💚Vermont: Je me souviens!

Friends I Have Known Along the Trail

Dear Scouters and Green Mountain Council family – Six years ago, I introduced myself to this council with a memory. In a video to a selection committee I have never stopped being grateful for, I began by asking where you were when the towers fell, because I believed then what I believe now: we are made of what we remember, and what we do about it. I closed that video by saying I looked forward to the roads we could walk together. I could not have imagined the roads…

Vermont welcomed us in the middle of a pandemic. We arrived as flatlanders and did our level best to earn our keep. We reported to the nearest Subaru dealership within thirty days to ensure family compliance. We learned there is no such thing as bad weather, only better clothes, that covered bridges are really kissing bridges, and how to properly pronounce Calais and Montpelier, place names my own French Canadian ancestors have technically been butchering for centuries. We visited family farms and sugar shacks, celebrated Christmas 2020 in solitude and Christmas in July at Mount Norris with hundreds of friends, Mr. and Mrs. Claus, and at least one penguin. We hunted trash pandas on Green Up Day every first Saturday in May. We fell under Noah Kahan’s spell and sang along on washboard dirt roads in search of Scouting functions, swimming holes, and creemee stands, changing the lyrics where the eight-year-old in the back seat required it. For three summers I lost myself as a Day Camp den leader at the Essex Expo, learning the joys of the buddy system and helping little people solve little problems, like how to include everyone in choosing a den name, which is how I came to serve proudly as a member of the American BB Pizzas! And this winter we tapped the two maples in our own yard and boiled sixty gallons of sap down to a few precious pints. Most of the work never shows. What remains is the good part. I cannot think of a better description of this community.

I will remember July of 2023, when the water came on the first night of summer camp. Our campers slept safe on the hill at Mount Norris while some of their homes in Johnson, Montpelier, and Barre took on the river. It took me five hours the next morning to find a crossing over the Lamoille, and I arrived with a dozen Poorhouse pies, because that was what I could carry. What this community carried was more. We suspended our own fundraising campaign, rallied Scouting friends across the country, raised more than $16,000, and put unrestricted $1,000 grants directly into the hands of flooded Scouting families before their children even returned home, trusting each family to know what they needed most. When the water came back a year later, we pulled together again.

I will remember a Life Scout named Liam, of Bennington, who did not make it home from school on a snowy December day, his Eagle project plans still on his desk. His troop made sure those benches were built. I stood with his friends and family in Bennington to lend a hand as they took shape, and I watched his family receive the Spirit of the Eagle Award in Montpelier. This community does not let its own stop mattering. Not ever.

I will remember watching the earth stand still beside my daughter during the total eclipse of 2024. I will remember signing 320 Eagle Scout applications, including Vermont’s inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts in 2022. I will remember climbing Mount Norris this summer beside Lincoln, a first-year camper who went to preschool with my daughter when we first arrived, and realizing I had been given six years of watching children like him grow into capable young people.

I will remember the closing campfire at Frontiers Camp, when Dave “Blackhawk” Sem left the circle, took me by the hand, and pulled me from the outer ring of spectators into the camp-wide dance. I shuffled my feet as best I could and understood what had happened: I had been drawn into a living, breathing tradition, shoulder to shoulder with campers who return to Mount Norris from all over the country, not for a program but for the camaraderie and earned belonging that bind one generation to the next. For a moment I was not the Scout Executive. I was simply one of them, and it is one of the finest things I have ever been.

I will remember Camp Sunrise in Benson, where I sealed my Brotherhood in the Order of the Arrow on a rainy night, and where my daughter learned to sled in the first snow of her first Vermont winter. When that camp passed to new hands, we promised we would return, and in 2026 we kept the promise. Our National Jamboree contingent gathered there and rekindled our council fire from the ashes of the last one, and Scouts carried those ashes home to their troops in the four corners of the state. I placed a share of them in the hands of Rick and Effie myself, old friends and caretakers who have stayed on as stewards of that land, so that future generations will cherish it. 

And I will remember the small things that add up to a life: our dining hall at Mount Norris that has been loved to death, the light on the Lamoille River driving home on a Sunday evening after checking in a fresh crop of campers, mornings at the Waterbury Service Center when the roof let go faster than I could work the roof rake, and the way every introduction in Vermont ends with “oh, you must know such and such.” In my first year, I rarely did. By my sixth, I nearly always did, or at least knew the stories. That may be the truest measure of these years.

I’ve learned some of my ancestors came out of Quebec, and their license plates say what I have been trying to say this whole letter: Je me souviens. I remember. Vermont, I will remember you for the rest of my life.

Now for the Yankee swap. After forty years away, Georgia is getting me back, and Vermont is getting Tony Vogl home. Tony began his Scouting career right here, and he and his family are coming home to lead us. You are the braided rope that makes this council strong, every strand of you, and I am asking one last favor: be for the Vogls what Barbara Ann Cochran was for my three-year-old on her first runs in negative temperatures. Help them grab the rope tow. Do not let go until they are gliding.

Thank you for letting my family matter to you. You will never stop mattering to us.

Je me souviens,

Mark, Bethany, Abby, & Riley
The Saxon Family