Headmaster's Letter to the Deerfield Community
Fall 2003

September 2003

Dear Members of the Deerfield Community:

During my time at Deerfield, a period that has coincided with so many anniversaries, I have often joked with the faculty that we would not know what to do if there were suddenly a year in which we didn't have something to celebrate. In 1997 we began the celebration of our bicentennial. That event itself took almost two years to observe, a length of time we excused by noting that it took almost two years, once the school had been chartered in 1797, for Deerfield actually to open its doors. Then, in 1999, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our return to coeducation, followed by the celebration of the millennium the following year. The 2001-2002 academic year will be remembered by historians as a year in which there was suddenly nothing in particular to celebrate at the academy itself, but it did mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of Historic Deerfield. Last year, all year long, we observed the centenary of Mr. Boyden's arrival at Deerfield in 1902. This year it is the tercentenary of the French and Indian assault on Deerfield in the winter of 1703-1704. After another lull, we will celebrate the centenary of Mrs. Boyden's arrival at Deerfield in 1905, and then, shortly after that, the centenary of their marriage in 1907. I can appreciate why someone in the village has impishly put a sign in front of his house that reads simply, "200 years ago nothing happened here."

Since this year also happens to be the 50th anniversary of my arrival as a freshman at Deerfield in the fall of 1953, I began to muse, as the school year got started, about what, or what did not, happen to me when I was at Deerfield. It seemed to me that I could quite as easily hang a sign around my neck that says, "50 years ago nothing happened here." I was extremely shy, and utterly lacking in the courage of my convictions, assuming I had any. Practically nothing that I tried out for did I get. If Mr. Boyden hadn't already underscored the plight of the painfully introverted boy in the figure of Tom Ashley, I would have volunteered myself for the role. Neither of the debating societies would have me, nor the Pocumtuck, nor the Scroll. Mr. Schuler did allow me to play in the last chair of the third trumpet section of the band, exactly the same chair I occupied when I graduated from Deerfield four years later. When it came to the Glee Club, I thought I had performed a compelling rendition of "Lord Jeffrey Amherst" for Mr. Oatley, but I was not selected for the Glee Club either. In my senior year I made the third string of the varsity football team, because there was really nothing else to do with me. The manager positions had already been taken. In the spring I was cut from the varsity lacrosse team after an absolutely awful game against the West Point plebes. Of course, virtually everything productive that happened in my life afterwards happened as a result of those seemingly fallow years at Deerfield, but at the time I seemed a failure to myself. One can well imagine that I might not have a lot to look back on as I quietly observe the 50th anniversary of the beginning of my Deerfield experience, and therefore not a great deal to celebrate.

The problem is that I am headmaster of the school. If I am going to help our students today come to terms with their own snags and disappointments, I had certainly better come to terms with my own. And indeed, that process had begun a long time ago. Surely it had something to do with my interest in returning to Deerfield almost ten years ago- not to recapture the past (you might ask why would I want to do that?), but at least to revisit the theatre of these strange educational dynamics, where so much had been put into me by such dedicated faculty, and so little seemed to come out.

If you will allow me to digress for a moment, I would like to write about the summer just past. Every summer Meera and I undertake some kind of quest together, just for the fun of it--not that we require any additional excitement in our lives. In the past we have scoured used bookstores for the works of M.F.K. Fisher and John Buchan, for example, or traveled to arcane sites related to our research interests. More recently we have turned also to the search for unusual trees, looking for specimens that we could plant on the grounds of our old farmhouse in southern Rhode Island.

Our quests are not quixotic, but rather conceived with the realistic chance of succeeding-we did find an excellent cedar of Lebanon, and a golden-leafed elm (Ulmus glabra "Aurea"), and two excellent redbuds last year, one a purple-foliaged cultivar named "forest pansy" (Cercis canadensis).

