“Indigo, turn that axe around so when you fall on your face, it won’t be in the way!” said Christopher, the trail-maintenance leader and my English teacher, in his usual goofy and sarcastic way. We, the trail-maintenance work-crew of four, were marching up a slight hill past a horse pasture – the pasture was bare and lonely, surrounded by an electric fence that divided it from the rest of the terrain. I looked ahead to the tree-line and saw where a trail started its winding path through the trees. In those woods, we would begin our weekly duty of caring for the trails on our school’s campus. I could taste the sweet droplets of water from the slow and constant drizzle. I love the rain. My shoes slipped slightly on the mix of grass and mud as we continued our brisk pace towards the tree line.
“What are we doing today?” asked Noah, an outgoing, eccentric fellow student who always finds joy in life. I had a feeling it would be an exciting afternoon.
“We’re totally going to make some stairs!” Christopher replied.
“Stairs?” asked Claire, a talkative and hyper girl who always has a smile on her face.
“Yeah,” Christopher said. “We’re going to carve stairs into the treacherously angled parts of the trail.”
By this time, we had reached the tree line, and the drizzle was reduced by the many layers of canopy provided by the tall evergreens of the forest. I noticed how green the forest was even before most of the trees and shrubbery began to leaf. I enjoyed looking at the wet and shiny peeling bark of the birch trees and the sparkling droplets of water on green rhododendron leaves partially illuminated by the cloud-filtered sunlight. We kept going at Christopher’s brisk pace, treading on inches of soft brown pine needles. The forest smelled freshly of pine. Christopher stopped where the trail split.
“Indigo,” said Christopher. “I want you to walk down this trail with the clippers, cutting every branch you can reach from the center of the trail.” He handed me the clippers with one hand while pointing down the right fork with the other. I looked down the path to which he pointed. The path was fairly straight and level, and looked like a tunnel through the woods. I began to cut the few stray twigs and branches and threw the dead fallen limbs off the trail. I had to keep reminding myself to keep moving at a quick pace, as I occasionally fell back into a methodical way of cutting branches.
I was about halfway down the trail when the strange sounds began. Although I could clearly hear the sounds, they seemed distant. It was an eerie sound somewhere between the mechanical roar of a turbine engine and call of a whale. The sound fluctuated greatly but carried a rhythm I doubted could be created by mistake: Like a symphony of farm equipment and animals working together in an eerie rhythmic humming.
At first I thought of the possibility of Christopher, Claire, and Noah, trying to scare me, but the sound was complex and not something easily created. Next I thought of farm machinery, but the sound was too organic. The more I tried to think about the cause of the sound, the more ridiculous my explanations of the sound became. I thought about ghosts at a meeting or an “ET” type spacecraft coming to pick up a rogue alien. Finally, I gave up and decided that there are some things better left a mystery, and I tried to resume my work, though unsuccessfully.
The sound lulled me into a thinking void, disconnecting my brain from my body, and I thought about my life. I thought about how great of an opportunity it was to be able to hear these mystifying sounds at The Outdoor Academy, a four-month boarding school in Pisgah National Forest. I thought about how grateful I was for the acceptance of others. I thought about the contrast between my life here and at home. How much more I enjoyed life at OA than at home, how much closer to the earth I felt, not to mention the forty-five amazing friends here at OA both fellow students and faculty. At home, I would never have had the chance to talk to a teacher about a non-related subject over a meal, they would have been fired for fraternizing with students—as if getting to know students was a bad thing.
Yes, life at OA was definitely a nice way to live. I was almost afraid four months of this community-based life style would spoil me for the rest of the world. Then I realized that OA would provide lessons and invaluable knowledge that would be useful for the rest of my life, and that after the wonderful experience, I would feel closer to everybody back home.
“Indigo.”
I snapped back to the real world, realizing the mysterious sounds had stopped, I turned around. Christopher was standing a few feet away.
“Those were some incredibly cool sounds,” he said. I strained to look as if I had been working, although I had probably been zoned-out for at least a few minutes.
“Yeah they were. What caused them?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It was like a whale was singing. Anyway, looks like you’ve done well enough here.” Christopher snapped off some twigs that I had considered to be off the trail. He then started back up the trail the way we had come. He took me up the windy trail he had taken Noah and Claire on. The day continued and our work-crew accomplished a lot. We leveled three sections of the trail, dug out at least ten stairs in two separate areas, and Christopher and I chopped a fallen tree in half with the axe.
That wonderful, drizzling day is one of my favorite memories yet. The sense of magic that was in the air, the great sense of belonging that day, not to mention the mysterious sounds. The sounds were something special that Christopher, Claire, Noah, and I still share. Maybe someday I’ll figure out where those sounds came from or at least hear my whale singing again. But most likely I’ll never know what caused the super-natural sounds on my first trail-maintenance duty. It is good having a little mystery in life.
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