A Traveling Jones—Delayed, Not Derailed

Joe Iuliano, Assistant Head for Academic Affairs
Fernweh: the German word means “the longing for a distant place or a desire to travel
 
It’s an odd year. It’s 2021, so by the numbers, it is an odd year. In all other respects, it’s definitely an odd year.. Yet, for the past two decades the numerically odd years have played host to Brimmer and May’s Upper School Winterim Program. In the second week of March of a typical school year, all Upper School students are reanimated from the deadening doldrums of the winter month that opens with Punxsutawney Phil’s meteorological melodrama and closes every fourth year with an extra day which to my mind is just piling on. A Winterim trip in March, on the other hand, wrests our latently intrepid students from the wintry grip of February and propels them headlong into the lap of subtropical experiential education, from the cold frying pan of the schoolyard into the eternal flame of the real world classroom. Education for the global citizen doesn’t begin with Winterim at Brimmer, but this program certainly helps bring it to life.
 
Actually, in most Winterim years, a New England winter is that much more bearable to our students because of the prospect of domestic or world travel that lies in the ever-so-slowly shrinking penumbra of the season. Weekly trip meetings with one’s fellow travelers and chaperones are scheduled to help build a knowledge base of the destination--of the people, culture, language, history, etc. For the students heading towards their various destinations, these meetings also review itineraries, address logistics, and remind them of the need to complete their personal travel arrangements--acquire visas, make appointments with the Travel MD, exchange dollars for foreign currency, purchase travel-size toiletries, and gather appropriate clothing among the sundries of preparation for globe-trotting.
 
Once en-Winterim, students exhibit a range of personal experiences. Some students pack too little; some pack too much; and some pack just right. Some spend too much money at the airport. Some lose their passports. Some sit by the window some by the aisle and some in the middle. Some lose their wallets, and some help them out by buying them lunch. Some buy lots of souvenirs and gifts; some just buy gifts to bring home for family members. Some love a museum; some don’t. Some love the food. Some don’t. (Can anyone love five days in a row of pork and potatoes?) Some take tons of photos; some get themselves into tons of photos taken by others. Some sleep on the bus--strike that, almost everyone sleeps on the bus. Some love the hotel; everyone loves going out to lunch on their own. Everyone learns, a little or a lot, about the world and about themselves.
 
Wanderlust: a strong desire to travel
 
As a co-curricular program, Winterim is the eminently popular and greatly anticipated biennial event for an Upper School student at Brimmer. When I was invited to attend senior exit interviews in the past, I consistently heard our incipient graduates uniformly affirmed that Winterim was a memorable and valuable learning/life experience, one they thought the School should continue to provide to its students ad infinitum (that’s ad infinitum, biennially). Seeing the world, particularly places previously unseen on family trips, with your closest school friends (or for the most adventurous sorts, with a group of students who are currently somewhat unknown to you but will soon be some of your closest friends) is exciting and fun. There’s gelato to eat, earphones to share, cities to explore, sites to see, language to practice, people to help, history to learn, art to appreciate, and so much more. 
 
Our students have journeyed to countries exciting sobriquets: the Land of Ice and Fire! (Iceland) that sits in the Herring Pond (Atlantic Ocean), the Land of the Rising Sun (Japan), the Rainbow Nation (South Africa), the Emerald Isle (Ireland) the Sugar Bowl of the World (Cuba), and the Playground of Europe (Switzerland). And gleaming cities: the Eternal City (Rome), the City of Light (Paris) the Big Apple (New York), the City of Magnificent Distances (Washington, DC), and the Queen of the Adriatic (Venice).
 
Our adventuresome travelers have stood on and within a number the world’s wonders: Angkor Wat, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Parthenon, and the Blarney Stone (well, okay, maybe the last one was a second tier wonder). And they have walked the streets of some the world’s greatest cities: Boston, New York, Washington, London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Beijing, Shanghai, Johannesburg, among numerous world capitals, and commercial and cultural centers.
 
Walkabout: a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work.
 
We’ve never taken a trip to Australia or New Zealand because they are too far away to get to for a 7 to 9 day program--one is in the air over the Pacific ocean for something equal to half the trip itself. (How about during a semester in college instead?) But we have gone to some locations sort of in the neighborhood: China, during more than one Winterim, Japan, and Southeast Asia (Vietnam and Cambodia). In fact, Brimmer students have journeyed to five continents as well as several bits and bits of tectonic plates that protrude from vast, watery swaths near continental areas; that is islands, such as (in alpha order, mostly) Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Galapagos Islands, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the UK, and Manhattan, as in NYC. Whether planted firmly on an expanse of land--Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy Spain, Switzerland, etc. on one familiar continent--or on a spit of turf affixed in a sandy-bottomed sea, our students have engaged the travel experience with eyes wide open (after the final destination flight has landed plus about four hours of sleeping on the bus and then a full night’s sleep in the first hotel; red-eye flights are tough on everyone.) And yet still with their eyes wide open.
 
Our students have traversed the geographical gamut--archipelagos (Galapagos and Japan); isles and islets (Ireland and Capri); an isthmus (Iberia!); major rivers from the Colorado to the Mekong; mountain ranges from the Andes to the Alps and stand alone peaks (Mt. Fuji); a peninsula (Italy) with a volcano (Vesuvius!) and a peninsula without a volcano (Belize on the Yucatan); a land with the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Sahel desert to the east (Senegal). They have traveled to these locales in and on airplanes, buses, boats, vans, scooters (they weren’t supposed to, though!), trains, bicycle rickshaws, camels, and their own two feet.
 
Brimmer students have traversed the cultural gamut as well. They have ventured to lands that weren’t France but spoke French, such as Senegal, Quebec, and Switzerland; to lands with diverse foods north and south or east and west (noodles and rice, spicy and mild, meat and vegetable); to countries that are democratic, socialist, and communist. They’ve toured palaces, museums, parks, historic sites, cathedrals and basilicas, forts and monuments and they have shopped until they dropped. Notably, they have also served the needs of others in hurricane-devastated Alabama and Louisiana and have supported the education of students in China, Senegal, and the Dominican Republic.
 
They have witnessed the landmarks of horrible human history--Auschwitz and the Killing Fields--and visited the lands of apartheid (South Africa) and the slave trade (Senegal) as well. Humanity has created gruesomeness and beauty throughout the world. Our students have seen these and grown from their seeing.
 
Novaturient: a desire to change your life; the feeling that leads you to travel.
 
The imminent approach of the second week of March, now that we are past the midpoint of one of the slowest weeks of the year (time allows slows down before a vacation or in this case a mega-field trip, combined with the coincidental commencement of CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy travelogue set me upon this fond reminiscence of Winterim’s past: visions of pizza in Napoli, pasta in Roma, risotto in Milano…Mangia bene, ridi spesso, ama molto! (“Eat well, laugh often, love much!”) With the pandemic a year into ruling life, we are all novaturient, full of a desire to change our lives, and the feeling that will lead us to recommence our travel? The prick and pressure of a needle to the deltoid and off we go! In the next odd year—it will just be Winterim. Just Winterim.
As an inclusive private school community, Brimmer welcomes students who will increase the diversity of our school. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, or any other characteristic protected from discrimination under state or federal law, in the administration of our educational policies, admissions practices, financial aid decisions, and athletic and other school-administered programs.