Week 4

 Week 4 of the Hegsted Joseph Smith Birthplace Mission

14-August-2022 (Sunday)

We again attended the South Royalton Ward since Dede and I were to open up the center after the first hour of the block.  I was asked to play the organ so we left early to practice and become acquainted with the organ.  I had prayed that the Lord would sustain me and allow me to play and not distract from the Ward Conference Sacrament Meeting.  I was truly blessed such that even without touching a keyboard for several weeks, I was able to play.  God be praised.

As I was sitting at the organ for church, I watched a group of campers (actually hikers) come into the meeting, put down their backpacks in the back of the meeting and then take seats there.  They were some of our first guests at the site.  For 124 days, they have been hiking the Appalachian trail.  They started in Georgia and will conclude in Maine by mid-September.  There were six members of the group, the parents, two daughters and a son as well as a cousin they had brought along.  Today was a zero mile day for them as far as the hike is concerned  After they visited the site, I got out the golf cart and took them up to Camp Joseph where they were allowed to shower.  I have absolutely no desire to make such a hike.  For at least the parents, when they complete this hike, they will have achieved the triple crown of hiking having completed the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and the Pacific Crest Trail.  Over 7000 miles of hiking with one million feet of elevation gain.

We continued to have YSA youth come through.  Some just to get last minute pictures, but others to get tours.  We then visited with a member of the stake relief society presidency who had come to ward conference and was seeking solace at the site after having lost a 44 year-old son and several close friends. to death in the last few months.   It is amazing how easy it is to talk about spiritual things at this place that seems to just soak in the spirit.

For the second day in a row, we did not have a chance to get a drink or run to the restroom.  We could have cut a few people short, but people today often had come to just spend time at the site and soak in the spirit of the place.  What a great mission to have.  We sit around and wait for people to come to us and be filled with the spirit and learn about a prophet of God.

15-August-2022 (Monday)

I am frustrated, I had completed the blog post for the 15th and 16th, went through and corrected issues in all previous posts and added pictures.  However the pictures did not download and when I tapped one hoping to delete or edit it, I lost all my work done these past two days.  In my discouragement, I want to just quit this project forever, it never seems like I have enough time to work on this and without proper internet, getting pictures has been a problem.  Oh well, buck it up, quit whining and proceed onward.  I did finally found the save button, I thought it saved automatically.  The save button and I are now good friends.

Started the day with our 8:45 devotional with President Ewer and Sister Ewer and the other site missionaries.  It was so good to be together, although we spent so much time catching up with one another that we did to get to the training that President Ewer had planned for us.  The Ewers were happy to report that more bus tours are planned and that visitor numbers were coming back or perhaps exceeding pre-covid levels.

I had brought work clothes and thus worked from 10 to 12 weeding gardens.  There is so much work for the two FM couples to do and they have had family visitors and want to do things with them and so they could use help.  I feel they struggle to feel part of the mission as their work is mostly unknown and so anything I can do to help I will do.

I took a family through the site from Montreal, Quebec.  All four spoke English as well as their native French.  However the parents were much more proficient with English than the children.  Thus I invited them to explain things to the children especially when we got into the room where we ask people what they like from the restoration board showing many accomplishments from Joseph's life.  I asked them to pick something they would like to share with their children.  It was fun to see how the children came to life when being taught in their own language, by their parents.  It will be good to remember that participation of not only children, but parents is so important.

Dede took through two people who were not members.  Both were kind and wanted to know something about the church, but neither wanted to know enough to actually discover how the church could change their lives.  I think it is so easy to feign interest and be politically correct, while not committing to anything enough to actually benefit from what religion might bring into their lives.

Dede took time to learn how to use iMovie on our phones.  She watched tutorials and then took pictures and videos from her phone and edited them to make a video.  We were excited to see the results.  We then finished our shift and went home and we worked on creating a video to show the Ewers so they would know the capabilities.  

16-August-2022 (Tuesday)

We expected things to be slow so after opening the site, Dede and I went out and dead-headed plants in the gardens for an hour.  I then began taking more pictures and videos.  I went up by the flagpole and took pictures and walked closer to the site.  This covers everything outside in one shot.  I also took pictures from these same areas focusing on the actual birthplace site.  I retrieved a ladder and climbed up to get a higher view of the birthplace site.  I think these will be good additions.

After noon, President Ewer came over and we showed him what we had done last night.  I think he was pleased to know that we had capabilities that he did not have with the PC and its software.  

Shortly before 1 pm a couple drove up on a motorcycle.  They told us the road (LDS Lane which leads up to the site) was blocked because they were filling cracks in the asphalt.  (Perhaps our lack of people stemmed from the road work and blockage.)  The couple was from Maine and had been at the site before, but we gave them a longish tour.  She had a comment for everything we said and just wanted to sit and talk with us.  Luckily it began raining and they had to leave as we needed to move forward.

We had thought to stay and take videos using the golf cart after our shift.  However with the rain we decided just to leave and try again another day.  We came home quickly and Dede prepared cheese and crackers and we went to the Goodrich Maple Farm about an hour away from us above Barre and Montpelier.  The man who runs the farm gave us a tour telling us it is unusual for him to be around and not out in the woods.  There was another family with us and I asked to many questions for them, so I quit and asked more after they left.  He is an engineering type and has created much of his equipment and techniques for harvesting maple syrup.  (I asked many technical questions and he was delighted to answer them.)  They did 150,000 trees last year and will add 40,000 more this year.  They are currently #3 in the state of Vermont for syrup produced.  And yet he calls it his hobby.

He gave a history of syrup production from the Indians to modern times and the changes in technology.  His farm no longer tap trees and drain sap into buckets, rather they hook flexible plastic piping (tap) and using gravity flow to collet all of the syrup. while having vacuum at the point of contact to prevent sap from going back into the tree.  They have two facilities, the one we visited and another in Eden with 3x the capacity of the facility we visited.  All sap harvested is refined to maple syrup the day it is collected to prevent contamination.  Rather than boiling alone, they use reverse osmosis technology to initially remove 90% of the water and then boil only the last 10% of the water away while caramelizing the sugar in the maple syrup.  All is done using modern techniques to control temperature and keep everything sanitized.  It was very impressive.  He designed most of the equipment.  The season runs 5-6 weeks, but they spend all summer preparing for the season so the work proceeds almost year round.  They are able to get top dollar for their products.  I did not know there are four grades of maple syrup that goes from light to dark or mild to heavy tasting.  Light works well for flavoring ice-cream or pancakes while the darker is better for cooking.  I felt fortunate to meet him and to also hear his conversion story as well as their maple syrup story.  He also provided nutritional information of maple syrup verses other forms of sugar.  Due to the cost, maple syrup lost popularity to cane, sugar beat, and corn syrup sweeteners.  However as people have chosen to eat healthier, its popularity has soared.

In the pictures below, you are seeing a cross section of an ancient sugar maple with dates and with the scars of past sugar taps.  See also buckets and other facts about the process.

We were able to see three more covered bridges on the way home.  At one we read a statistic stating that 1200 covered bridges were washed out in flooding in approximately 1927.  There must have been an amazing amount of covered bridges in New England.  Two bridges we saw yesterday were or had been privately owned bridges.  The third was on a public road.