Linda Scheller:
guide to the worlds of nature and creativity
By TINA ARNOPOLE
DRISKILL
Linda
Scheller’s work as educator, poet, thespian, sports enthusiast, naturalist and
mother have allowed her to teach formally and by example, both in fourth through
sixth grade classrooms at Westport School for the past 24 years and in the
community beyond.
Civic responsibility, cooperation, peace and justice, are the focus, along with math, reading, writing, science, social studies, language, spelling and art. She has taught poetry workshops at local libraries, written and directed Westport School plays and accompanied sixth graders to Foothill Horizons Outdoor Education Camp for many years. She also coaches the Westport Science Team with the help of volunteers and other staff.
She has been a screener for the Modesto Peace/Life Center Peace Essay contest and has encouraged her students to submit essays. Her students also participate in other writing contests that promote peace, nature, public education and humanity.
She holds a Certificate of Language Acquisition Development credential and strives for greater proficiency in Spanish, German and English for instructional purposes and to further communication with students and their families.
Her writing has appeared in over 30 publications including Seattle Review, Poem, Hawaii Pacific Review, Plays, and Maryland Review, and she has written and directed numerous school plays to encourage and celebrate tolerance, compassion and respect for diversity.
Much of her time is devoted to volunteering for Newman Performing Arts, a nonprofit organization which produces community musical theater. Most recently she portrayed the role of Mother in the musical Ragtime with NPA and has appeared in dramatic productions at California State University Stanislaus.
She played soccer with Modesto’s co-recreational league for 20 years and coached youth soccer in Newman. She has taken part in back-packing adventures, which she has found most inspirational.
Born in Schenectady, New York, she lived in nearby Scotia as a child, spending summers at YMCA and Bible camps in the Adirondacks, where her family moved when she turned 13. She is a graduate of Saranac Lake High School, attended Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY, and studied in England. At age 19 she left home for Anaheim, California and worked in a greenhouse. After marriage she lived in Maine, completed her Associate of Arts degree at Napa College and her Bachelor of Arts degree at CSU Stanislaus with a major in English and minor in drama. She began teaching at Westport after teaching at Keyes and Don Pedro elementary schools.
Linda lives in the country outside of Newman with her two children, Andra Scheller and Rigel Smart, four donkeys, two dogs, some chickens, three cats and a variety of wild creatures.
The morning sun glints on dark water
dammed and trapped,
drowning the canyon far below the boat.
We ride slowly past fishermen
and their litter, adolescents in powerboats
and treeless shores, gold on one side,
green on the other. At the reservoir's end
we disembark to walk among the red maids,
tidy tips, popcorn flowers, lupine,
brodiaea, golden poppies, cobweb thistle.
Here the Yurok women sought wild onions,
planting rings of smaller bulbs for gardens
in the tall, whispering grass.
Here the Yurok men stalked antelope
and tule elk, passed by grizzlies
and the giant garter snake, now
all ghosts. We rest beside the creek
clotted with fertilizer-fed algae
and muddied by the cattle
that leave stubble in their wake.
Beneath our feet a grinding rock reverberates
with memories of pounding stones and songs.
Listen, the water murmurs.
Padre de la Cuesta is coming.
Remember how the people were forced to leave
their houses of tule, their baskets of acorns.
The padre and his soldiers on horseback
drove the Yurok through the canyons
to the mission fifty miles away.
Yurok men, who did not care to leave
their hunting, gaming, fishing, and dancing
were tied by their thumbs and dragged in a line
behind the soldiers' horses. Many arrived
at San Juan Bautista with bleeding opposable
stumps. Those who escaped the endless progression
of work and prayer were hunted and shot.
Miners killed women and children on sight,
diseases came for which the plants and smoke
held no cure, and now the vacant canyon
is stalked by corporations that prey on beauty
and eat indigenous cultures whole.
The wind sighs, the flowers tremble.
A new dam has been approved,
a larger reservoir is planned.
The ancient forest of sycamores
and brilliant mosaic of orange lichen
will drown and vanish beneath brown water.
The wheels of the conquerors
will crush the bones and songs of the past,
rolling over diminished peaks
silhouetted against the dirty sky.
The boat carries us back,
gliding toward our cars.
In the still, deep water
we pass a flock of grebes
swiftly diving for fish
and surfacing again like cork.
Grebes mate for life, dancing on the water
in their annual attraction
and the babies ride their mother's back
as she swims. The grebes float beside us,
neither fearful nor aggressive,
constant in their care for one another,
unchanging over ages. Their numbers
will rise with the water
as they drift on the flooded canyon,
diving down to the Path of the Padres
to pluck the fish
from the graves of the Yurok.
- printed in Notre Dame Review, 1998
For four days we walked
beneath the trees, past
moss in various shades
of green, in spikes and fans
and forests on granite.
Small creatures played. I saw
nine young, all the deepest gray.
You found blood. I cringed
while other women watched
and smiled. Rain fell unceasingly
one whole day, and no one wept.
Our tribe saw many deer
which did not run from us.
That night the stars were gone. I
slept on a bed of oak leaves
under a ledge of stone.
With dawn I found a lizard
curled beside me. Steam rose
from bark, acorns fell, and
lichen. I rose to seek the others,
stepping softly on the rocks.
It is the last weekend of September
and we fill the car with old clothes,
preparing for the earth and ash of camping.
Food for fireside, games beneath the lantern,
plastic animals, soccer ball, sleeping bags
and favorite books settle in around us
for the journey to the coast,
the edge of wonder,
far from the telephone and washing machine,
the mailbox that asks for money
and leaves bad news in return. We drive
past field crawling with migrant workers
in camouflage beige, blue and white,
past blinding rows of new cars
like fishing lures in the sea of debt
and shopping malls, expanding habitat
of the American consumer who steals food
from the mouths of distant, darker babies.
But let's forget all that-we're going camping
in the redwoods, cool dark pockets
folded into suede hills
filled with ferns and evergreen incense
where the pace of life is measured
by the progress of banana slugs,
citrus bright on redwood duff.
When we arrive at the grove of ancient and enduring peace
we are told Butano is full. It is survival of the fastest
in the race to relax, and those who started sooner,
live closer, plan better
now inhabit our dreams.
There are more campers than campsites,
more people seeking escape than trees to hide them.
We reluctantly turn east and drive up sinuous roads,
crawling past gated estates and fenced kingdoms,
the personal forests of the privilge
where others of their kind are entertained
and whatever few wild animals remain
cower and slink in the darkness. We fold
and put away the map that has led us
to three more public campgrounds, all full;
small, crowded islands in the vast sea
of private property. Keep out. No trespassing.
In the back seat the children scream
and hit each other, tired, hungry, crying.
For the second time in one aborted day
we stop at a MacDonald's
and buy our way into their plastic playground
towering red, white and blue above the freeway.
Pieces of dead domesticated animals
lie on plastic trays before us
while bubbles ascend in plexiglass columns,
shimmering with the colors of neon advertisement.
The plastic ivy lies on its side, exposing the wires.
Everything is carefully arranged to obscure
our view of the other tired faces, trapped
in reflections of steel and glass.