This summer, however, we set ourselves a much more ambitious assignment, which was to find a more mature specimen of the famed dove tree (or Davidia involucrata). The existence of such a tree was first reported by a French Jesuit, Pere David, who sighted it in China in the 19th century, and described it in bloom as resembling a flight of white doves, their wings spread as they perched in the tree. But the tree was otherwise not known in the West, and it attained an almost mythical reputation over the years, simply because after Pere David, no one could find it again. Many naturalists would go to the interior of China in search of the dove tree, but they invariably returned empty-handed, until the 20th century, when Ernest Wilson, an intrepid horticulturalist, was able to secure some seed that proved viable. Since the rate of germination and growth for this tree is very slow, and the bloom time even slower, it was decades before Wilson's labors were rewarded, and he was finally able to witness the same wondrous sight that Pere David had witnessed a century earlier.

We found our tree less eventfully, but no less happily in Allen Haskell's Nursery in New Bedford, not quite as far away as China. We brought it home. We planted it. We have tended it faithfully through the summer. We have gotten an immense amount of pleasure out of the successful completion of our quest.

Yet, the tree does not seem to be growing at all. I am aware that the dove tree is supposed to be a slow-growing tree, but at this rate will I ever see the blossoms? Such were my impatient protestations to Meera when I began to think about Deerfield again and the growth-rate of our students. I thought autobiographically about myself, and again about how much Deerfield had put into me those many years ago, but how little seemed to come out right away.

It is no different today with many young people. Whatever the pressures on our students, how absurd it would be to expect it to be different. We ought never judge the education we provide against some notion of an instant return, either for the effort or the money. What matters now is the nurturing, the human horticulture. The florescence will happen. We teachers may see it, we may not. What we try to do at school is the best job we possibly can of nurturing our students until that moment when (who knows when it will occur, but occur it will), like the flowers on the dove tree, their wings spread as if they are ready to fly.

In Mr. Dicklow's Latin class at Deerfield, I imagined that the words "horticulture" and "hortatory" must come from the same Latin root. Not only were they right next to each other in my dictionary; they also seemed to suggest the same idea of urging onward whatever action was under consideration. In the case of our relationship with the plant world, there was of course no doubt what horticulture meant, except that the root comes from the Latin word for garden, and has nothing to do with exhortation at all. Meanwhile, the hortatory part of our profession as teachers often makes us think of ourselves as nurturers instead, tending the Deerfield campus as if it were a garden, but knowing that our students will ultimately develop at their own speed, and often irrespective of our pep talks. In some residual way as a student at Deerfield, I must have known that Mr. Dicklow believed in me.

But it was John Burke, who along with Peter Brush continues the Deerfield tradition in Latin and Greek, who reminded me that the words have nothing at all to do with one another. John did say that Virgil and Ovid were particularly known for their creative word play, and would have been quite capable of suggesting an etymological relationship between the two terms, even where they knew perfectly well that none existed. So at least I felt in good company, and free to pursue the imagery a little bit further, as the summer gave way to the new school year. That is what I have tried to do with my story of Davidia involucrata. I only hope that readers of this letter will be as patient with me as I have tried to be with that very slow-growing tree.

Just as the summer ended and before the academic year began, I went briefly to Japan with Meera to help her establish herself in her new habitat in Kyoto, at the Stanford Japan Center, where she will be the visiting professor this year. I must say there will be no doubt about her viability there, for she is in a terrestrial heaven of sorts, surrounded by ancient cedars and a host of exquisite temples and tea gardens just a few steps away. Soon she will be writing back to Deerfield herself about all of these things.

What unites the entirety of the human experience is the idea of the quest, the heading in a certain direction, the setting of goals and objectives, the acceptance of the possibility of failure. One way or another we are all sorting those things out all the time. My student years at Deerfield were a seminal time, by which I mean the seed for all of my future development was sown here. I just know now, in this anniversary year for me, how lucky I was that my life's journey took me through Deerfield fifty years ago. As the new school year begins, with everyone now re-planted in their Deerfield habitat, I can therefore also say, without presumptuousness, that our students today are pretty lucky as well.

Sincerely,
Eric Widmer