I once took an undergrad outdoor education pedagogy course in which a classmate taught a lesson on quantum physics as his final. We had no test; instead, the professor wanted us to blend feedback we’d received on lesson plans and micro-lessons we’d submitted and taught over the semester into one, hour-long class on a subject…

While I studied abroad in Bilbao, Spain, the war in Ukraine started. My Spanish university offered housing, Spanish language instruction, and student visas to fifty Ukrainian students, a move many of the professors blasted as a public relations stunt because no instructors at the university–even in the language center–spoke any of the same languages as…

“Do you need a doctor’s note to not work this afternoon?” The ER doc charts my visit–a quick one. I managed to give myself a three-milimeter-deep laceration diagonally into the joint on my left thumb with a handsaw trying to take the end off a fifteen-foot poplar sapling we felled to serve as the sprit…

Every day at work, I give at least one 75-minute boat tour about the nautical history of Lake Champlain around Fort Ticonderoga. The fort, where I’m a historic interpreter, owns a 1920s style Thousand Island tour boat, a gorgeous 58-foot long motor vessel with a covered roof held up by inch-long strips of varnished, glazed-duck…

I’m getting ready to wrap up the season as a maritime historic interpreter at Fort Ticonderoga and move to Kingston, NY, to do winter maintenance on Pete Seeger’s environmental education tall ship, the sloop Clearwater. Moving, plus my first semester of online MFA classes, has me feeling a little overwhelmed.  On my days off from…

My twin remembers a tour guide at Colonial Williamsburg saying men at balls would present their calves to women they wanted to dance with to showcase that they were rich. Nice calves meant one rode horses, which meant one had horse money.  I remember hiking with my grandpa, mom, and sister as a kid and…

If you were a ghost on a battlefield, would battle reenactments piss you off? As a staff member at Fort Ticonderoga, I participated in my first battle reenactment in September. We reenacted Brown’s raid, when American forces returned to the fort and tried to take it back from the British and their German allies in…

Fort Ticonderoga sits on a bulb of land sticking out into Lake Champlain. State Route 74 t-bones the lake on the peninsula at a cable ferry and heads West, perpendicular to Champlain, where it becomes Main Street in Ticonderoga, NY. Between the ferry and Main, there’s a four way stop, where, recently, I braked for…

I butchered the first board I planed with a block plane in maritime trades at Fort Ticonderoga. I set the blade too deep, and instead of peeling off the thin layers a visitor told me her grandmother used to make a blonde play wig as a girl in the 1890s, I carved out chunks, leaving…

Nothing activates mansplaining like using a block plane in public. As a maritime trades interpreter at Fort Ticonderoga, I’ve been using an antique block plane to smooth green pine planks and make them more hydrodynamic when we bend them around the frame of the bateaux we’re constructing. A bateau (bateau plat in French) is a…