Island Profile: Trying to recreate for kids his own Island childhood joys

Mark Mobius, yes, Paul and Dorothy’s son, now 42, went to college off-Island and worked for a number of years in the Peace Corps and the American South. Now he’s back, a feat he claims he’s been trying to accomplish for the last 20 years. He said he’s delighted to be here.

His parents, as many Islanders will remember, were partners in the Pridwin Hotel with the Petries from before Mark was born until 1986,when he was 16.

Growing up with access to the sailboats, motor boats, the game room and all the older college kids working there to hang out with was part of what he loved. Also there was the beach and the acres of woods behind their home on Nostrand Parkway, so deep that he and his younger brother, Matt, never dared to venture to the end of them.

“I was always just fooling around, flipping logs over, splashing around in a little muddy area, a little marsh, and I was just fascinated by those things, snakes and bugs. And down along the water’s edge, if you turned the rocks over, there were eels and crabs and all kinds of stuff and that’s what I wanted to be doing. I really like to compare how much I liked it to how much I didn’t like summer camp. My parents attempted to send me a couple of times and it was only for a week or two but I felt like I was missing out on so much. I always knew the summer only lasted so long and I really wanted to be here.”

No one was surprised that Mark went on to major in experimental sciences and biology when he went to college at the University of Virginia. After graduation, he joined the Peace Corps and was based in Bolivia from 1995 to 1997. He was supposed to be teaching environmental science in the school system there but the educational situation was far from stable. The power was often off, school would be closed for some fiesta or another at least once a week and then the teachers went on strike for months and the schools were closed. He worked on starting a library with help from the Island’s Presbyterian Church, which raised some funds and sent books that the teachers had requested.

He stayed on after his term expired because he had met someone he wanted to marry. They returned together when her term expired in 1998. They moved to North Carolina, married, and in 2000 he enrolled in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, where he earned a master’s degree in environmental management in 2003.

Mark began work in environmental consulting, based in the northern Virginia town of Aldie, “a quarter the size of Shelter Island,” he said. He focused mostly on wetlands restoration and environmental management. Most of his work was for the military and the Defense Department, managing the natural resources that their bases contained. “In most areas, a military installation represents the largest unbothered chunk of natural habitat anywhere. On Forts Bragg and Lejeune, there are tens of thousands of acres. There are trails and bombing ranges but the majority [of the acreage] is just left there. People think of the military as being bad for the environment but in reality most of the time they run the best preserved areas.” If forest experience is what the troops are training for, the forest has to be maintained — tanks can’t go crashing through, destroying it.

He went to work for a company involved in wetlands restoration but, when the economy worsened, 40 percent of their professional staff was cut in a single day. Being one of the highest paid, he said, he was among the first to go. He then spent some time unemployed and going through a divorce at the same time.

An opportunity came in 2010 to teach science at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton. He was the resident scientist, a position requiring science experiments with different age groups. He went on to be a full-time teacher for two years. “But it was just not my calling. I wanted really just to do science. If I’d wanted to be a teacher, I would have been one by then. It was a mixed-age classroom, seven- to 12-year-olds, only 11 of them.” It would have been a hard job for an experienced teacher but for someone with no teaching background, it was a little more than he wanted to handle.

This spring he finished his last semester.

Currently, he’s a project manager for a landscape design company here on the Island, Buttercup Farm and Garden; they design patios and pools and the surrounding plantings, with the masonry subcontracted. In addition, he dedicates three mornings a week to an undertaking dear to his heart, which he founded with the support and urging of his significant other, Cassandra Bliss. It’s called the EcoDiscovery Experience, which he offers area children three mornings a week at Sylvester Manor.

Geared for five- to seven-year-olds, the program currently has eight children enrolled. They meet at the Quaker meeting site on the Sylvester Manor grounds, where Mark has set up comfortable work tables and chairs. They plan their expedition for the morning and set out on whatever the day plan might be, snacks in their backpacks. They might be checking their rain gauges, concentrating on edible food to be found in the woods, setting a series of bug traps or collecting mud samples.

“We dig, we turn over logs, we examine leaves, we get dirty and we challenge comfort zones,” Mark said. “We don’t just learn about nature; we engage with the habitats we explore. We look, listen, smell, touch, and in some cases taste our way through the environment. And we have a blast doing it!” They come back with a half an hour to spare, get out crayons and watercolors and paper and they draw what they like. He tries, really, to duplicate his own childhood joys.

Although the program ends tomorrow for the season, he plans to return  next summer. EcoDiscovery Experience can be reached at 731-4910.