PREP

@50
With the continued support of our
community, future generations will
benet fromthe work we have done
here, just as we have beneted from
the work the founders did years ago.
WarrenThompson72
Non-Profit Org.
US Postage
Paid
Albuquerque, NM
Permit No. 1893
Santa Fe Preparatory School
1101 Camino de la Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-0396
505.982.1829 www.sfprep.org
Join Santa Fe Prep on Facebook
Follow our sports on Twitter
Subscribe to our blog at
santafeprep@wordpress.com
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PREP MAGAZINE COVER_PREP COVER 10/2/13 12:59 PM Page 1
PREP
@50
With the continued support of our
community, future generations will
benet fromthe work we have done
here, just as we have beneted from
the work the founders did years ago.
WarrenThompson72
Non-Profit Org.
US Postage
Paid
Albuquerque, NM
Permit No. 1893
Santa Fe Preparatory School
1101 Camino de la Cruz Blanca
Santa Fe, NM 87505-0396
505.982.1829 www.sfprep.org
Join Santa Fe Prep on Facebook
Follow our sports on Twitter
Subscribe to our blog at
santafeprep@wordpress.com
S
A
N
1
A
|
L

P
R
L
P
A
R
A
1
O
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Y
S
C
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L

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PREP MAGAZINE COVER_PREP COVER 10/2/13 12:59 PM Page 1
42
MEMORY IS A NOTORIOUSLY MALLEABLE MEDIUM,
a shifting terrain viewed in hindsight from an ever-transforming
present. At a certain point, life begins to seep across the neat nar-
rative lines we draw around our experiences to make sense of
them. The colors, to use a metaphor from the world of laundry,
begin to run, and the things we thought wed never forget begin
to slip unceremoniously into the technicolor mush. So what, in
this unceasing onslaught of experience, are the things that re-
main? What really counts in the long run, and what are the mo-
ments that stay? If you ask someone who went to Prep these
questions about their time at the school, you may start to notice
a pattern about the stories that have stuck. Whether they gradu-
ated in the late nineteen-seventies, the mid nineteen-nineties, or
last year for that matter, there is a good chance that the things
they remember about their teachers, their classmates, and about
themselves were formed on one of the schools many trips, far
away from any classroom or campus.
For me one of those unforgettable moments came on the first
day of my senior year rafting trip down the Green River in south-
ern Utah. I had learned from my friends who had graduated the
year before that our entire class was going to fly in tiny, single
engine airplanes, into the Canyonlands before getting on the river,
but it wasnt until I was standing in front of the actual plane on a
dusty airstrip a few minutes before dawn, that the reality finally
set in. My plane got into the air just as the sun broke over the
horizon, and through the windows my classmates and I watched
the warm light spill out across the desert, illuminating the canyons
WHATWE
TALKABOUT WHENWE
TALKABOUT
HIGH SCHOOL
PREPS LONG TRADITION
OF MEMORY-MAKING
OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
Alexi L.M.G. Horowitz 08
Stuck in the sand near Mazatln, Mexico,1967. Jane Daum photo.
43
and plateaus that splintered and rippled below us in every direc-
tion. Everything held a distorted quality at that middling altitude,
a perspective that turned the world into a series of contiguous
dioramas rendered in immaculate detail. Although the plane was
careening wildly back and forth in the morning breeze, eliciting
responses from my friends ranging from seasickness to real-time
imaginings of our surely imminent funerals, the thing that I re-
member most vividly about the flight was drifting into a state of
calm and contentment, the further into the Canyonlands we flew.
In that moment I realized that no action of mine could any longer
help my chances of survival, that my life was in the hands of forces
much larger than I usually considered. It was a feeling of peace
and perspective that has stayed with me. For me thats what made
the Prep trips such a central part of my experience the feeling
that by stepping onto unfamiliar ground (or air) together, we were
able to discover new ways of seeing that we might never have
otherwise found.
This matches the idea of experiential education as Fred Maas
explained it to me when we sat down recently to talk about his
experiences from over thirty years of organizing, leading, and chap-
eroning student trips at Santa Fe Prep. Fred sees the challenges
and unexpected situations that inevitably arise during camping and
international trips as essential to the process of learning: Dealing
with these real life situations becomes part of their [the students]
lifes understanding, of stepping from childhood into adulthood.
