You show up in your old car and walk up to the field, sit in a circle of folding chairs in the August morning sun. You meet the people who will be your friends for the rest of your life. You listen to us talk of the day, of the joy of beginning with all of you on your time here as a Field Naturalist. Perhaps later that day, your whole team goes off with us to some bit of wilderness in our valley, tumbles out of the cars, and immediately descends on the weeds in the parking lot. You are beginning the discoveries you will make together, perhaps starting with a monarch caterpillar on the milkweed nearby. We are decades older than you, expect you to reach the summit long before we do, but we get there first—you have been constantly distracted by the natural world as you learn how to be together, which you will be so much of the time in the months to come.

Then there are the days in botany boot camp. You set out for the wealth of places in this countryside where you now live—so many Official Course Plants, day after day, all day long, rain or sun. You join me in Smuggler’s Notch, where I try to convince you that ferns are possible to tell apart even though they love to hybridize, intent on tricking you. I am taken by the intense focus that you have, the manifest hunger to come to know everything about the natural world—you and every Field Naturalist I have ever known. When Field Botany is over, often you all gather at our house for dinner to celebrate the time together. Sometimes you bring your guitar or banjo with you; once, a big accordion. You teach me new songs, songs I still sing years later, like Wagon Wheel.

You go off to other courses, to Bernd’s cabin, choose a project. Occasionally, you show up in my office and I end up being your advisor or on your committee—I’m honored. You and your team disappear for the summer—the FN space is quiet now. Sometimes I end up at your field site with your committee members, dubbing about in a bog or a forest to help you think about the place and the process. You have taken ownership of your project; you are metamorphosing before our eyes.

Back you all come to UVM, begin to make sense of your summer’s work. When I go to the computer room in Jeffords on an errand, I see you there with one or two of your team, going at your writing and mapping and statistics. So much to do. Then it’s the home stretch. There is a Field Final scheduled, we get the directions to your site, end up in some swamp or woodlot or soggy slope looking for little bits of the natural world to bring back, hoping to stump you in your field final—sometimes we do. Once, in a soil pit, you left me a beer.

Then you all give your seminars; yours goes well even though you thought it wouldn’t. The final copy is miraculously put together, and the sponsor is pleased. Then, the day in May comes that we go down to Shelburne Farms (or years ago, up to Hub’s house) and celebrate your success, speak to your accomplishments, accept your appreciations, and you get your little shovel. Then you disappear. I do not understand this part; you have become our fast friends, shared so much with us, completed your ecdysis to our delight— and you simply disappear, filling your old car with your things and going off to your job. It seems as if you were only here for a couple of weeks. I wish it had been longer.