Frautschi Point
A Nature Story

"What makes a ten-year-old girl think she can go out in a boat alone, at night, with only her dog for a sailing mate?
  Well...muscles. Exactly!"

– Appelt, from Keeper





3.

And so the Bees Knees Bee Center was born from that very short and cold moment standing in the shallows of Lake Mendota and saving that little honey bee from a very uncertain fate. Now, not to confuse anything, Trace and her dad and Sam had already started on rehabilitating the old building down there by shore, but it was entirely another thing to know what you were going to do with it once it was finished. You have to get people to the place. You have to get students down along the half mile trails and past the community garden. You have to get everybody out of their classrooms and out of their houses and jobs!  But there would be no stopping Trace after the day that she experienced her seventh grade field trip to Devil's Lake in Baraboo WI, that magical lake that is surrounded by rock forms that looked like something out of the old cartoons of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.  She remembered the day often with her and her two friends Haley and Clair. The three of them had been working on expanding the 'mondays outside' program at Leopold Middle ever since Mrs. Sheranden had announced that starting in the spring, unfortunately, there was not going to be the afternoon option of outdoor learning. Some group of people somewhere up or down the line had decided that there wasn't quite enough 'going on,' as she put it, on those hours in the field. Trace could remember phrases like learning objectives and words like impact. This was too bad on one hundred levels. The three of them had carved out a little part of the world on those hours outside. They knew all of the pockets of places to run and hide and chase away the likes of little Harvey and Clair's little brother Josh. One day way back at the beginning of the school year, when some of the plants were still in bloom, Mrs. Sheranden set each of them out along the edges of the woods to inspect the wilting milkweed leaves for holes.  "It's very possible that Monarchs had been nibbling at these leaves." As she was saying it, standing there with a little disk magnifying glass in her hand as always, no kidding, a fully grown Monarch had flitted just behind her as if listening and landed on her shoulder for about two seconds, then flitted back up and down as if on a string to the little woodland patch.  Behind her, built onto the jagged old oak placed at the center of the playground was a tree house that the kids had to stand in line to get up into. The three girls, when they got their turn, went up into treehouse and practiced their own classroom, handing out lesson plans for fun, and teaching the next set of kids in their own imaginative ways about the great oak that might someday just walk away like they do in Lord of the Rings, or how a classroom could be out in the middle of the pond behind the edge of he woods on a floating raft "with sides to climb and we could sing." All of this was in fact a far cry from the drudgery of the rest of their day inside. Not that it was all bad inside the school. There was plenty to talk about. There were the gum splotches on the undersides of desks. There was little Harvey to attend to in the halls when. Mrs. Sheranden's biology class was just fine as they sat inside desks and looked at the pictures of things. But something had happened in those months outside. When Mrs. Sheranden announced that there would be a trip to Devil's Lake, the eyes of the girls brightened to wide stars.