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[caption id="attachment_49180" align="alignnone" width="800"] Long Pond Greenbelt Director Dai Dayton and Mashashimuet Park Manager Jeff Robinson work to install the first of several storybook signs that will be placed along the trail encircling Mashashimuet Park. Michael Heller photo[/caption]
“It is dawn at Long Pond. A white mist covers the water. Little warblers awaken and fly from the tall pine trees to the blueberry bushes below. They dart to the pond’s edge and take long sips of water.”
By Douglas Feiden
So begins the 1989 children’s classic, “Box Turtle at Long Pond,” a Library of Congress book of the year that chronicles a day in the life of a turtle as he hunts worms, forages for grasshoppers, nests in the hollow of a log, evades danger, seeks shelter and traverses a living, breathing world of raccoons, chipmunks and dragonflies.
The pond and its surrounding uplands, portrayed in a turtle’s-eye view, bear a remarkable resemblance to Long Pond in Sag Harbor and its woodsy environs, says Dai Dayton, president of Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt. But the book was actually modeled on a very different Long Pond in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, says illustrator Lindsay Barrett George.
Still, the flora and fauna depicted in the fictional work so closely mirror the robust if fragile natural ecologies of the greenbelt that when the friends set out to create a new program for local children aimed at promoting education, physical exercise, literacy and environmental awareness, they turned quickly to the adventures of the turtle at Long Pond.
The fruits of those efforts are expected to be officially unveiled today – Thursday, March 17 – near the grandstand on the east side of Mashashimuet Park. The Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt and park officials will debut a “StoryWalk” — one of the first of its kind on the East End — which is basically a self-guided, outdoor storybook trail walk in which the pages of a book are mounted on signposts to educate, enlighten and delight children, parents and caregivers.
“It’s a nice way to get kids outdoors and walking and a nice way to get them reading and learning about nature all at the same time,” Ms. Dayton said. “So it’s really a pretty amazing combination.”
And the entire family-friendly project — offering a little exercise, a little bit of reading, a smattering of nature and a whole lot of fun – requires virtually no staff time or salaries and comes with minimal costs: “About $200,” said Jean Dodds, the organization’s secretary.
Installation began on Monday morning when Ms. Dayton and Jeff Robinson, the Mashashimuet Park manager, dug a hole near the bleachers and planted the first of 14 cedar stakes in the ground as rain fell. Then they took two laminated pages from the book, about 1 foot tall by 2 feet wide and mounted them as a signpost atop the stake, making sure it was roughly 4 feet high, at the eye level of a small child.
The remaining signboards, each representing two pages from the book, or 28 pages in total, were arrayed along a 1-mile loop trail, and follow the camouflaged box turtle as his “red eyes look out from his shelter within a crumbling tree, and his day begins…”
Starting by the grandstand near the park ball fields, the StoryWalk heads south on a trail through an oak-hickory forest and passes tiny Fore ‘n‘ Aft Pond, then turns west and crosses Ligonee Creek. It makes a right turn and circles back north on an abandoned Long Island Rail Road spur, crosses a bridge over another point on the creek and then reenters the park, ending at the picnic tables near the tennis courts.
As the young hikers hike, they view the gouache watercolor paintings created by Ms. George to illustrate the box turtle’s crawling and foraging activities.
“The sun sets on the far side of Long Pond,” her book concludes. “The evening air grows colder. The box turtle burrows in the soft pine needles to stay warm, and closes his eyes. It has been a long day.”
The board of Mashashimuet Park, which is privately owned by the Parks and Recreation Association of Sag Harbor, enthusiastically approved the project at its February meeting, Mr. Robinson said. It doesn’t always yes.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to have to say, ‘No’ to people’s requests for using the park,” he said. “But this was a slam-dunk. It will provide encouragement to get people out to enjoy parts of the park they haven’t seen or used before.”
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Ms. George, who wrote the book with her late husband William T. George, said she’s “thrilled” that “Box Turtle” was selected by the Friends group and offered to help in any way she could.
“I hope my books about nature engage young naturalists to think about how to live with our friends in the woods,” she said. “But better yet, to get kids outside — and experience the natural world for themselves.”
StoryWalk had its origins in Vermont, where Anne Ferguson of Montpelier, then a chronic disease prevention specialist for the state’s health department, started the project in 2007 as a way to get families together to walk and exercise outdoors for health reasons. It quickly broadened into a children’s reading initiative, and the idea caught fire.
“It was all about health and mixing it up with something fun,” she said. “It’s now in 1,056 cities in all 50 states and at least 11 foreign countries, including Australia, Germany, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa and Sweden.”
