NEW SCOTLAND — Grace Ziamandanis strapped with safety goggles huddles over a small pile of string twine, frantically running a flint rock as fast as she can over a steel file. Other Fifth-graders are lined up in a row alongside the lean-to on patches of dirt, trying to start a fire — the old-fashioned way, before fake fire logs could be lit with a switch.
"Oooh, I got a spark!" a girl yells. While a boy calls out, "Where’s the marshmallows!"

A few seconds later students lean over their tinder, coaxing tiny sparks with breaths of air.

For 35 years, Voorheesville fifth-graders have gone to the Heldeberg Workshop at the base of the escarpement off of Picard Road in New Scotland. There, at the end of the school year, they enact scenes from a novel they read for class. Workshop instructor Bill Morrison said they started this field trip program in 1971, a decade after Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain was published. The book, still part of the students’ annual curriculum, is about a 12-year-old, Sam Gribley, who runs away from his family in New York City to live in the Catskills. It’s an adventure novel, where the boy learns how to survive in the woods, living in a hollowed-out tree.
The Voorheesville students said they saw a lot of parallels between the field trip activities and Sam’s life style. "We got to see how he lived," they said. Ziamandanis, Carly Myers, Amanda Gatt, and Michaela Muth, sat around during lunch talking about all the stuff they had done that morning in seminars. They got to touch beaver skin, tried to piece together the bones of a deer, and went on a nature hike where they saw salamanders and a centipede, they said. They also learned how to identify trees that had been hit by lightning.

Survival skills

Morrison taught a class on orienteering, showing the children how to read topographic maps, how to use the sun as a guide, and how a compass works. He said he thinks it’s important for children to learn basic survival skills, such as orienteering since it’s commonplace for people in the Capital Region to go hiking in the Adirondacks or Catskills.

He put the kids out on a short bushwhacking course to have them get from point A to point B on map by using compasses. A number of children had used compasses before in physical-education classes and Scouts, Morrison said.

Lennox started his seminar on fire-building by telling the children to always have water ready nearby by for safety, and not to start a fire on dry grassy ground. He said that matches don’t work when they get wet so hikers often purchase waterproof matches and keep them in water-proof containers.
"But Sam didn’t have matches, did he"" Lennox asked. "Flint and steel!" the children responded in chorus.
"Flint is a very hard rock, " Lennox said, holding it up. He then went through all the fire-building materials — tinder or wood shavings, cedar bark, kindling. He warned that people should never strip the bark off of a live birch tree because then that part of the tree will turn black and in a few years die. "It’s like taking a piece of skin off your body," he told the kids.

At another station a few 100 meters away across a small stream, Joe Okoniewski was peeling and cooking wild plants for the students to try. The kids tasted lamb’s quarter boiled with nettle. Some quickly ran over to the side of the woods to spit it out and others sampled slowly and then in handfuls. Okoniewski said if the kids like spinach, then they’ll like lambs quarter.
Next, he took a large cattail. "You have to take the stalk from above the roots," he said. He then pulled back the outer lays of the stalk and chopped up the white strand into crescents. It has the same nutritional value as lettuce or cucumber, he said.
The students got to try cattail raw, boiled, and pickled. The biggest hit were biscuits made of wheat flour and yellow pollen. "Cattail pollen is 35-percent protein," Okoniewski said.
Okoniewski said he doesn’t expect the students to remember the names of all the plants after his 45 minute workshop but he hopes he started "an interest in the common wild plants."
The kids will now keep their eyes open when they’re walking in the woods or might recognize a plant in their parent’s garden, he said. "There’s something about eating, you remember it...It makes an association," Okoniewski told The Enterprise.
"I spent a lot of time in the woods when I was a kid," Okoniewski said. And, when he was a teenager, he picked up a book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, written by Euell Gibbons, which talks about the ways to use and eat wild pants. When he first read it, he said to himself, "We’ve got milkweeds." This is when his interest in wild foods began.

Okoniewski has not integrated wild foods into his regular daily diet, but he does have more of an appreciation for nature, he said.

The amount of time it takes to forage for your own food, collecting enough sustainable nutrients, and then preparing them, is unrealistic for today’s modern America lifestyle, he said.

The workshop in the center of the Heldeberg property was one where students were making their own nature journals — a place for them to write and draw. My Side of the Mountain is written as if from Sam’s own personal journal.
"It’s a sketchbook because Sam drew in his notebook," fifth-grader Carolina Weiss said. He kept track of what he ate whenever he tried a new food, she said. "So in a way we’re doing it in honor of Sam," Weiss said as she strung together yarn, binding the colored paper.
"I hope they can go home and make their own journal," said Heldeberg Workshop instructor John Vandenburg. He’s an artist himself, and was excited to see kids already attempting their own nature sketches, doing close-ups of caterpillars, or rubbings on rocks.
Okoniewski said the goal of the Heldeberg Workshops is "developing some type of interest in the outdoors."

For some students on Monday that meant art; for others it involved eating, mammal identification, tracking, or wilderness survival skills. For Grace Ziamandanis, her favorite thing was the nature hike because she got to see a waterfall.