Leo Stoscheck Listen to Leo read his essay. Read Leo's biography. Leo Stoscheck It's late December and my family and I have finally returned home from three months living in the city. A small house built by my parents twenty-five years ago and the hundred acres surrounding it on this easterly facing hill in upstate New York, this is my home. As we all trudge up the steep and winding path towards the pond with ice skates in hand, I glance up at the bright full moon. I begin to recall memories of my seventeen years growing up on this land. I skate around the pond like I have done every winter. I have lived on this hill, in these woods and fields, my entire life. The moon illuminates the trees, the ravines, the surrounding hills and valleys, the land that has taught me much of what I know and has shaped me into the person I am today. Under full moons my family and I have followed the tracks of deer, explored forgotten trails, and cross-country skied for miles. We have swum in cool waters on warm August evenings at moonrise just as the fog settled over the pond. Over the years I have developed a deep rooted connection to this land: from my bones to the veins running through my body like the ravines and small creeks mapping the surface of this hill. After living in the city for three months I am struck by the silence. It has always been quiet here. The only sounds I hear now are the blades of our skates scraping the frozen pond. But this pond is not always frozen. In spring it teems with life. Often on early spring nights my mom would hand me a flashlight and head outside into the warm darkness. The peepers were calling and she was out to look for them. I would run after my mom, catching up with her on the dew-drenched path, through the crown vetch leading up the bank to the pond. Crouching on all fours we would stalk the tiny and elusive frogs for hours. Believing that one of them was calling out from just under our noses, we would flip on our flashlights only to see a wavering blade of grass. Eventually, if we got lucky, we'd catch sight of one with its throat bulging larger than the frog itself. Holding our breaths, we would remain crouched there, enthralled, until the little frog jumped into the darkness. The trill whistle of thousands of spring peepers resonated deep within me. My world was full of life. Until I was fourteen years old and attended school for the first time, the land we lived on was my classroom and its occupants my teachers. So much was learned from building a terrarium, hatching a wood frog egg found in a cold puddle, and observing its entire life cycle; or from observing the strange spiraling flight of a male woodcock's mating ritual in the field above our house. I found a dead deer once while walking in the woods. I collected the bones and reassembled the skeleton. Mine was a living education. As I grew older, though, the vast woods and fields that were my classroom seemed to be shrinking. All I had known was woods, fields, and streams, and so I assumed in my young mind that most of the world looked this way.But as I spent more and more time away from home, in school and in the city, my perception began to shift. The untouched wilderness of my childhood, once endless, now seemed to be a small island surrounded by the concrete world of humans. The night I knew this to be true was when I heard the coyotes for the second time in my life. Only recently had the Eastern Coyote returned to our area since they were eradicated. Their undaunted howls filled me with a renewed hope for the resiliency of the natural world. I awoke that night to the distant sound of a fire siren in the valley. There was nothing remarkable about this, but then I heard the excited yaps and howls of coyotes in the fields below our house, calling back. Witnessing Nature calling out, trying to communicate with a machine, forced upon me the ultimate realization that it is almost impossible to escape the far-reaching influence of man. As I unlace my skates and head back down the steep, slippery pond bank I have a renewed awareness of this land that bore me and my deep-rooted connections to it. I glance up at the moon before turning toward the glowing windows of the house. I am still young and foolish. I cannot say where my life will take me. I do not know if one day I will return to this area and settle down. I do know, however, that part of me will always be here in this land that showed me the value of silence and reflection; educated me; and ultimately led me to realize its very fragility.