Fred has dozens of these stories: of campsite floods that awoke
campers in the night, and windstorms that flattened every tent in
the campsite except for his. Speaking both on how he has amassed
and remembered so many stories from his time at Prep, and on
why learning life lessons in the field can be more long-lasting
than those in the classroom, Fred said: Theres nothing like a little
adrenaline to enhance ones memory.
Fred describes himself as one of the earliest and most vocifer-
ous proponents of the move to expand Prep students education
from the classroom to the outside world, and it was in the years
after his arrival in1969 that camping and international trips began
to play a larger role in the school culture.There was a feeling early
on that outdoors trips werent going to be academic enough,
said Fred, recalling the first faculty conversations about the trips.
There was even an idea floated around at one point to make the
students lug their text books along with them.
Whatever the particular deliberations that led to the first Prep
trips in the early 1970s (no textbook lugging was required), by the
middle of the decade the school was taking students on its first
serious trip, the one the teachers who I spoke to say started it all:
the end of the year middle school trip into the Grand Canyon, to
the waterfalls at Havasupai. The Havasupai trips were epic affairs
because of the time required to drive to central Arizona, and
the hot, eight-mile hike down into the canyon, the trip often took
upwards of eight or nine days. At that time, the middle school
student body was small only two dozen or so students but
getting them safely down and back up the exposed, zig-zagging
trail to the falls was a considerable feat in itself, and it required a
good deal of preparation. According to Marie White, who taught
English at Prep from 1970 until 1995, We would take them up
Atalaya mountain before Havasupai, to see if theyre packs were
going to be too heavy, or their boots were going to be too tight.
Mr. Maas described the Atalaya march as a way to simulate the
1,200 foot ascent out of the canyon. Despite the difficulties, the
trip usually went off without much incident, and among both the
teachers and the students who I spoke to about Havasupai, there
is still an overwhelming fondness for the trip, and the place itself.
When we finally got down to the bottom of the canyon the kids
would all throw down their backpacks, and run and jump in the
pools to cool off. said Marie, smiling as she remembered.It was
like a little paradise.
Havasupai was the first major trip to become a yearly Prep
tradition, and for over two decades it served as the unofficial mid-
dle school right of passage, a reward to students for their work
during the year, and a way of interacting in a different way with
their teachers and fellow classmates. As Jesse Roach, class of 1990,
put it: Havasu, and all of the trips, on top of bonding us as a class,
were a way for us to get to know our teachers outside of the con-
text of the classroom, away from their roles as authority figures
and disciplinarians. As the school continued to grow, the larger
trips were split up to make them more manageable and soon each
of the classes were taking separate yearly trips to places like
Jacks Creek Campground in the Pecos, Chaco, Bandelier, Diablo
Canyon, and other directions around the Southwest. It was also
in the late 1970s that the senior class began to mark the end of
their final year with a trip to San Francisco. For Prep students from
the late 1970s and early 1980s, the San Francisco trip is legendary,
and conversations with alumni from that time are likely to evoke
stories of disco clubs and Grateful Dead concerts.
Finally there were the international trips, usually held during
the spring and summer vacations, which developed in the mid-
1970s with the Language department trips led by Steve Machen
and his colleagues. Steve Machen was twenty-seven when he
joined the faculty at SFP and shortly thereafter led a group of
students on Preps first international summer excursion, a six-
week overland journey through Mexico and Guatemala. From the
very beginning Mr. Machen knew that he wanted to make Preps
THERES NOTHING LIKE A
LITTLE ADRENALINE TO
ENHANCE ONES MEMORY.
! Continued on Page 46
44
IT FORCES PEOPLE TO BE
FLEXIBLE, AND TO ADAPT,
OR AT LEAST TO COME
TO TERMS WITH THAT KIND
OF CHALLENGE. WHEN
YOU COME BACK FROM A
TRIP LIKE THAT, YOU SEE
YOUR WORLD ANEW, AND
YOU ASK QUESTIONS
ABOUT IT THAT YOU NEVER
WOULD HAVE THOUGHT
TO BEFORE.
ELIOT FISHER | 01
45
IT WAS A TRIP THAT THEY
WOULD NEVER TAKE WITH
THEIR PARENTS. IT WAS A TRIP
THAT THEY WOULD NEVER
TAKE WITH ANYONE ELSE.
STEPHEN MACHEN
46
international language department trips a unique experience: It
was always our feeling that we could do it better than the national
organizations. What we did not want these trips to be was a tour.
We wanted our trips to offer an experience that was absolutely
unique for the students. It was a trip that they would never take
with their parents. It was a trip that they would never take with
anyone else.
