Between Arcadia and Arcadians
By Krish Gupta and Eric Kniple
September 14, 2026
The trees creak and the leaves quiver as Kyle Gaffney’s headlamp starts to flicker. The summit of Mount Arab is right around the corner, but a pair of eyes await. As Kyle approaches, the deer staring at him leaps away, snapping branches as it runs off into the darkness. Kyle wonders what other creatures lurk beyond the beam of his light. As he reaches the fire tower on the summit, he takes a sigh of relief. “The battery of my headlamp took its final breath as the stars took their first,” he later writes in a journal where he reflects on what made him embark on this solo journey.
What do you do when you have free time? Do you use your phone? Surf the web? Go shopping? For the eleven Arcadians living in the yurt village of St. Lawrence University’s Adirondack Semester, those are not possible ways of spending their free time. Arcadia, the yurt village, is an off-the-grid village where we live without our phones, laptops or Wi-Fi. We also can’t leave our area without having specific plans with our assistant directors Nate and Nicole. So what do these Arcadians do in their free time?
“I think completely unstructured free time was rare,” says Adirondack Semester alum Lars Fattinger when asked about how much free time they had during the semester. It’s true, everything in the village takes longer. Without running water, we have to haul water from the lake. For laundry, we have to paddle thirty minutes to Gannett, a Boy Scout lodge—although for some, laundry means forgetting clothes on the dock and finding it drenched in water hours later, twice. For conversing with friends and family, we must write letters. “I just got a letter from August 18th,” exclaimed Joe Frankenfeld on September 11th.
We spend a lot of time keeping our village running smoothly by doing chores. We take turns with cook shifts that take about five hours total for a breakfast and a dinner. Everybody is required to be at all meals as they also serve as check-ins to ensure everyone is safe. This is why Kyle had to embark on his journey at 7:00 p.m., after dinner, and hike in the dark.
Our classes are fully offline. If you think reading 200 pages of academic content in a week is hard, try handwriting academic papers without the delete key or the cut-and-paste functions, and try thinking for yourself (as we do) without AI! Our homework also includes spending time studying the nature around us.
Sometimes free time isn’t really free, it is time you are allotted to do the things you have to do. For three Arcadians, Eric Kniple, Evie Hopper, and Spencer Kavanagh, that meant going back to Dead Creek on their open Sunday to retrieve the lost community flag.
It was haunting, seeing the waters of Dead Creek once again. I, Eric Kniple, along with Evie and Spencer, stood at the bridge that marked the end of the section of Dead Creek we had paddled on our canoe trip. This time, however, we had returned on a different mission. During our first time up Dead Creek, we had made the mistake of leaving behind our community flag on the bank as we had stopped for lunch. The flag may appear to be little more than a bandana tied to a stick, but as Evie put it, “The flag is the single living document that describes the values we promised to uphold as a community.” This flag served as an important reminder of these values, and thus the G.I.V.E.R.s, our leaders for each day, carried it in the bow of their canoe as they led us onward toward Arcadia. Now we were retrieving this vital community symbol.
As we began paddling the waters of Dead Creek once more, we were filled with memories of these waters from only a couple of weeks before. Still, it felt like a lifetime ago that we had been on our way to Arcadia, paddling these never-ending waters in the hopes of making it to our new home. Every bend of the winding creek brought laughs of “Hey, here’s where Will fell in,” or “I remember this beaver dam!” Eventually, we came across a bend in the creek leading to two beaver dams that we immediately recognized as our former lunch location and our target for today. We got out, and within thirty seconds, Evie exclaimed, “I found it!” Spencer and I hurried over, and lo and behold, there in the long grass lay our flag, still tied to the striped maple branch it had been flown from. It was slightly worse for wear, muddied and with some of the words bleeding outward, but we didn’t care, we had found our flag!
Finding the flag had lifted our spirits immensely. Dead Creek, even on the second go-round, has a way of sapping energy like nothing else. Maybe it’s the uncountable number of beaver dams, or maybe it’s the endless identical bends, or maybe the shallow mud waiting just below the surface to trap a canoe. This time, though, after finding our flag, we were able to reflect on its beauty, snack on its elderberries, and admire the hard work of the beavers to make their dams.
After making it back to our portage, we took a short break to rest and refuel ourselves for the final leg of our journey, the long canoe portage back to Lake Massawepie. The first time, at the start of our portage on the canoe trip, we had smeared our faces with mud, like football players before a big game, to prepare for the long heavy slog. This time, though, we left Dead Creek jovial and with a newfound appreciation for its unique beauty, no longer needing the mud. During the canoe trip, Dead Creek was the final major obstacle between us and Arcadia, but now it served as a boulevard for us to march down with our flag so that it could be hung up next to the flags of previous generations of Arcadians in the Curt (Community Yurt). We marched back into Arcadia in the midafternoon, triumphantly waving the flag before planting it in front of the kitchen at the center of the village.
Back in the village, people were making the most of their free day. Luke McChesney and Joe Frankenfeld had gone off to find the best places to catch fish, Krish Gupta had gone exploring to find a hidden climbing crag, and Mr. G, our personified pickle barrel, hung from a hook in the kitchen. Elsewhere, Peyton Hunsicker read her book in her hammock, Izzy Kinsella was painting the landscape, and music could be heard from the guitars of Will Chalfant and Emily Helterline as well as the banjo of Adirondack Semester Director Jake McCoola.
Playing music has been a common use of free time, especially in the evenings, and always draws a crowd. Without access to apps like Apple Music or Spotify, music is limited to the one working CD player left in the village and the knowledge contained in our minds and few books. It is for these reasons that well-known songs like “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine or “The Weight” by The Band have become crowd favorites here in Arcadia as people love to join in singing.
Music has been a key part of the way our community has formed since our arrival at Camp Canaras before the canoe trip. From chorus vocal warmups like “Baby Sardine” (see Appendix A) to classics like “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles, our days on the water were full of song, which helped us push through when the going got tough. This collective practice has continued on into September. Most nights, after dinner, a group forms on the kitchen deck. Some people, especially Will and Emily, play their guitars. Some people like, Evie Hopper and Kyle Gaffney, add their voices to the mix. Some people, like Eric Kniple and Luke McChesney, find a nice object to add some percussion. And some people just sit and take it all in, enjoying the show.
After dinner is also a great time to relax and reflect in Arcadia. As the sun goes down and the stars come out, many people flock to the South Dock, which provides the best view of the lake and sky in the village. The South Dock is also a great place for reflection. Away from the hustle and bustle in the village, one can get lost in their thoughts here. According to Luke McChesney, “I love going out to South Dock at night to think about the stars and how small we are compared to everything else out there.”
While everyone comes to Arcadia for different reasons, a few common motives among our group were to reconnect with ourselves, build community, and connect with nature, all of which require a significant amount of reflection about ourselves and the world and people around us.
Back on the Mt. Arab fire tower, Kyle thinks about his Arcadian family and being far from them. He thinks about the many thoughts in his head and realizes that being outside allows him to understand those thoughts. He ends his journal by writing, “As the wind blows, my lungs breathe. As the water flows down the streams, so do my worries. I see my path, I see my place, and nothing stands between my mind and the stars.”
Arcadians may not have a lot of free time, but we spend the time we do have building our community, knowing the nature of our place, and finding our place in nature.
Appendix A: “Baby Sardine”
A baby sardine saw his first submarine and was scared to look through the peephole.
“Come, come, come,” said the sardine’s mom. “It’s only a tin full of people.”