Call of the Wild: How One Private School Aims to Take Privileged Students Out of Their Bubble
Pat Barnes is teaching his students how to not die in the woods. “This is our emergency response,” Barnes says, starting his lecture. It’s a chilly evening in late September, just past dusk, and the group is standing on a dirt path behind the academic building of the Mountain School, an alternative-learning semester school and 416-acre largely self-sufficient farm in rural Vershire, Vermont, 30 miles south of Montpelier. Each semester the school enrolls 45 academically gifted high school juniors from around the country, with the mission of teaching them “to take care of a place and work for the common good,” as Alden Smith, the school’s director, puts it. In addition to a rigorous, honors- and AP-level academic schedule and on-site farm training, the teenagers learn wilderness survival skills, the teaching of which Barnes leads.
“All of you have your whistles and compasses around your necks,” says Barnes, who also teaches environmental science, physics, and chemistry. “Because that’s how we spend our solo: with our whistles and compasses around our necks.”
The “solo” Barnes refers to is a camping trip in the White Mountains, where, for three days and three nights, students will be entirely alone in the wilderness, with no more technology than a flashlight. The solo is a way to not only test their cumulative outdoor training but also to allow them to experience some solitude and self-sufficiency in an age of hyperconnectivity.
This semester’s trip leaves a week from now, and the students are doing last minute preparations, including reviewing emergency response drills and getting used to being alone in the woods at night. Half the student body completed this exercise last night, and now it’s the other half’s turn.
Barnes teaches them that if you have a life-threatening injury, you should blow your whistle three times—loud.
“And then wait how long to do it again?” Barnes asks the group.
“Five minutes,” one boy calls out.
“Five minutes?” Myca (pronounced Meeka), a 16-year-old girl from Westport, Connecticut, says, nearly laughing. “He’s dying!”
“Five seconds,” Barnes corrects him. “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand. And then?”
“Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!” the students say in unison.
Barnes goes over the call-and-response tactic: The nearest student to hear the three whistles will blow her whistle once, both to signal that she hears the call for help and to likewise send the distress signal farther down the line of campers; it will then, hopefully, reach base camp, where faculty will be stationed.
“Myca, did you hear three whistles?” Barnes asks, as if it were a real emergency and she was the next camper in line.
“Yes.”
“What should you do?”
“Whistle once.”
“Go ahead, whistle once!”
Myca takes a breath and blows into her whistle as hard as she can. The high-pitched squeal slices through the air.
“Oh, beautiful! Excellent!” Barnes says. “If you can hear the three whistles, you are close to the person who is having what they consider to be a life-threatening emergency: broken ankle, appendicitis, femoral bleeding—you know, spurting arterial bleeding”—he uses his hands to suggest blood shooting out of his leg—“any of those. If you can hear three whistles, make sure the message gets passed on, but then go and give aid.” He looks around at his pupils. “We will rehearse this even more. We want this to become muscle memory.”
Barnes then leads the students into the woods, where they will split up, spread out along the on-campus trail, and try to endure 20 minutes of alone time in the darkness. They have just come from dinner, where Myca, over vanilla ice cream doused in maple syrup, showed some apprehension not only for tonight’s activity but for the concept of a solo camping trip in general.
“Wait, you have to be, like, alone for 20 minutes?” Myca said, spoon in hand, about to take a bite. “I don’t want to be alone in the dark! Literally my worst fear ever.”
Now that they’re actually in the woods—Barnes won’t let them use lights of any kind—Myca’s fear starts to show. “Myca, why are you apprehensive about 30 minutes?” asks Jacob, who’s from New Haven.
“It’s 20 minutes, okay?” she retorts. “Stop saying the number 30!”
“Do you have some sort of phobia of 30?” Jacob says, clearly trying to provoke her.
“Nope—the dark,” Myca says. The team continues down the path.
“Okay, folks,” Barnes says, stopping the group. “The goal for tonight is principally to give you some time on your own as the sky gets darker and darker, all right? It’s a chance to sit and relax and listen to the sounds of the night, sounds you might be unfamiliar with, but also to get a sense of what it will be like to be out on the solo.” He explains that as they keep walking he will periodically tap one of them on the shoulder. That person will stop, and Barnes and the rest will continue until the group is dispersed along the trail. After 20 minutes the first person who stopped will resume walking along the trail, collecting the group as he goes.
The first student is tapped (“Bye, guys!”), and the rest of the group walks on. Myca is the second student tapped by Barnes. Although no one can see her face, her groans are audible in the darkness. A faint crackling can be heard among the trees, an eerie stillness settles around her, and the arms of the trees hug the sky out of sight: complete darkness. Twenty minutes go by, and the first students to stop start moving again. It actually wasn’t that bad, Myca tells them. A boy farther along jumps up and screams.
“Aaaaaah!” Myca yells. “I hate you!”
