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| Kathy Hoffmann and the sundial |
Parson's Terrace - a personal history
In 1994 the construction of the Media Centre had been complete for a year. The terrace below the flagpole was a mess of overgrown weeds, a half circle of cement-what looked like half a culvert, stones and rubbish from construction. In May/June of that year, I had taken my grade 12 English classes out on that area for writing exercises as they prepared their "My Woodstock" creative writing folder. We sat around the area writing. One smallish tree had slowly tipped over in the monsoon, but was still green and alive.
In July 1994, at the start of the new school year, I was made homeroom teacher of the new freshmen, Class of 1998. I encouraged them and we decided to make a class project over the next 4 years of reclaiming the terrace. We started by pulling up the fallen tree and securing it so it could continue to grow. .We identified and named the trees with the help of Rick Alexander, a forest ranger who worked as a dorm parent in Hostel for one year. Vininoli Chishi made a plaque for our tree with the date, height etc and we were going to see how much it grew by graduation 1998. We also planned a clean up and the planting of flower beds. Slowly we got rubbish and other construction debris moved. The clean up was huge job and took months. At one point workmen were about to remove what looked like half a culvert. Just in time we saw them and were able to get the principal to call a halt to it, thereby saving the sundial!
The first winter of grade 9, a heavy snowfall tilted our tree the other way. We decide to pull it up again and have a great photo of that venture in our scrapbook. We decided after we identified the tree and understood its root system and looked at the original photos of the sundial area, that the tap root must be blocked by the cement pool that was in the area and that was why the tree could not stand. We had guide wires on it. Sometime between 1998-2000 when I was away, someone cut it down.
Caroline Burden, a landscaper from New Zealand who worked in Alter Ridge, helped us identify plants and plan the flower beds and gardens. With her we ranged the hillside in the monsoon and dug up plants to plant in our flower beds. Once we did some planting, it was a job keeping donkeys and cows out. Sometimes I would look out the window and see an animal in the garden and call out to the class, "donkey on the terrace" and some students would run to chase them out. Eventually a gate was put at the far end. Leki Norbu dug from the original plant below the tea garden, the cuttings for the three yellow flowering bushes that now drape over Parson's Terrace fence. They are in full bloom right now. I always think of him when I see those flowers.
In grade 9 Joshua John painted an artist's rendering of what the terrace could look like when we finished it. He did a beautiful job and even now that painting is a good representation of what we finally were able to do. A picture of the painting is in the scrapbook.
We somehow managed to find out that E. Dudley Parsons had made the sundial with his physics class in the 1930s. Then we found his address in Edina, MN ( I don't remember how) and Namrata Tamang wrote to him. We received back a packet with 5 X 7 black and white glossy photos of Mr Parsons and the sundial after its completion. Since I am from Minnesota, too, I tried to contact him on one of my home trips. I did reach his wife and she told me that he was in the hospital on his deathbed. But she said if she could, she would tell him that we were reclaiming the terrace and, would try and refit the sundial, and were naming the terrace after him. I don't know if she was able to tell him; I think he died shortly after that conversation.
Through grades 9, 10, 11, and 12, we slowly kept working on the terrace organizing Saturday "work parties" every now and then. A few students came to each one. Some students, such as Emmanuel Lalfelkima and Minam Apang, were committed throughout; others came periodically. We began to realize that to set up the sundial to be a working dial would be too difficult for us given the way trees had grown up, the narrowness of the terrace at a sunny point and our level of expertise and time. As Graduation approached and time was running out to complete all we had planned, I began to panic. I knew we couldn't finish everything before graduation and wanted them to have the finished project. I approached Kate Whitcomb in the alumni office for help and funds to complete the flower beds. We (the class and I) had decided to set the sundial ornamentally in a safe place rather than functionally in order to preserve it. The Alumni office financed a mason and workmen to set it securely the way it is now.
At graduation 1998, we had the grad photos taken on the terrace in various places, some in the sundial itself. And the very last thing: Rhonda Blosser, her dad (class of '68) and I, in light monsoon drizzle after the graduation events finished that afternoon, scattered grass seed that she brought from the States and we never got to sow until then.