Nobody ever said that life followed a straight line.
By John Schubert '80
It seems that sometimes, given enough time, “the road not taken” bends back around on itself. At Middlebury in the late 1970s I majored in northern studies, an environmental studies program focusing on sub-arctic and arctic regions. Four summers working in Alaska and several forays into the Canadian north cemented my love and understanding for northern regions—their ecosystems, politics, and culture.
Following graduation, despite requesting a Peace Corps placement in a high-elevation country such as Nepal or Bolivia, circumstances led me to two years in a rainforested mountain village in tropical Fiji. Remarkably my northern anthropology field and course work held me in good stead, even 90 degrees of latitude from the Arctic Circle. (Post-Peace Corps travel took me to Oceania and Asia, but my best efforts to land work in Antarctica came to naught.)
Eventually in the mid-1980s, friends from the Peace Corps and “way leading on to way” brought me to Oregon, my childhood home of 25 years prior, and a career since then as a trails specialist with the U.S. Forest Service and Student Conservation Association. And while I’ve applied my liberal arts and environmental studies education in many ways over the years, both in my trails career and as a community activist and city councilor, I’ve often wondered what life would have brought if I had pursued a graduate degree and career in some aspect of northern studies.
After 20 years designing and building trails—and training others around the country to do the same—a peculiar e-mail arrived from my first trail work mentor. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in consulting with a young trails organization in Siberia: the Great Baikal Trail Association, which was seeking assistance in building a 1,300-mile trail around Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest lake. Faced with little tradition of recreational trails in Russia, this five-year-old ecotourism group needed someone who was familiar with both trail design and the subarctic region; and I needed, well, I needed to return to the northern region. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity.
So now I’ve spent several weeks in the forests of Siberia, reveling in a landscape very reminiscent of Alaska, Canada, and northern Vermont. It has brought me deep delight to see familiar old plant and animal friends out along the trails of Baikal. At odd moments, even some of their Latin names surfaced from dim recesses of my brain, old acquaintances back for a visit.
Of course, every life is filled with roads not taken and musings about what might have unfolded had a different decision been made along the way. Nonetheless, I felt a deep sense of rightness that my road chosen in the world of trails had eventually curved around to the northern forests of Siberia. “And that has made all the difference.”
John Schubert ’ 80 is a trails specialist with the U.S. Forest Service in Bend, Oregon.
The blog from his recent trips to Siberia can be found at http://web.mac.com/johnschubert/i>