And unique and dynamic they were. On his first trip one of his
students had her purse and passport stolen in southern Mexico,
shortly before the group was meant to cross the border into
Guatemala. Mr. Machen had to sneak her through Guatemalan
customs. Later in the trip, another student came down with acute
appendicitis, and had to have it removed in a Guatemalan hospi-
tal. The doctor came out after the operation and showed us the
offending appendix. It looked like a red finger, he said of the
experience. Another time the bus broke down in Mexico, on their
way back toward the states. Mr. Machen, John Bachman, the
Headmaster at the time, and the driver figured out a way to use
a whittled broom handle to plug and fix a punctured brake line,
and, thanks to the bus drivers terrifyingly fast driving he
wanted the new land record, as Mr. Machen put it the group
still made it to their destination ahead of schedule, despite their
mechanical mishap. Steve went on to lead another thirty trips
after his first, taking Prep Spanish students all around Central
America: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico. Looking
back on his experiences, he says that he had no qualms: That
kind of travel has so many lessons to teach.
What quickly becomes apparent, listening to Fred Maas, Steve
Machen, and Marie White tell stories about their experiences
traveling and exploring with Prep students, is how much enjoy-
ment they have each derived from these experiences, despite the
challenges, and difficult decisions that have had to be made. In
some cases, the impacts of those trips have lasted lifetimes and
drastically altered the life-paths of their participants. Stuart Day, a
professor of Spanish at Kansas University who graduated from
Prep in 1987, credits Mr. Machens teaching, and the Mexico trip
they went on the summer of his sophomore year: There is no
doubt that by taking us to Mexico Mr. Machen set the course of
my life, said Stuart.Once I had traveled to Mexico I was able to
connect school to the real world, which in turn promoted my first
academic success. It would take me a while to catch up (I was a
mediocre student, at best) but I never forgot the note Mr. Machen
wrote on one of my report cards. It went something like this:
Stuart isnt doing well, but I dont plan to give up on him. I loved
all of my Spanish teachers at Prep, no doubt about it. But those
trips, and the note Mr. Machen wrote on that report card, are two
defining memories that set his influence apart. They are also two
key reminders for all of us that K-12 teachers canand regularly
do work miracles.
I THINK ONE OF THE MOST
IMPORTANT THINGS WE
CAN DO IN OUR LIVES, IS
TO STEP OUTSIDE OF OUR
COMFORT ZONES.
ELIOT FISHER | 01
Above: Cambodia 2012 / Right: Rafting 2012
47
Today the raison dtre of Preps international trips has ex-
panded beyond that of language immersion the last couple of
years have seen trips to China and Cambodia that were designed
and led by history teacher Coco Toderan-Manson, more with
culture and history in mind than language immersion but
the underlying sentiment remains the same. Eliot Fisher 01, an
alumnus who teaches digital media and yearbook at the school,
was a chaperone on the Prep trip to Cambodia last summer, and
sees the role of both the trips he went on as a student and the
ones he leads today, as one and the same.I think one of the most
important things we can do in our lives, is to step outside of our
comfort zones, said Eliot. On Preps tradition of experiential
learning, he saidIt forces people to be flexible, and to adapt, or
at least to come to terms with that kind of challenge. When you
come back from a trip like that, you see your world anew, and
you ask questions about it that you never would have thought to
before. Steve Machen is excited about the direction that Prep
trips are going as the school evolves, although he does have an
ongoing desire to see them open to as many students as possible:
The issue for me regarding the trips is an issue of accessibility,
just as it is for the school more generally. I think that being able
to say to any kid, if you work a bit extra, that we can find the
money so that you can do this. I think its really important.
In talking to Prep students and teachers from across the schools
fifty year lifespan, it became clear that these experiences mean
something. They stick. The trips are rites of passage, fundamental
to what makes Prep the unique, vibrant, and cohesive community
that it has become. It means forging common bonds, and con-
necting what we learn within the classroom with the world
outside it. For me, flying over the Canyonlands of Utah stoked a
hunger for movement, adventure and alterity. It nurtured in me
the germinal notion that this world, for all of its chaos and com-
plexity, for all of its hardship and strife, was filled with a spirit of
openness and possibility, a feeling which empowered me and the
hundreds of others who shared these experiences to delve into
the world more fully and without hesitation.
Havana, Cuba 2003. Stephen Machen photo.