RS: Can you give us an example of how Questing has impacted an actual community?

SG: There’s a Quest in Thetford [Vermont]—it’s actually in the village of Ely—and it’s called the Miraculous Tree Quest and it goes to a standing, mature American chestnut tree. The story is that all the chestnuts were lost beginning in about 1904 from the chestnut blight. Well in this town, there’s still a tree that’s 100 years old and it’s producing seed and it’s beautiful and a magnificent victory for the chestnut. So a treasure hunt was made there and people started to use it and it was nice to share that story. But it wasn’t until a number of years later that somebody was coming from out of town to give a lecture on the chestnut blight at the library. And when the specialist came, somebody said, “Oh, I think there’s a treasure hunt to an American chestnut tree in town.” And the person said, “Oh, no, there are no mature American chestnut trees.” And so they brought this person on the treasure hunt, and he said, “Oh my God! This is the biggest, healthiest tree I’ve ever seen.”

He called the president of the American Chestnut Foundation, and then the American Chestnut Foundation came, and they brought a forester from the Yale School of Forestry to bag the flowers and cross-pollinate this with another tree and that process took and they are now, they think, growing disease-resistant chestnut trees, based on the work of this group to make a treasure hunt eight years ago. A little community, sharing its special place, might actually have international implications for the success of a species.

RS: Can you give another example of how designing Quests or hosting Quests has helped a community to discover its “Heart & Soul”?

SG: I worked with a teacher, Marguerite Ames, to develop something called the Village Quest in Norwich, Vermont, which was a process for going out to a settlement in the community, seeing what’s there, drawing pictures of the older buildings, placing those pictures together to create a map, researching the history of those buildings, and then creating a walking tour. It was a really successful project; that unit got written up and has now been used by 40 or 50 other communities. At the sort of peak moment of this group investigating the little village, an oral history event was held in the old one-room schoolhouse in the village and we invited all these people who had gone to the school to come and talk to these children. At that event, some adults hadn’t seen each other since they walked to school as children, so that helped strengthen the community.

RS: Valley Quest originated right here in Vermont and New Hampshire, but you’ve also spent many years in Colorado and the West. In what ways is Questing influenced by the landscapes and communities right at your doorstep, as well as others you’ve lived in?

SG: We’ve been here for a little bit more than ten years now and there are over 200 Quests in this region, made typically by a group of 15 students and a bunch of adult partners, so we’re looking at maybe 4000 people who’ve helped make the Quests. But before I came to work here I did live in Colorado and Arizona and I would say that the lesson I brought with me from Colorado was learning how to read the cultural landscape.

Some people can read the natural landscape. They can look and say, “Ok, there’s a stone wall. A stone wall means that something happened here to build the stone wall. Ok, behind the stone wall, it’s all white pine trees. I can see these trees are 35 or 40 years old, I know white pines like sun, therefore this was a pasture 40 or 50 years ago.”

In Colorado I lived in a town called Lafayette where there were all these teeny houses that were the same and, then at the ends on the corners were double lots with bigger houses. It turns out that Lafayette was a coal town and that underneath all of these streets were mines and all of these houses were where the mine workers lived, and the larger houses were where the foremen lived, and the really big houses, which have the streets named for them, were for the people who owned the mine. There was this tremendous beauty and space of the West, but on top of that was this overlay of cultural activity—mining, gold, trains. So I learned how to read cultural heritage beginning in Colorado.

In Arizona I started to learn to see the long view. I had my first experience of finding a chip from somebody making a tool and following the flakes to a chipping ground and following the chips to find pottery shards and starting to see that where I was, though it seemed like a natural setting, for hundreds of years had been a village and one could learn to read that by looking for very small details.

RS: How has Questing expanded to other regions or disciplines?

SG: Just as we stole the idea from letterboxing, and there are now letterboxes across the United States, when people come here and they go on Quests and they think they’re fun, they say, “Oh, we could do that in our community.” So I believe now there are Quests in 15 states and in 5 other countries. There are communities now which have gotten to the point of having their own program with a book, a website, curriculum materials; there are Quest programs in the Bay Area through KQED, on the Oregon Coast through Oregon State University; there’s a Quest Martha’s Vineyard program within the Martha’s Vineyard Museum and Historical Society; there’s South Shore Quests in Hingham, Massachusetts; Keene Quests; Orleans County, Vermont.

