Teens to Trails Volunteer Gary Hernandez ’27 Recounts a Tale of Talking Trees

"At the start of our sessions, the students had trouble exploring on their own," he wrote in a recent post for Teens to Trails, which organizes the after-school program for the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders.

"The sad part of being in a classroom for eight hours a day is the loss of childhood wonder-the kind of wonder that engages with nature for pleasure rather than a means to a larger, academic goal," he added.

The first question the students asked Hernandez was what they should be doing. He answered that they could do whatever they wanted.

The point of the program, Hernandez explained, is not to direct students in organized activity, but to encourage exploration and creativity outdoors. Behind the junior high school is a small forest with trails and a creek that the group used as their stomping ground every Tuesday afternoon, from 2:40 p.m. to 4:10 p.m.

The students' uncertainty dissipated quickly, though. During the second session, Hernandez's co-leader, a high school student, picked up an acorn cap and blew across it, making a whistle. This delighted the kids, who turned it into a tool for a game of hide-and-seek.

"After that, they got into it," Hernandez said. "They started to see the possibility of playing in the woods." The group searched for salamanders, went birding after Hernandez brought in his binoculars and Audubon book, and began to learn how to identify trees.

One day, Hernandez noticed one of the students staring intently up at the treetops and standing close to their trunks. When Hernandez questioned him, the student replied that he was listening to the trees, that they were saying something. "From then on, he continued to bring his binder, pen, and paper to interview trees and tell their stories," Hernandez said.

The student translated those interviews for the others, saying they spoke a kind of broken English. It turns out the trees are just like us, in a way. They have good days and bad days, cranky moods and more lighthearted ones, depending on what's happening around them.

"Sometimes the trees would say, 'I am having a bad day because it's cold,' or a good day because a squirrel visited it," Hernandez said. In his post, he wrote, "Sometimes the trees were annoyed when I leaned on them; sometimes they were excited that an interviewer was approaching to ask questions; sometimes they remained quiet despite the interrogation."

He said at first he thought it was a bit silly, but started to play along like it was a game of make-believe. Then, somewhat magically, he and the other students began to listen themselves to what the trees were saying. The original listener helped with translating. "He was our connection to a mystical word," Hernandez wrote.

Student Community Action Network

Hernandez got involved with Teens to Trails through the Student Community Action Network (SCAN), a McKeen Center program open by application only to twelve students a year.

Admitted SCAN students commit to volunteering a minimum of fifty hours with a Maine nonprofit for one semester. They are also asked to complete a project to help build the agency's capacity.

Each participant receives a $1,000 stipend and also engages in a weekly chekck-in with their Bowdoin cohort, led by McKeen Center Associate Director Sam Cogswell '11, to discuss their experiences and deepen their knowledge about the nonprofit and public sectors.

Hernandez said he applied to SCAN because he liked the organizations available for the student volunteers. Also, it's been a priority for him to be involved with the community and the McKeen Center since he began at Bowdoin.

This past summer, he had a Maine Community Fellowship to mentor kids ages ten to seventeen who live in Portland public housing. In August, he led a McKeen Center Orientation Trip for incoming first-year students to volunteer with BIPOC-led Portland organizations.

When it came time to rank the twelve nonprofits available to the SCAN students, Hernandez selected Teens to Trails as one of his top three.

"I am passionate about environmentalism and being outside," he said. "I grew up in a place that didn't have a lot of green space [in Atlantic City]. There was a lot of concrete and gray industrial areas."

But when he was sixteen, his family moved to a more suburban area, and his house backed up to a park. He spent many hours in the woods, and he developed a love for birding.

Though his obligation as a SCAN student is complete, Hernandez said he plans to keep volunteering with Teens to Trails next semester. This spring, he also will declare a major in education and English.

Heading outdoors on the weekly adventures over the last three months helped him reconnect with a younger, more open version of himself. "My experience of being in the woods with these students, and being there with intention, revived my forgotten sense of childhood wonder. I'm sure the trees would report the same," he wrote.

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