Jamie Lammers, Nederland. I arrive at the southeast corner of the Mud Lake area, eager to start my shift as a volunteer tour guide at the Enchanted Forest for the second year in a row. I walk down the trail with Wild Bear board member and fellow tour guide David McElvain to get a sense of what walking the trail will feel like before the visitors start arriving. He tells me how he’s lived in Ned for about three years, how this is his third time volunteering for the Enchanted Forest and his second as a tour guide (he played the tiger salamander the first time around), and how appreciative he is of Wild Bear’s mission to encourage the protection, conservation, and understanding of nature. 

We finish the walk and I get ready for my shift. I meet some of the other fellow tour guides and am excited to get started, but today, I have a double duty. When I’m not leading groups of fifteen to twenty-five into the half-mile-long trail leading to Mud Lake, I’m interviewing the staff members and volunteers at the event.

This Enchanted Forest is special for three primary reasons. For one, it is the first Enchanted Forest to take place in Wild Bear’s brand new Mud Lake space. In April of this year, Wild Bear swapped their five-acre plot in the northeast corner of the lake with another five-acre plot on the southeast corner. This deal was settled after a sinkhole opened up in the original space, rendering it unsuitable for building a planned new nature center. After Wild Bear acquired the new space, they built the half-mile-trail that David and I walked. They also moved the old log cabin and famed 1941 Toronto Transit bus (which the staff refused to scrap for parts) into the new area with the generous donation of Jesse Seavers, the owner of High Performance Land & Home Excavation. 

For two, the general consensus from everyone there is that it feels like this new space is tailor-made for Wild Bear. The catwalk-like main path allows for easy setup of stands, stages, and petting zoos and truly feels like a small, mysterious corner of the forest tucked away where no one can see it unless they search for it. 

For three, Wild Bear is now coming up on its 25th anniversary. In February, Wild Bear will celebrate its half-century milestone with a backcountry film festival, among many other nature-centric activities.

Amongst the volunteers, there are varying levels of experience. There are newcomers who have never volunteered for the Enchanted Forest before, like Meagan Figgins and Jessi Stensland. There are people like Sally Brady (a member of the Board of Directors) and Mark Reichert (Operations Manager and Development Associate) who have been working for Wild Bear for a little over a year, around the same time as the previous Enchanted Forest. There are people who have volunteered at this event for years, like Arwen Ek, director of The Holistic Homestead and head of the “magic cabin” at the forest, and Brent Warren, also known as comedian/magician Doc Murdock. Both of them are now in their fourth year of volunteering. Last, but not least, there are veteran volunteers like Leah Russell, who has been face-painting guests and staff at the event for sixteen years now-- as long as her company, Face Fiesta Face Painting, has been in existence. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve attended a Wild Bear event before or not. You’re accepted as a member of the community here and you’re pretty much guaranteed to leave with at least some newfound respect for the wilderness.

Every performer at the event is incredibly prepared. David Williams performs an incredible set of his own material, including Mormon Cricket and Umbrella Bird. Doc Murdock arrived at the event with a small “bear” carrying him the entire way. Murdock cleverly tells me that the reason the bear can carry him for so long is that it eats a lot of Wheaties. Meagan Figgins and Ely Nitsch prepare full-on backstories for their fairy characters, who have grown exponentially in size on this one day of the year and can’t use their powers or fly. 

Meagan’s Buttercup is a 112-year-old fairy that can make flowers appear out of nowhere and Ely’s Moondust is a 110-year-old fairy that can illuminate the moon. Last but not least, all of the animals absorb themselves in their roles, engaging the children, teenagers, and adults alike with their engaging personalities and interesting new knowledge. Even volunteers who have to replace some of the animals in the middle of the day manage to memorize their routine within a few tours. The event is well-managed and prepared for, with every character actor masterfully answering questions from the kids about the strange world around them, including whether or not it’s even real. Finally, of course, all of the regular volunteers, including Sally, Mark, and Hillary Katz, are welcoming and just as passionate about nature as the kids are.

I usually avoid writing columns like this in the first person. It’s incredibly important for me to stick to the facts of the story in question, and it’s easier to do so when writing in the third person, at least for me. However, for this article, I have to write in the first person because of how personal this subject matter is to me. 

I have been involved with Wild Bear in some capacity for the better part of twelve years. I remember being a five-year-old kid at the programs held at Chautauqua, carrying some kind of book involving animals or dinosaurs every single day. Becoming the first-ever Wild Bear docent in November 2012, continuing to be involved with the center, and seeing how far it’s come over the past few years and that kids are still as passionate about it now as they were when I was younger is amazing to watch. 

In my honest opinion, I do not believe that Wild Bear would be what it is today without the founder herself, Jill Dreves. I can hear the passion and drive in her voice as she tells me how important it is to get involved and how incredible it is that Wild Bear has managed to form the community it has today. It is that exact passion, that exact drive, that has kept Wild Bear afloat for the past half-century. I recorded voice memos of the people I interviewed so that I could listen back to them while writing this article (I did the same for my Ned*Ned article a couple of weeks back), and hearing her enthusiasm and love for the program she created in that voice memo honestly choked me up. 

Jill will tell you as she told me that the program is no longer about her, that it’s about conserving nature, creating a community, inspiring children, combating the climate crisis, and encouraging every visitor to get involved in a nature program. Even though the program is no longer just about her and her vision, there is absolutely no way that it would exist without that vision, without that path that she laid for the organization 25 years ago. Seeing all of the volunteers, staff, children, and parents that visit the Enchanted Forest and absorb themselves in this little corner of the wild, that vision is still as strong and possibly stronger today than it was half a century ago. I may be a senior in high school this year, but you better believe I’m coming back to volunteer next year, because as Jill always says, “Once a Wild Bear, always a Wild Bear.”

(Originally published in the October 3, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)