I could see that in the future there might be hundreds of programs. A lot of communities didn’t used to have land trusts and now they do. There was a time when communities didn’t have parks; now they do. The Quest is a good model for bringing together a variety of partners and stakeholders: educators, museums, conservation professionals, downtown associations, community foundations, and saying, “We want to create a process that both tells our story, so we know it’s of value, and shares it, so we pass the baton of what’s the heart and soul of our community.” So I would love to see a Hudson River Valley program and a Central Valley program and town-based programs. Some states might be small enough for a state-based program or a watershed-based. It’s a good program to match a group of people who, because of circumstance—geography, economy, watershed, habit – share something that’s bigger than all of them.

RS: You’ve described Questing as a community education tool. What are some of the benefits for schools and communities?

SG: If one were a fourth grade teacher, and you need to teach town history or state history and you adopted this approach, then in your teaching career you might be able to make a Quest a year, teaching one of your historical sites or natural sites or community assets. And in a ten or twenty year career you could publish a book that guides all the future generations to these important stories. A lot of places don’t have an invitation that beckons people to go to them and see what’s there and what’s important, so at the same time you teach your students, you could map and share the assets of your community.

That’s good education and then it’s good for the community to have a collection of adventures that initiate new citizens, whether it’s a family that moves there, successive generations of six-year-olds, or ten-year-olds, or twelve-year-olds. The community can say, “Here’s our places to swim, and there’s our really big trees, and here’s where you can go to see the butterflies dance at this time of month, and there’s where the fish migrate.” Catch children when they’re young, and build those formative experiences so they’ll be different adults.

RS: Questing grew out of Vital Communities’ work here in the Upper Valley. Can you talk a little bit more about how the Quest idea developed and what Vital Communities does?

SG: Vital Communities grew out of the League of Women Voters of the Upper Valley. They were concerned about how much the communities’ physical and emotional and spiritual character had changed in just one generation, and they had the vision to look forward and say, “In one more generation, will we even recognize what was here and what we’ve lost?”

So we did a very large community forum, inviting people to come together and envision the future. We made four fake newspaper fronts, envisioning futures of all the kids going to school on the Internet, remembering what a country fair was like, subway and airport expanding. Very provocative. We got them to come and asked them about what they valued most and then we grew our organization out of those values statements. Valley Quest’s goal was to foster sense of place. We won’t preserve what we don’t know, so we have to know.

I view Questing now as a way of seeing and learning to see—wherever you are—the pieces that are there. Once you see the pieces, they start to fall into patterns, and once you see the patterns, then those start to point toward processes, and so if you go through the pieces, patterns, processes, you can learn to read a landscape. And because you’ve learned to read it, you can then tell it and share it. That product of the Quest sits there for others, but you carry with you the process of learning how to see and understand, so anywhere you go in the future, you can see.

RS: What’s next for you and for Questing?

SG: My job isn’t to maintain this local program; my job is to help people adapt these ideas. And as we do this well, we might find out, does this really work, or could only happen once in this Vermont/New Hampshire community? I think there’s something bigger here, and timeless. But Part A is to work with others to take it seriously; Part B is to then take that learning and develop the replication kit that allows any community to use the process.

As part of that I see working across the United States. I also am interested in adapting this to other cultures and languages. It’s time for communities to notice what is of shared value and remember it and sustain it. There are, what, thousands of villages under the Three Gorges Dam and under the water line in China, so walking through it and appreciating it is gone, but there are lots of places where I think one can still turn a corner to reinhabit local landscapes and transmit the place, stories, affection for place, and memory of place.

Steve is interested in hearing from anyone who’d like more information or materials (books, curriculum, examples, and trainings) on Questing. He can be reached at steve@vitalcommunities.org. information is also available on the website, www.vitalcommunities.org.