Sterling Terrain V02 - Flipbook - Page 42
40 | Sterling College
The Sterling School
Written By
John Pell Babson ‘67
It’s been 55 years since I graduated in a class of 26 from Sterling. Some of us were
on our last chance to be accepted to a high school because of extraordinarily poor
grades, boredom with public school classes, or unacceptable rebelliousness. This was
a unique school!
Fifty seven years ago, Sterling began a unique yearly event, and it was a life changer
for me. This was the Bounder experience, from Outward Bound survival training. I
have five impressionable memories since 1965 which characterize Sterling’s ability
to successfully experiment with learning situations outside the norm. The Sterling
School reunion in 2008 only reinforced for me the school’s continuing vision to challenge its own to excel in reaching their personal potentials and learn to thrive regardless of circumstances.
Save the Date
65th
Sterling School
Reunion - 2023
Friday
October 13th
&
Saturday
October 14th
My five Sterling experiences, all borrowed from Outward Bound I believe, established
us to be beneficiaries for surviving well. I remember Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking
the Wild Asparagus, with his grizzled face, leaning down in a wet bog showing us
plants side by side, safe and unsafe to eat. We all had to learn how to carry out an injured person in a heavy forest. I held one corner of a stretcher, struggling to walk over
dead tree trunks without losing balance and dumping the student volunteer. Like the
US Army’s boot camp, we had to learn to scale a wooden wall 15+ feet high and get
over it as a team. The fall portion of the Bounder experience culminated in a three-day
December trek, not far from the Canadian border for 100 students and teaching staff,
bussed into a desolate region. My memories and Sterling yearbook photos chronicle
the rigors we endured. I did three years of slogging through one to two feet of snow
for hours each day, enduring uncomfortable basic backpacks, making camp for two
really cold nights with no tents, just self-made lean-tos, sleeping bagged and fully
dressed on hard packed snow. In the late spring of the new year, every senior had to
experience a three-day solo bivouac in order to graduate. Each of us were dropped off
a mile apart, left with little: a six foot square square plastic sheet, hatchet, six feet of
heavy-duty string, six matches, sharp jack knife, sleeping bag - all in a backpack with
extra dry clothes. As soon-to-be graduating seniors, most of us didn’t eat anything
as it snowed that first night, kindling was wet and campfires were next to impossible.
As I ponder the effect Sterling played in my development of becoming an engaged
young adult, an empty plot of ground comes to mind. Our lives are like that. But what
will you do with your life, that empty plot? Picture a fallow field and a tilled garden. The
purpose for that plot, our lives, is of the utmost importance. Fallow fields do feed on a
daily basis by the wild grasses’ endemic to them. But, if we want to feed for a lifetime,
the field needs tilling for planting to harvest crops. To have a producing garden demands the care of purposeful intentions. Sterling’s example did that for me then, and
Sterling does that now. Never would I have guessed the seeds sown by this unique
school would flourish after I graduated.
My memories of Sterling are of a unique experiment which continues today, for which
I am so very thankful for being a recipient.