Essay Contest Winners

Meet Catherine Wessel and Samantha Sapp — Award Recipients of the 2024 Waterman Fund Essay Contest

The Waterman Fund is proud to announce the winners of our fifteenth essay contest.  We welcomed 43 essays of which ten made the final round.  The committee is composed of current and former board members, outside readers, and the editor of Appalachia Journal.  Our First Place Winner for our 2024 Essay Contest is Catherine Wessel for her piece, "Old Friends in the Alpine."  Our Runner-up is Samantha Sapp for "Splinter Hill."

The prompt for 2024 was as follows:  Wilderness has the capacity to create memories, some of which are so powerful they affect the entire course of a life.  Describe a single moment you have experienced in the wilderness that profoundly changed you.  How did that moment reverberate through your life?  What changes to your world exist because of that single moment in time?

The following are excerpts from this year’s picks. . .

 

. . .

 

Sometimes the soul of our land is underfoot and we don't know it.

It was late summer in a remote pocket of southeast Alabama, not far from the border of my home state Florida.  Down here, summers are brutal—even the trees sag and sweat in the heat.  Still, my fiancée and I had trekked deep; into the woods to find the bog at Splinter Hill.

Bogs are hardly exotic.  When tourists flock to the beach with the rhythms of spring and summer break, they bypass the bogs entirely, unable to see past the swarms of flies and fetid stench of death.  But on the Gulf Coast, bogs are havens for the only genus of pitcher plants in North America. "Sarracenia."  Of its eleven species, ten can be found in Alabama and Florida.  Only one can be found outside the South.

Samantha Sapp, "Splinter Hill”

 

. . .

 

From the Chin of Mount Mansfield the highest point in the state of Vermont, I watch a stream of hikers cresting the Lower Lip, their t-shirts making dots of bright color across the long face of the ridgeline.  It is an unusually spectacular day, all blue sky and sunshine.  The air is warm and still and the mountain has already transformed from a few weeks previous—growing things have sprung into action with incredible speed and vigor as soon as the show disappeared.  The serene weather feels like a good omen for the field season.

When I see an older couple in khakis pausing with hiking poles in hand, I know it is whom I am waiting for: Bill and Betsy Howland.  They have generously offered to meet me here, on the summit of a mountain that I am preparing to study just as Bill did for several summers beginning in 1991.

Catherine Wessel, "Old Friends in the Alpine"