Arcadian Beliebers

By Sophia Nickolas & Kaya Williams
September 23, 2024

An Arcadian world is a world filled with individuals from universes of our own, all conjoined by the value of music. With dispersed personalities, we build insight and friendship toward one another when harmonized through the sounds of music. In this village, there is a balance of silence and sound that goes a long way. When needed, individuals can have solo dance parties for solo regulation, but our community also regulates through field trip rock outs in the van.

During continuous gatherings in the kitchen, two members of our community, Keegan and Hannah, gather to lead us with blissful sounds of the guitar before and after meals, opening an offer to learn and share these notes, adding layers to friendships built between us. This kitchen holds a special energy, being one of the community spaces that feels like home. In this space, there are CDs present for shared use, some being collective fan favorites. With special features to Justin Bieber’s “Believe” album and the Top 50 Songs of 2014, these albums synchronize us, as all can collectively agree that they hit hard. They show the importance of music’s contribution to this community. These albums came out at a time when we weren’t present together in this space, but now they are a great thing we can bond and bump to.

Aside from student-to-student bonding, we Arcadians are able to bond with our directors through iPod jam sessions along with hits on the radio, which take us back in time. These relationships that we work to build in the village hold great value to us, as we work to strengthen our community, making the most our of the time we share together.

In our time here, we have welcomed other visitors into Arcadia who also share a love of music. For example, Dan Berggren came and visited us at Arcadia. To welcome him, we lit a fire in the Curt and he joined our family dinner. For reference, the Curt is our community yurt, where we hold group meetings and events in the village that do not have to do with meals—otherwise, we will be in the kitchen.

Anyway, Dan attended our college, St. Lawrence University, many years ago. It was at SLU that he met his wife. Every year, he comes to our school’s local Folk Fest and plays a song called “Green Sweater.” So, when he came to play music for us at Arcadia, we all requested this special song. “Green Sweater” is a love story to Dan’s wife who knit him a green sweater while he was at SLU. He still sings about this sweater that “feels like a hug.” Through his music, Dan shares his spirit—he shares his heart. It is uncommon to experience someone’s emotions with them at a first-time meeting. However, music provides a different baseline for sharing experiences and emotions. Not only does music share what an artist is feeling or has felt, but it brings the audience in, allowing us to import our own experiences into the song’s story, thereby making the music relatable to all people, no matter the background one has. Music is a shared experience.

So, as we all sat in the Curt with the fire keeping us warm on the outside, Dan’s music kept us warm on the inside. We cozied up on couches and connected to each other, to Dan, and to his music, which is a part of him and now of us.

Dan was not the only person who shared himself through song with the Arcadian community. Len Mackey is a local community member who grew up in Potsdam—right next to our school’s home base in Canton, New York. Len has been visiting our yurt village for many years as well as Dan. Unlike Dan, though, one of Len’s main focuses when joining us is to teach about tracking footprints and to impress us with his camouflage skills. Some of us never spotted Len when he was hidden in a bush in front of and below us.

After our Friday class with Len, he joined us for dinner and stayed the night. Before heading to bed, though, Len shared his drums with us. He brought enough drums for most of us to use one, and whoever was not drumming was playing the xylophone. In a circle we repeated after Len when he assigned us all a different beat to play. Working together, we made music. This is what life at Arcadia feels like.

We all come to this yurt village from different beats of life. We’ve danced to different songs and sang different lyrics. But at Arcadia we piece our varied instruments together. Sometimes we make harmony and sometimes we make an eclectic collage of rhythm and notes. When we were drumming with Len, we were not all on the same beat or rhythm, but we still danced around a fire and, rhythmically or not, we played the drums together.

Living at Arcadia is like forming a song. It takes time to write the lyrics, and instruments need to be restrung. But we write our lyrics, we string our instruments, and together we create music.