They keep walking until all the students are together. After a few minutes the group emerges into a clearing lit by moonlight. “Oh my god!” one student calls out. “Look at the stars!”
“There’s the Big Dipper,” one says.
“And the Little Dipper!” another shouts. All the kids stand in silence for a moment, looking up.
The following morning, just before 7 a.m., the students start trickling out of their dorms—hair wet from the shower, faces slack from fatigue—to do their chores. There’s a cyclical, interdependent rhythm at the Mountain School, which was founded in 1984 as the country’s first semester school. The students are an integral part of its operations; without them the entire system would crumble. That’s part of the school’s mission, after all: to allow students to be a part of a place that needs them as much as they need it.
They plant and harvest crops, care for the animals (cows, sheep, chickens, and others), take out the trash, do the dishes, clean the classrooms and dorms, manage the compost, and stack hay. “They come here ready to commit to something that improves life for others, not just for themselves,” Alden Smith says. “We tend to draw kids that want to help the world, and we also have a curriculum that helps them practice doing that over and over again, every day.”
The Mountain School may seem an unusual if not downright peculiar place for wealthy families (who can afford the $30,960 tuition) to send their children, but the experiences it provides can be eye-opening and even life-affirming for teenagers acclimated to the bubble of an upper class upbringing. “When you’re living in New York City and your kid is in trouble, you send them to a wilderness program. But these kids are up there to build life skills. There’s a distinction,” says jewelry designer and Child Mind Institute co-founder Brooke Garber Neidich, whose daughter went to the Mountain School in the early 2000s. “And it’s one semester when you aren’t talking about SATs or where you’re going to college; that’s not their conversation there. It’s a great break.”
The concept of nature programs, academically related or otherwise, as a tool to help high schoolers prepare for adulthood has been current among well-to-do families for decades. At the turn of the 20th century Teddy Roosevelt promoted getting out in nature generally, and the Boy Scouts of America in particular, to reinforce the masculinity of upper class young men.
As the college admission process has become more competitive, however, the need for students to have a diverse range of experiences has become paramount. In addition, “there’s an element of pedigree within these types of programs,” says Hilary Levey Friedman, professor of education at Brown and author of Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture.
She says that not only do students in programs like the Mountain School’s develop skills necessary for success in adulthood, they make lifelong connections within elite circles, which creates a cycle that perpetuates such programs’ sociological prestige. “If kids going there did not go off to great colleges and careers,” Friedman adds, “getting into these programs would not be as competitive.”
The Mountain School, which is owned by Milton Academy (a boarding and day school in Massachusetts), normally receives more than 100 applications for each semester, most of them the result of recruitment at dozens of schools with high-achieving students. The admissions process is need-blind, and there’s usually an even split between public and private school students in each highly curated class.
“We’re trying to pack as much diversity as possible into the 45 kids: artists and athletes, students from different geographies, a certain ratio of boys to girls. We want students of color, people from different economic backgrounds,” says director of admissions Emily Adler Boren. She adds that the Mountain School’s students are learning not only in the classroom and on the farm but from one another, too. “One person can have a big impact on such a small group.”
For Myca, who was born in New York City, lived in London as a child, and moved to Westport just before starting at Staples High School, the program was recommended by her mother Giselle Hantz, a lawyer turned art specialist at Christie’s. “Myca had recently quit ballet and hadn’t really found another passion, and I thought she would benefit from being challenged and expanded in this very different way,” Hantz says.
Myca wants to be a doctor when she grows up, and she sees the Mountain School as a way not only to boost her résumé but to gain some life experience outside Westport, where rich kids live in monotonous comfort (“I’ve never known where my food comes from,” she admits) and where her father works “in hedge funding—like, banking, some sort of dad job.”
Hantz agrees with Myca’s assessment; she says the aim of sending kids from affluent communities like Westport to the Mountain School is simply to thrust them into a challenging experience. “It’s about getting kids out of this sort of coddled, protective environment,” she says. “Any kid of mine would benefit from a more Rousseau-like experience, where you mix physical work with the work of the mind.”
Myca says she was hesitant about going to Vermont, “but now that I’m here and actually doing it, it’s really amazing. I think it’s cool that we’re participating in something that we benefit from. Everything is maintained by us.”
Today is a day of heavy academics, so after breakfast Myca hustles over to the academic building, which is honeycombed with classrooms, for humanities. The class is taught by Jack Kruse, who has been a faculty member since the school’s inception. The topic of today’s discussion, Kruse announces, as if he were Julian Morrow from Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, is how to think about science and uncertainty, the synthesis of conscious thought, and the concept of truth in an inherently subjective world.
It’s a pretty heady assignment given the age of his students, but they take to it. He has them chew on the topic in smaller groups and then distill their thoughts down to a paragraph or two.
Myca leads the discussion in her group. “The topics we choose to focus on are based on our biases and our opinions and experiences, so, like, there might be a whole world of possibilities, but we’ve only researched one,” she says, her peers listening intently. “So things that are supposed to be completely objective are still slanted by our own biases.”
