Backwoods Blog

THE FIELD TRIP

Backwoods Blog;

in the woods and on the road…

This faded image is one of the few photographs we have of my father before the age of ten (and a double exposure at that). He’s sitting on a bale of hay holding an apple and looks as if he’s trying to decide who’s going get it, he or the dog…The family homestead was located on the Nichols Road, and back in those days most every side road had their own school house and church, oftentimes sharing the same building. This was the case on the Nichols Road and that’s where my father and his siblings attended school and church in their early years. It was a traditional one room school house which meant if you were curious enough you could take several years of schooling at the same time. My father used to tell a joke about what it was like attending school. (I probably heard him repeat this line a hundred times.) 

“Little Johnny wasn’t too smart, he just went to school a couple of days in another boy’s place…” 

When he was a little older he got his first paying job at the school lighting the morning fire in the wood stove. He would walk to school early, organize the wood shed and get the building warm before the teacher and the rest of the students arrived. I don’t remember him telling too many stories about the little school house, but there was the time he led the entire school on an ill-fated field trip. It was mid-way through the morning when my father announced he knew where there was a huge spruce tree in the woods with more spruce gum than he had ever seen. He convinced the teacher that they should all take a field trip to the tree and he would lead the way. Since they all had “packed lunches” they could make a picnic out of the trip and they should be back in no time. Off they went into the woods behind the little school house with my father as the group guide. Before too long, after winding through the woods and circling back around a couple of times and then wandering some more, even deeper into the woods, my father announced, “I think I’m lost!” By then it was lunch time, so they found a good spot for a picnic and then returned to the task of finding their way back to the school house. My father knew exactly where they were the whole time and so did a couple of the other students, but the teacher had no idea at all. He kept leading the group around the woods the rest of the afternoon, keeping a close eye on his watch until it was time for school to get out. They (miraculously) found their way back just in time. As it turned out it was a pretty good field trip after all; they did find some spruce gum along the way (even if it wasn’t from the giant tree), they had a good picnic, got plenty of exercise and the teacher was glad to get everyone safely back to the school. My father never led another field trip during his Nichols Road school house days.

In the woods,

Dave

April 13, 2022