New book intertwines nature, adventure, and human connection at Tremont

This piece was written by Holly Kays, lead writer at Smokies Life, and originally published by Smokies Life. Read the original publication.

Pictured above: Located within Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Townsend, Tennessee, Tremont introduces thousands of children and adults to the wonders of the outdoor world each year. Photo by Joye Ardyn Durham.

Jeremy Lloyd’s first visit to Great Smoky Mountains National Park was far from kismet. A directionless 24-year-old, Lloyd came to visit a friend who was working at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont—an environmental education center located inside the park—and, while he was at it, to apply for a job there. He’d been working at a door frame factory in Michigan, and he wanted out.

“I understood next to nothing about the work Tremont carried out, and I barely cared,” Lloyd writes in his new book, Forest Time: Footnotes to an Outdoor Education. “Anything sounded better than serving more time as an inmate in a factory where the foreman blasted Mötley Crüe through loudspeakers at full volume at six o’clock each morning.”

He bombed the interview, but when the top applicant was found to have listed bad references on his resume, Lloyd got another chance. The other candidates had already accepted other offers, so he got the job—though on a strictly probationary basis.

Now, he’s in his 27th year as a Tremont employee. The experience has centered, changed, and matured him in countless ways; Forest Time is the culmination of a decade-long effort to put that transformation into words.

“One of the goals of this book is to draw people into conversation about what it means to be human,” Lloyd said, “and what does the natural world have to do with it.”

Student and teacher
Lloyd came from a family of educators but always swore he would never become one. And though he’d always enjoyed the outdoors, he knew precious little about ecology. His first job title at Tremont—“teacher–naturalist”—felt out of step with his actual aspirations and abilities, but he soon found solace in the realization that he, like his students, didn’t need to be an expert to succeed. He merely had to be a receptive vessel to discovery.

“I’m always a student,” he said. “I’m only sometimes a teacher.”

When acting as a teacher, he was able to do so in a way that would make many classroom teachers jealous—allowing the students to follow their curiosity and explore the world free of the constraints of school bells and testing standards.

“We learn with our bodies and our hearts and our brains, all of that,” he said, “which is what it means to be human. You’re not just a brain.”

During those first few years at Tremont, Lloyd’s whole life—on the clock and off—was oriented toward hearing the heartbeat of his new home. He lived onsite in a building that had previously served as living quarters for park rangers. Its Tremont inhabitants christened it “the Oasis.”

“Far more mice than humans reside in the Oasis,” Lloyd writes. “One winter we trapped seventeen in a matter of weeks. . . . The most rapacious organism inhabiting the house by far, however, is mold. So determined is it to return the Oasis to the wild, overtaking it inch by inch, there is hardly any object in the house it hasn’t touched.”

Despite these less-then-glamorous accommodations (which, since the days of Lloyd’s early employment, have been upgraded sufficiently to banish the mold) the Oasis provided luxury of a different sort: a chance to unplug from the chaos of society and tune in to the enveloping realness of the natural world.

“My toad neighbor at this late hour has finally ceased his amorous melody-making. Perhaps he found what he was looking for,” Lloyd writes. “The ensuing silence feels like an invitation to make noise. Eager to make mischief but too comfortable to want to peel myself off the sofa, I feel like a bear on the verge of exiting its den and stretching its muscles. Stalked by whatever force is prowling the dew-heavy air, I make easy prey tonight. A breeze moves up the mountainside toward where the pines grow and bobcats sleep. When I turn off the lamp, the blackness is so deep that opening or closing my eyes makes no difference. Bedtime calls and I obey, entombing myself in perfect and companionable darkness.”

Lloyd’s initial term at Tremont—which he expected to be his only term—lasted for two years. After that, he left for the piedmont region of North Carolina, where he cycled through jobs as a bicycle courier, UPS customer service rep, and data entry worker while also attempting to make it as a singer–songwriter. Enrolling in graduate school, he returned to Tremont for a summer and then decided to work a second summer season before moving on in search of his place in the “real world.” But he soon realized that nothing felt more real than the world at Tremont, a life that fit him “like a comfortable pair of shoes.”

Transformation at Tremont
Lloyd never left again. He currently serves as Tremont’s manager of field programs and collegiate studies, living off-campus with his wife and pre-teen son. He still spends his days working to help all the kids, adults, and families who visit Tremont better understand the natural environment and their place in it.

Such experiences can be transformative, as Lloyd knows firsthand through his own memories of attending a place called McKeever Environmental Learning Center as a sixth-grader in Pennsylvania. That single week from his childhood continued to reverberate in his psyche during the years that followed, especially as he explored his new world at Tremont, where thousands of children leave with similarly indelible memories each year. Early in the book, he tells the story of a child he calls Theo, who was so excited by the sight of a tumbling waterfall that his “body shook and his eyes bulged as he gazed spellbound at the wall of falling water.”

“The hike itself and the freedom he had been given to explore,” Lloyd writes, “were too much for him—and yet just right. . . . I hiked at the end of the line on the return trip to campus, watching as Theo’s clumsy feet tripped over easily avoidable objects. He glanced around each time in search of the culprit rock or root, the astonished expression on his face speaking for him: ‘What in the world was that?’ As thunderheads rolled across the sky, down in the leaf shade of a temperate rainforest, a boy was making first contact with the earth. I felt lucky to be witnessing it.”

Environmental education centers like Tremont offer the opportunity to slow down enough to notice these mysteries, consider the clues that might solve them, and reflect on the deeper meanings toward which they point. The longer Lloyd stayed at Tremont, the more attuned he became to such seemingly trivial enigmas, like the sight of a large wasp flying through the air one afternoon as a group of students from Cincinnati settled down in the amphitheater.

“It moved slowly, even for a wasp, and then I understood why: trailing behind it, tethered by a foot-long strand of gossamer, was a spider. Having blundered into the arachnid’s web, so I gathered, the wasp struggled under the weight of its passenger as it attempted to make its escape,” Lloyd writes. “The spider meanwhile was going on the ride of its life.”

Eventually, the silk strand caught on the edge of a wooden shingle and broke. The wasp flew away free, and the spider returned to solid ground. Lloyd took a moment to ponder.

“Watching the scene unfold, I couldn’t decide which creature I identified with most,” the passage continues. “Wasp or spider. Overburdened pilot struggling to mount the air on the oddest of journeys or its clueless and thoroughly mystified passenger. The range of choices seemed incomplete, I realized, upon returning my gaze to the expectant young people seated before me who were waiting their turn to make the forest their home for the week, for there was my answer.”

Lloyd’s book Forest Time: Footnotes to an Outdoor Education was released in April. It is published by University of Tennessee Press and available for purchase at UTPress.org. For upcoming book readings, visit JeremyLloyd.com.

Holly Kays works as a lead writer for Smokies Life. Formerly a journalist for The Smoky Mountain News, she earned 62 state and national awards during her news reporting career. Originally from Maryland, she is a graduate of Virginia Tech’s creative writing and natural resources conservation programs. Holly is also the author of two books: Trailblazers & Traditionalists: Modern-Day Smoky Mountain People, which profiles some of the diverse people who call this region home, and a novel, Shadows of Flowers.