precision, the artistry—was done to exacting standards and is an example of museum-quality craft. Tragically, Parkhill died at a young age. His sister left his entire collection to Mead, and then, at some point before 1939, Mead (by this point a Middlebury trustee) donated both his and Parkhill’s collections to the College. We know this because the spring 1939 News Letter published a story about how this ornithological collection was being used in biology courses. And after that, things get murky. During the next decades, Middlebury’s biology department added some outstanding faculty—Hal Hitchcock, George Saul, Duncan ïxJûJ^ta2Æj McDonald, but I don’t think they were all that interested in the museum skins. And when the science departments were moving from Warner to the new science center in the late ’60s, my guess is that someone looked at these cabinets of birds and thought, I have no interest in those. So they were moved into storage, essentially left to be forgotten. I was hired in 1985, and on one of my first days By Stephen Trombulak , Professor of Environmental AND on campus, I went down to the storage room Biosphere Studies , as told to Matt Jennings in the science center—which, by this point, was filled to capacity—and started rooting around. Waiting in the Wings It was dark and dusty and filled with all of this junk, and at some point I spotted a couple of museum cabinets pushed against the wall way The story of this ornithological teaching collection in the back. (This tells you they were probably the first things to go into storage.) They were goes back roughly 130 years to the mid-i88os, when a great looking cabinets, so I started digging through stuff to get to them—it was like digging couple of Addison County teenagers, Chester Parkhill through sand. In order to go forward, I had to take something in front of me and move it be­ and Albert Mead, became interested in local birds. hind me. Finally I reached the cabinets, cleared some space, and opened one of the doors. The They were bird fans—that was the term back then, bird overpowering smell of mothballs hit me, and my jaw dropped, not because of the smell, but fans—not birders or bird-watchers—and the way because of what I saw. This cabinet was filled people observed birds in the late-i9th century with these bird skins—birds from the 1880s, was you see a bird, you shoot it, you observe it. all from Addison County, expertly preserved*. Following this, Trombulak also discovered boxes of eggs, as It tvas barbaric by our contemporary standards, Unbelievable, I thought. I knew I had to move well as mounts.They’re without documentation but he believes u ■ t l l i they were all part of the Mead collect,on. (More on the entire «bviously, but that was the Custom. these up to my teaching room, and I have been collection onp. }o.) When Parkhill and Mead were in high school. curating the collection ever since. B} COVER AND ABOVE PHOTOS BY ROSAMOND PURCELL Summer 2013 1 IS C E N E Just down the hill from campus, the David W. Ginevan Recycling Center sits along Route 125, seem­ ingly right at home in the countryside. As you leave campus and drop down the hill heading west, the view changes from nestled college buildings to countryside, which stretches out to Lake Champlain and the distant Adirondacks. Though I often drive this route from town to my Cornwall home, the transition is so abrupt it rarely fails to get my attention. One last set of buildings is on the College edge of the roll­ ing farmland: the recycling center (officially called the Material Recovery Facility). It operates nearly 365 days a year and its busy workers ensure that two-thirds of what would otherwise be College waste is reused or re­ cycled. This view from above shows the metal-roofed recycling center, a wind turbine providing part of the center’s electricity, and the Homer Harris Farmhouse with its now idle silo. Amid this collection of old and relatively new, the hills in the distance hint of the rural landscape that lies beyond. IS C E N E In Santa Fe, I thought about silence. All summer I honed a theory about it and underlined choice passages in McCarthy and Gather while I worked in my room—its view, incidentally, is more or less pictured here. The place’s quietude mesmerized me—make a sound and chances are it would disappear down an arroyo, or be­ come dehydrated, or rise up to commingle with the spirit of Georgia O’Keeffe before it bounced back to you. But the silence also left me in a perpetual state of suspense. At Ojo Caliente, a hot spring up Route 84 where we would go and cover ourselves with mud, I was half afraid to dunk my head. Bringing up the rear of a sunrise hike, I looked over my shoulder with a shiver. Riding a bicycle down Canyon Road into town, I held off the brakes, egging on whatever it was. By Angela Evancie ’09 Photograph by Michael Clark A quiet, sunny afternoon affords plenty of time for reading and reflection on the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English campus in Santa Fe. IS C E N E Missy Foote concludes her 38-year career as a coach at Middlebury, retiring as one of the most influential and successful Panther mentors of a1! time. One of my fondest memories of Missy Foote involves our team running repeats on the hill behind the golf course; she lapped some of us even though she was more than double our age! But beyond the epic and memorable conditioning workouts, Missy built people, teams, and a community of players. She inspired us to be great on the field, but also conditioned us to be suc­ cessful and resilient in life. I use the skills she taught me every day—providing both my children and my col­ leagues with positive reinforcement, asking questions to learn about people and their interests, and visual­ izing the outcome I want in any situation. f[ There is _ M a reason that hundreds of current and former players and parents attended both Missy’s induction into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame and her retirement party. Missy »' is a great coach, but, more importantly, she is a friend % and mentor for life. i . i %.% % *:■ • • m By Becky Castle ’91 Photograph by Brett Simison % i. 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