I drove right by Foxfire in Mountain City, Georgia, I am abashed to report, @LisaRoseStarner. I will not drive by it a second time.

As an extenuating circumstance, it was night on Friday, January 28th, 2011, around 7:30 PM. One of the better parts of travel is wondering, with the help of Googling, where exactly had I been wandering.

 

I remember the Foxfire Books appearing on teacher's desks during Middle School, and our middle school stood just above the flood plain of the Shiawassee River, strong from having gathered all of its branches in Byron, Michigan. Between the river and the school, a forest began and we were given the task of caring for trails inside the mature forest of hickories and maples, spreading woodchips and trimming branches along the way. It was out there I learned to identify plants and even how to trap fish in buckets, although I didn't eat anything I caught. In the spring time, we took a week from the reading and arithmetic and enjoyed outdoor school, learning to map by triangulation at the Mill Pond on the Shiawasee River or learning to sample water and evaluate it for cleanliness. The week ended with a daylong canoe trip from a point upstream from the school, arriving at the landing by our middle school just before the buses departed. We are talking 1974 and 1975 here, and all of it came to us because we built a new school, staffed it with newly graduated teachers, all of whom had been trained on Foxfire methods. I can't believe I drove right by Foxfire in Moutain City Georgia without notice.

 

There's a great folksong about being at Foxfire again, and I simply can't find it. I can find John Denver's Foxfire Suite.

 

By the way, one of those new thinking teachers came with my troop to Camp Tapico, Grass Lake, Kalkaska, Michigan, and on a dark night we extinguished our flashlight. It took awhile for our eyes to adjust, but we found foxfire on the branches of a tree rotting on the leaves. The tree limbs had turned to punk. I took a section back to my tent, but it never illuminated again. I not sure if it dried too much or if the section of branch was separated from the forest floor.

Foxfire is a series of books, a place, a magazine and a way of teaching young adults.
http://www.foxfire.org/