Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!
By Lars Fattinger & Jacqui Smith
November 10, 2025
The weather outside is not that frightful, but the fire is still so delightful. As snow quietly trickles down outside, we huddle around the fire in the kitchen while playing songs on the guitar. Some sit on the floor, getting as close to the fire and each other as possible, while others lie in the loft being lulled to sleep. Our love for the community is pulsing through the kitchen between giggles, lyrics, and hugs. It’s early November, and winter is coming to Arcadia.
What used to be green is now slowly turning white as t-shirts are traded for puffy coats. Temperatures are getting below freezing at night, so fires in the kitchen and Curt (our community yurt) constantly burn. Thus, a new haul of wood is needed, which signals a new adventure: schlepping wood in the snow.
It was all hands-on deck getting wood across the cove on our barge and bringing it into the village to dry out. When reflecting on the schlepping, Arcadian Jordyn Bell said, “It was so fun moving wood because I didn’t get to do it earlier in the semester, and I was happy to help my community.” Another example of how we are still having fun outside as the weather turns colder happened just last week.
October 31, 2025, aka Halloween, was the first snowfall and stick of the season. So, to celebrate the season’s turning, many of us embarked on the “Massawepie Nine,” a tradition in which we portage to and paddle on all nine ponds in the Massawepie area. Bundled up and in costumes, of course, we set out for an adventure. Five hours later, drenched with mud and snow, we returned home with a new story to share over breakfast. “The Nine was a challenge,” said Arcadian Jordanna Samburgh. “But being together brought us closer. Wet and cold at 3am, the love in the community is what kept us going, and that we all wanted to do it together.”
At breakfast, stories were shared from the Nine, and love for this family was pulsing through the air but also manifesting in a physical form: heart-shaped pancakes. This was a teaser for what was to come that afternoon: an Arcadian wedding. Dressed in costumes once again, we attended and participated in the most picturesque wedding on the dock with snow falling.
As the newlyweds canoed off in the snow, the next event on everyone’s mind was planning a 20th birthday party for Arcadian Jacqui Smith. She says that she uses her birthday as a marker of seasons turning: “November 3rd is when Christmas starts; my birthday is the buffer between Halloween and Christmas.” With this in mind, a party was planned at a Scout Lodge across the lake where we played pool, poker, and pin the tail on the beaver. Our love for Jacqui was radiating through the lodge, especially when Jordyn made vegan Nanaimo Bars, Jacqui’s favorite dessert and a Canadian delicacy.
These three days were jam-packed with loving memories. Moments like these correlate with us getting emotionally as well as physically closer. For those of you who enjoy graphs or are visual learners, here you go:
The purple line represents how as time goes on we get emotionally closer, while the orange line shows how the weather getting colder has made us physically closer, leading us into a “high affection zone” in the upper right corner as the semester comes to an end.
This past week in her annual visit to Arcadia, St. Lawrence University President Kate Morris got to experience our village and all of its cozy, joyful winter glory—a welcome change from campus where the first snowfall was yet to come. Shortly upon entering the village, she found several Arcadians huddled around a wood stove in the kitchen, singing and laughing, exemplifying our place in the high affection zone. Especially during this snowy season of love, our magical home presents a stark contrast to the outside world, making it even more difficult to imagine a transition away from here. One aspect of our conversation with the President centered around the importance of remaining in community and relying on each other as we return to campus. This connects to a theme we have been exploring in our class titled “Knowing Nature”: reciprocity. Once the semester concludes, we will give back to the wider SLU community through the enthusiasm, commitment, and intentionality we’ll bring to the various campus groups and organizations we are involved in. President Morris’s visit concluded when she gave us a cardboard box (much needed fire starter) filled to the brim with Pub Cookies and, in turn, we posed for a photo for the President’s Instagram, after which Jacob McCoola, Director of the Adirondack Semester replied, “Can you please tag us?”—a sentence rarely spoken in this village.
This social media request is, however, a representation of the increased role that technology has recently played in our lives. As the semester approaches its conclusion, our happy bubble slowly begins to form cracks. We are painfully reminded that we still need to deal with things such as housing and class registration for the spring semester. This created a need for the much-dreaded “Tech Time,” a horrible event where all the Arcadians gather in Gannett Lodge and blank-facedly stare at their laptops, a device that may have started feeling quite foreign to some of us. This jarring change to our lives has caused a noticeable disruption in our community. Leah Rice sums it up perfectly: “Tech time is like a window into the future that makes it hard to remain present and disrupts our natural flow.” A similar sentiment echoed through our village throughout the theme house application process. Considering the large role that communal living plays in our lives here, it is no surprise that many of us choose to live in theme houses upon our return to campus. However, housing decisions have added another layer of complexity to our collective anxieties about the future. It is hard to imagine a future in which we can no longer walk twenty feet across snowy boardwalks to each other’s yurts or find everyone gathered in the kitchen.
The spatial separation that the spring will bring to our group is hard to grasp, but in the words of Lars Fattinger, “I have no doubt that our community’s love and closeness will persist no matter where we live. This experience will forever connect us.”
While dealing with the far future, it is easy to forget about everything happening in Arcadia right now. Every time one of our professors mentions that we only have one or two classes left, a collective gasp echoes through the Lurt (our learning yurt) accompanied by a tear or two. As classes wrap up, they are also increasing in intensity. We are putting together final projects and presentations, studying for exams, and writing the last two web features. As such, the Lurt’s wood stove has been constantly burning the drenched firewood from our last wood schlep.
Classes may be concluding, but the semester is not over just yet. After Thanksgiving break, each of us will embark on a two-week long internship with a community mentor somewhere throughout the Adirondack region. From woodworking to ecological monitoring, the options are vast and decisions are difficult. We are all eagerly awaiting the results of where each of us will be placed as the director team puts the finishing touches on the assignments.
Winterization and our departure from Arcadia are steadily approaching, a reality none of us wants to accept. However, as we make the most of our last two weeks here by dancing in the snow, organizing weddings, and playing Skip-Bo after dinner, it is important to realize that the end of our time in the village does not mean the end of our community. We may be more physically spaced out starting at Thanksgiving, but it’ll be pretty hard to keep us apart for very long. The love we created and the memories that only we comprehend will continue to bring us together wherever we are. Because no matter how frightful the outside world becomes, we will always be able to gather around the delightful fire of our community.
