Students take on month-long sustainability challenge

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To live self sufficiently, Karen Sanchez and Sylvia Channing raised laying hens, milked goats and planted a vegetable garden.
Photos by Kyril Bromley

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Milking goats and cooking over a fire wasn’t on the curriculum at the Ross School, where Sylvia Channing and Karen Sanchez are seniors, but that didn’t stop them from doing it.

In fact, after a month of living “off the grid” in a tent in Sylvia’s sprawling backyard on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton—where they grew vegetables, raised chickens and fished to feed themselves—it seems there isn’t much that could stop the two from doing what they set out to do.

“I wanted to do something with sustainability for a while,” said Sylvia, 17, who started the environmental club at the Ross School two years ago. “I would always say to my friends, ‘Let’s live in the woods this summer. We can be totally self-sufficient in this amazing agrarian community we live in.’”

But the idea didn’t come to fruition—“people had jobs and other things that would keep them from really committing each summer,” Sylvia said—until the spring of her junior year when she was planning for her Senior Project, what the Ross School’s website calls the “culmination of a student’s learning experience” at the school.

That’s when Sylvia, who wanted to focus on living sustainably, found Karen, who had a family history of farming and wanted her senior project to focus on animals. Though the two hadn’t known each other well they committed to living together in a 16-by-16 foot tent for the month of August. They pledged to work their own land and survive off only what they could grow, raise, catch and collect. They bought milking goats and laying hens. They would only bike wherever they had to go—for Karen that included a job in Southampton—and would use only what electricity they got from solar panels they had purchased.

“The only thing we had in common was that we wanted to do this,” said Karen, who is also 17.

The first step was the research, which started in the spring, according to Sylvia. The two students had to figure out what foods they could eat the least of with the most nutrients and what would grow in the local environment. They planted a healthy garden of watermelon, cucumber, zucchini, tomatoes and berries, among other fruits and vegetables. But then it was a rainy June, which brought their first hard lesson.

“We kept coming upon these problems that I didn’t predict,” Sylvia said. “Anything we planted before June was just gone and we had to adjust to that.”

“What I really learned is that you can read about farming animals or anything like that as much as you want,” Karen said. “But once you get down to the hands-on experience like that you realize there is no amount of books that can prepare you.”

The girls described the month they lived in the tent, and the months before that they used to prepare for it, as an experiment to the fullest extent of the definition. No matter how much they planned, there was always more to learn and more to work out, Sylvia said. It was about learning the rhythm of a totally new way of living.

Both girls recalled their first fishing endeavor toward the beginning of the month. They biked to Sag Harbor Marina and spent the whole day fishing in the hot sun with no luck. On the one hand, Sylvia said, the girls knew they needed to wait it out until they caught something or they would be eating cucumbers for dinner again. On the other hand, if they didn’t get back to the tent and start a fire by 6, it would be too dark to cook. In the end, frustrated and disappointed, Karen said they biked to World Pie in Bridgehampton instead.

“We felt guilty about it,” she said. “Especially Sylvia, she has a very high conscience about what we were doing.”

But at World Pie, Karen said they ran into a few of their teachers, who helped them understand their setback wasn’t a failure. Take it slow, their teachers told them, because things were sure to come up.

And things definitely did, Ms. Channing said. They couldn’t chop their own wood, they couldn’t figure out how to get the solar panels they had purchased to work, the goats ran away (and fortunately came back), they had way too much quinoa and not enough diet variety and above all, they got lonely.

That’s when Sylvia said she realized the true value of community.

“If it was just the two of us we were constantly wondering what we have to do next,” she said. “If there was just one more person there we could relax a little with the extra hands.”

And they had help everywhere they looked, she said. Friends, family and teachers would stop by and stay for hours. Friends helped cook, clean and chop wood, Sylvia said.