After lunch and the rest of her classes (math, environmental science, and English), Myca sits on the lawn with Caroline Meliones, a Spanish teacher who is her adviser, to discuss next week’s solo. Meliones talks about mindfulness, and the way teenagers are overstimulated and disconnected from nature. “Just sitting and watching and being in nature,” she says, “is a really powerful experience.”
Meliones draws three concentric circles on a piece of paper, the smallest one hardly bigger than a dot. “All the things I think can happen”—she points to the largest circle—“what actually could happen”—the second circle—“and what actually does happen”—the dot—“that’s the visual of the power of fear in the mind.” She pauses. “Does that make you feel more comfortable? Or are you still, like, Nu-huh?”
“No, that makes me feel more comfortable,” Myca says.
“Also, think about the future, to after solo, coming back on Saturday with all your friends, being like, ‘That was so wild and crazy! I can’t believe I did that! I can’t wait to shower! I heard a crazy noise that I thought was a deer but it was just a stick falling!’ Having this experience that pushes you, that stretches you, not to the point of breaking or panic, but having this shared experience—that you did that, that you persevered through something.”
Myca says that she called a Mountain School alum earlier in the day for advice. “I said, ‘I am really hesitant about the solo. Do you have any words of encouragement?’ He just said, ‘You are going to graduate college and get a job, and the chances of doing this in the future are slim to none, so now is the time to push yourself out of your comfort zone.’ ”
Still, the contract for the solo sits unsigned at her feet. The last step is for Myca to sign it, committing to the trip. She puts it off, explaining that she needs another night to think about it.
“Happy Farm Day!” a student calls out in the dining hall the next morning. Farm manager Liana Horster addresses the group. “I hope you’re feeling as pumped as I am about today,” she says. “Our goal is to bring in all our storage crops—that’s going to be thousands of pounds of produce. We’re going to be bringing it in, washing it, culling it, packaging it, and storing it. Finally, after all these months and months of taking care of these crops, finally they are in a place where they are going to feed us. Today is that day.”
The students eat quickly and then make their way up to the crop field, a six-acre plot atop a hill on the campus’s south-facing slope. They split up into teams, each of which will handle a specific vegetable: potatoes, carrots, beets, radishes, and turnips. Myca is assigned to carrots, and she squats at a furrow’s end and begins pulling. With dirt-caked hands and dusty boots, she gawks at the organic carrots’ unique shapes. A truck makes trips to haul the vegetables down to campus to be cleaned and sorted; a smattering of trees in the distant hills beam a soft yellow as fall approaches the valley.
The students have picked all the vegetables by 11 a.m., so they switch to pulling weeds to prepare for the afternoon session, when a different group of students will spread compost, the first step in starting the process over again for subsequent semesters. After lunch Myca is assigned, along with two other students, to help assistant farm manager Gwynne Durham, who primarily takes care of the animals.
“Sheep are very prone to internal parasites,” Durham tells them. “You guys will wrangle them, and I will harvest some fecal material that we will put into a little bag.” From there, she explains, the samples will be sent out for testing. “If you start to feel jealous—”
“—of the poop picking?” Myca interjects.
Durham smiles. “I don’t want to hear of any journal entries where you’re upset that I hogged the best part!”
They walk down to the field and herd the roughly 30 sheep into the barn. Durham shows the students how to wrangle a sheep: a modified headlock, holding an ear and gripping the chin. It’s Myca’s turn to catch a sheep.
“What do I do? Just grab it?” she asks. Durham gives her a quick “Yep.”
“Can I get a little one?” Myca asks. She goes after a lamb, gripping its neck and chin.
“I’m so sorry!” she tells it as it tries to squirm away. “You’re so tiny!” Durham pulls a glove on, lifts the lamb’s tail, and successfully retrieves a sample.
The group finishes the task and takes the sheep back out to pasture. Myca stands with her arms outstretched, guiding them. For the rest of the afternoon they take down and reset grazing fences, shuffling the cows and sheep from one field to the next. At 5 p.m. the day is done, and all the students go swimming in a small pond at the school’s entrance. Myca slowly wades in, shivering in the late afternoon shade. A glow falls off the mountains, engulfing the pond in a golden haze, the cattails lining its edges lit up like tiki torches in the slanting light.
It’s a quick swim, and everyone rushes back to the dorms to change before dinner: shepherd’s pie, a fitting meal in light of the task they just completed. Myca, clad in sweatpants and slippers, sits with Meliones, her adviser. Upon finishing dinner, Myca follows Meliones to her faculty mailbox, where the solo contract awaits. Myca picks up a pen and finally, without hesitation, signs her name on the line.
For admissions and application information, visit mountainschool.org.
This story appears in the April 2020 Issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
You Might Also Like
