Fieldwork 2023 Fieldwork 8/9 Place Project: Part II Instructions: After you find your tree/plant/object Say hello to it in some way or another (can be silent or out loud, with a touch, or simply by proximity). If this feels strange, ask yourself how would you greet this tree or object differently if it were an animal? A person? A friend? A mirror? Ask yourself if you have found yourself thinking at times about this location/tree/object over the course of the school year? Having spent time with it in the fall how do you approach it differently? How is coming back to a place different than to meeting it formally for the first time? Include in the upper right-hand corner: your name, date, time, weather, moon phase, and location. Sketch and label: a particular detail of your tree or object. Find some part of it, be it the pattern of the bark, the curve of a branch, the coloration of the rock, the debris or animal tracks that surround it, and draw it carefully. Use this portion to pay close attention. Please include a dash of color somewhere in the sketch. Make an observation: of your tree/object. In your observation include what has changed since you last spent time with it. You may refer to it as “my tree,” or “my stone,” but please do not name it on paper yet (4-6 clear, well-crafted sentences). Interpretation and Response: Please read the following excerpt from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and respond to the questions below. While there is no required length for these responses, your writing should be clear, thoughtful, and in complete sentences. To receive full points, you should be writing enough to make sure you convey your ideas and arguments in their entirety. 1. After reading this passage, what descriptions or phrases stand out to you? Why? (pick at least three). 2. What doe Thoreau mean by the line, “to such routine the winter reduces us”? 3. What is Thoreau suggesting about winter and routines in his second sentence? 4. Why would Thoreau walk 8-10 miles in the snow to meet with a tree? What might this also say about the rest of us? (Keep in mind he is a highly regarded author in American Literature). 5. What does an owl have to do with it? How is Thoreau connecting the experience of seeing a barred owl to ideas about winter? 6. After having read Thoreau and answered the questions above, take a few moments to describe your tree/object in vivid, imaginary, or descriptive language. (2-3 sentences). Fieldwork 2023 From Walden: “In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks -- to such routine the winter reduces us -- yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the show was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and crunched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which be preserved a pennisular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.
