Students find an alternative to typical spring break

At a time when many students continued to sleep away the memories of the last week’s… At a time when many students continued to sleep away the memories of the last week’s midterms, or were just tucking themselves in after a night of Cancun debauchery, a group of Pitt Alternative Spring Break participants had their own vacation slumber suddenly interrupted by a call to arms.

“Yeah! All right! Let’s build some trail! French toast!” came the screeching 6:19 a.m. wake-up yell of Cumberland Trail Conference Program Coordinator Mark Stanfill, wielding the tantalizing promise of a French toast breakfast to coax the volunteers out of bed and onto the trails.

As part of Pitt’s ASB program — which included numerous other trips, such as tutoring Navajo children in Arizona and working with Habitat for Humanity in Hawaii — the 12-person group traveled to Soddy-Daisy, Tenn., to help construct a segment of the Cumberland Trail, which eventually will span over 300 miles through 11 eastern Tennessee counties.

Joined by other college students from Michigan State University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, Illinois State University and an assortment of other volunteers, the 11 Pitt students and one staff member spent the week carving, digging and evening out a four-foot-wide by eight-foot-tall hiking space through the rolling, rock- and tree-filled Cumberland Valley.

Organized into teams of about 10, the road-cone, orange-vest-clad volunteers took turns sweeping away dried and crackling leaves with a fire rake, pruning stray branches with hand clippers, battling tree roots with a mattock — similar to a pickax — and sending weighty slabs of sandstone out of the trail’s path and careening down the hillside.

“Rock!” the obligatory accompanying warning echoed.

In addition to the several daily-anointed leaders within each team — referred to as “Mule Skinners” — groups also had an overall leader called a “Wagon Master,” an experienced volunteer whose duty was to oversee progress and motivate the volunteers.

“This tree’ll have to come down,” said Wagon Master Jim Schroeder, a 71-year-old New Jersey transplant to the South and former triple bypass patient who had to be continuously nagged by his group members to eat lunch after tirelessly working away the morning and early afternoon.

How’s that for motivation?

But if Schroeder’s dedication to building the Cumberland Trail was remarkable, it was not without parallel.

Fellow Wagon Master Shawn Basil, a 30-something ex-Marine who’s rippling, muscled physique suggested that he spends his weekends pulling 18-wheelers on ESPN specials, paused for all of 10 seconds after dislocating his thumb to grimace in pain, shove it back into position, and continue working, much to the opened-jaw amazement of those around him.

“It happens,” he said.

But the trip wasn’t all about dislocated thumbs, chopping tree roots, and carefully removing ticks while in the shower — it was also intended to be a learning experience.

Once a day, a park ranger would meet with students to discuss local flora, fauna and history — including the region’s economic transformation from coal to peaches, and now, apparently, college spring break haven.

The learning and working of trail time ended daily at 3 p.m., when minivans full of physically drained volunteers began the winding 40-minute drive back to home-away-from-dorm-room Dogwood Lodge.

Free until dinner time at 5 p.m., participants took advantage of the Lodge’s plush Christmas-green-and-red plaid couches to grab a quick nap, scan meaty tomes of global economic history — “my professor recommended it,” said the reader of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” — or play a few games of Hearts. “America’s Spirit,” the “Family Game for Patriotic Americans” sat unused on a corner shelf.

The more energetic took advantage of the outdoor basketball court’s 9-foot, slanted rim to hold a dunk competition or convened on a nearby perfectly flat grass lakeside field to play all-out, 11-on-11, diving-and-knee-bloodying games of soccer and Ultimate Frisbee.

Entertainment for the week, however, culminated with Friday night’s square dance, a several-hour fiddle fest of frenzied dancing and partner swinging, the sound of which penetrated the Lodge’s stretching corridors and deep brown wood-paneled walls.

It was a distinctively Southern event in a distinctively Southern trip, from the roadside Fireworks Supermarket, the ubiquitous Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, the Chattanooga barbecue ribs and OutKast’s “Hey Ya” thumping ad nauseam from the Dodge Grand Caravan’s speakers.

But, in the end, it was all about the trail — a trail conceived in 1998 and scheduled to be completed in 2008, and of which the participants constructed 1.1 miles that have left them with positive memories.

“I like the rewarding aspect of seeing what you’re doing making a difference,” said trip participant Phillip Legge, who actually had a dream about trails after returning home to Pittsburgh.

“It involved building a trail in the concrete around Towers,” he said. “I think somehow we had to go through my room, and I remember using a mattock.”