APRIL 22, 2025 – I remember the first Earth Day—this day in 1970. I was in my sophomore year of high school at Interlochen Arts Academy, parked in the wilds of the northwest part of Michigan’s lower peninsula, 15 miles south of Traverse City. Across the highway that ran past the entrance to our campus (part of the much larger and older Interlochen National Music Camp), was a state park bordering one of the two lakes that gave Interlochen its beautiful setting. Having transferred from Sterling School (now Sterling College), an all-boys prep school in the gorgeous northeast corner of Vermont, where outdoor sports, hiking and winter camping were not only de rigueur but compulsory, I naturally gravitated toward such activities at Interlochen. So did many of my fellow students.
When advocates and organizers of the first Earth Day were launching their efforts across the country, staff and faculty at Interlochen jumped on the band wagon enthusiastically. So did we students. Even kids who normally devoted all their waking hours to practicing their instruments, filling canvases with lines and color, rehearsing their theater play lines or refining their ballet maneuvers were on board: You couldn’t walk from your dorm to the dining hall or from the dining hall to your rehearsal hall without walking beneath the many regal pine or within easy sight of scenic Green Lake. I remember well the easy access we had to nature just outside the back doorway of our biology classroom. In short, every single one of us was much aware and appreciative of the environment.
To celebrate that awareness and appreciation and in observance of Earth Day, arrangements were made to spend solo time out in the woods—from dusk to 10 or 11 o’clock p.m.; in other words, in the heart of darkness, as well as in the heart of nature. I have no idea exactly where those woods were. All I know is that we had to ride aboard the rustic open-air school vehicles—borrowed from the camp—to reach the location of our “solo” experience. The area was heavily wooded and undulating. A series of dirt roads wound through the place, and whether you ventured through the woods or along the roads, you could easily find yourself . . . lost.
As wild as the Interlochen experience sounds, it was a far cry from the “Senior Solo” version of communing with nature at Sterling back in Vermont. There, the experience was hard core. Every senior had to participate in a three-day solo retreat in the most remote part of the Northeast Kingdom, which is what the area around Sterling was called. I transferred from Sterling after my freshman year, so I didn’t experience the survival test that was a prerequisite to graduating.
The yearbook from the year I attended Sterling (1968) describes the “Senior Solo” this way:
Each senior [. . .] is sent into the wilderness for three days with only the bare necessities for survival. The boys were trained in identifying edible plants and survival techniques. They were each given a knife, a piece of string, a compass, a fishhook, and a sleeping bag. At the end of the solo, the boys returned to school where they were greeted with a large meal to satisfy their hunger. Despite the strain of having to forage for their own food, the boys seemed to have enjoyed the challenge of three days in the peace and quiet of the Vermont wilderness.
By comparison, the Interlochen “solo” hours were tame, yet as I reflect on the experience now, over a half century later, the whole idea seems rather crazy. What? Haul a bunch of teenage boys and girls out in some strange neck of the woods, drop them off every 100 feet or so, tell them to hang out there alone while they contemplate the earth, then when the wagons roll along the road, jump back on board for the ride back to campus? What were they—the grown-ups in charge—thinking?!
For starters they definitely weren’t thinking that rather than hang out alone for three, four hours, we’d spend the first five minutes alone but then we’d walk all along the winding road to team up with our friends, and maybe, just maybe, share a bottle or two of cheap Boone’s Farm wine that the usual suspects had procured ahead of time by clandestine means and purveyed to willing participants in defiance of school rules. Nor were the adults responsible for our Earth Day observance thinking that boys would find the girls and the girls would find the boys, and well . . . how could the grown-ups not imagine what might ensue under such conditions?
To their nominal credit, apparently, the people in charge had given some thought to the possibilities. Like armed sentries, at several-minute intervals the adults equipped with flashlights patrolled the road that wound around the individual sites to which each of us had been assigned.
What went on in other quarters of the woods, I can’t say. I can speak only for myself and the girl who, after a determined search had managed to find my designated neck of the woods. She confided that she’d “had her eyes on me for quite some time” and had signed up for the “solo” experience not in observance of Earth Day but “to make out with” me! I was rather stunned by her seductive candor. Not only was she an exceptionally good looking senior, but she sat fourth chair, first violins in the “varsity” orchestra. She was headed for a career as a professional violinist, which right there meant she was a far better violinist than I’d ever be. And she had taken advantage of Earth Day so she could corner me in the woods?! It was not a feature of Earth Day that I had contemplated.
I’ve been writing this post while listening to a recording of Martha Argerich performing Schumann’s Piano Concerto, a piece with which I became very familiar at Interlochen, thanks to a kid who worked on it for hours every evening for weeks while I practiced a few practice rooms away. I told myself I’d end this post when the music stopped, which it just now . . . has.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
