The Baxter Award Part II: The Dream Realized

Hagit Elaz, the 2016 Baxter Award recipient, had expectations for her trip that weren’t matched by reality either. She and her father journeyed to Poland, where he was born and where much of their family was murdered in the Holocaust. Hagit’s paternal grandparents were survivors who met right after the Holocaust. Together they erected a family gravestone with almost 30 names of family members killed in the horrific Treblinka death camp.

“My dad sees Poland as a graveyard,” she says. “When I told him it was my dream to understand our family story, he would always say, ‘this is not a dream — this is a nightmare.’”

On their two-week excursion, Hagit and her father searched for days to find the family gravestone.

“All over Poland, I was looking for evidence of what happened not just to my family but to all the Jews there. I was looking for our history,” she says. “And I wanted to see it written all over the place, because in my mind, it was a big deal. I wanted to see it there.”

There was little evidence to be found. Many of the Jewish burial sites were overgrown. Ghettos had been torn down and developed.

“Most of my family died in Treblinka and it was leveled to the ground. All that was left was a beautiful forest,” says Hagit. “It was really disturbing for me at first. There were no signs of the death or destruction. A grave site was now a dress shop, a ghetto was an opera house — and I was trying to figure out what my Baxter story was. How am I going to tell this story when there’s nothing here?”

Telling the story is a crucial part of the Baxter Award, and often, the story proposed in each successful proposal — the dream imagined — is not the same as the dream realized. 

“There is a moment where my dad and I met in the middle of a bridge crossing a river and it was just like a story,” says Sonia. “I was nervous and I could see he was nervous. I wasn’t quite ready to see him yet, and I’d spent the two hours right before that crying in this park.” 

“It was actually called the Park of Tears,” she laughs.

After their storybook reunion, Sonia and her father explored a nearby botanical garden and spent a few days together in Coimbra.

“It was really interesting to be the visitor in a country because that's what my dad had been from 1985 until 2010,” says Sonia. “One time I plugged in my phone at the bar and my dad was like, ‘you can't do that, you're being extremely rude right now.’ And it made me wonder how many things he did when he was in the U.S. that people would call out, just because he didn't realize. It really built my empathy for him living here all these years and choosing to go back to Portugal.”

After a few days together reconnecting and catching up, Sonia broke some unexpected news to her father. 

“I’d initially planned on doing 100 more miles and then I was going to stay with my dad for a month after, but I started feeling like I should finish the trail,” says Sonia. “So another hard part was calling up my dad and telling him I was doing 300 more, which meant less time with him. I felt a lot of guilt going into the conversation, like I would be letting him down, but he was really supportive. That was a big moment for us...and he even ended up walking for three days with me.”

Andy and Matthew had expected their stay in Ladakh to be rustic, but the surprisingly rigorous work days harvesting hay were punctuated by something more rustic than Andy had envisioned: bed bugs. 

“That first place we lived in, we only stayed for a week, because I got bed bugs. Working during the day, tapped out from heat exhaustion at night and then not being able to sleep...it was difficult,” says Andy. “I really learned how cushy life is in the United States. Just being able to sleep in predictable, sanitary conditions is something to never take for granted.”

Their friendship made all the difference in weathering the intense physical nature of the six-week experience.

“Andy and I had good EB — what we call expedition behavior. I don't remember any riffs or problems, though he may tell you differently,” Matthew laughs.

“No, if it wasn't for Matthew, I think it would have been a lot harder,” says Andy. “For both of us, we gained a deep appreciation for what it really means to live a sustainable, holistic life on the land. It's incredibly rewarding and also very challenging. That was a big eye-opener.”

Hagit, too, found what she was looking for, and like so many Baxter Award recipients, found what she was not looking for.

“We really wanted to find my family’s gravestone, and we knew the cemetery where it was located but weren’t sure beyond that. When we finally found it, we saw that the whole cemetery was vandalized and destroyed,” she says. “It was very obvious we weren't going to find the gravestone. That was really disappointing.”

However, Hagit and her father had a picture of the gravestone with her grandparents standing beside it, and while they were in Poland, they discovered a nonprofit organization that had created a photographic database of Jewish grave sites in the country so that people could at least find where their family gravestones or plots once stood. 

“We submitted the picture and a few weeks later once we were back in America, this group sent us the exact coordinates and a picture of the actual shattered gravestone that my grandparents once built. It was an incredible closing of this loop.”

Once the Baxter recipients return home after their eye-opening, life-changing experiences, they share presentations at the annual Baxter Breakfast to a community of staff, friends, family and past recipients. Next year’s winners introduce themselves and announce their ambitious journeys. And of course, hardworking kitchen staff serve pancakes in honor of the many Saturday morning pancake breakfasts Matt used to host.

“As someone who knew Matthew Baxter, it became very important to me to bring him into the room at every Baxter breakfast, and to really remind people of just what an incredible human being he was,” says Kristina.

These presentations are part of the ripple effect that inspire NatureBridge staff members to send in their own Baxter applications, bond past recipients and instill even more excitement in the newly selected Award winners. The breakfasts also offer another chance at reflection.

“I wrote up my presentation, cried a bunch and sent it to Kristina Rylands, and she wrote back, ‘You didn't put any of the hard parts in there,’” says Sonia, now an education manager at NatureBridge. “And I hadn’t because my dad was going to be there and we didn't really finish those conversations. So the day before my presentation, I called my dad and we finally had the honest dialogue we both needed in order to open up. It took me all the way up until the day before the breakfast to really understand that sometimes you need to pull off that band aid and have those big conversations. It can be healing for both of you.”

Now 25 years removed from their Baxter experience, Andy and Matthew continually take the chance to reflect on what their time in India together means for their lives and career trajectories.

“My trip with Matthew shifted the way that I see what a meaningful life is really about,” says Andy, now Education and Programs Mentor for Thorne Nature Experience in Boulder, CO. 

“It also stoked a lot of interest within me to get involved with the Aboriginal rights of people on this land. I’m now building relationships with Cheyenne and Arapaho communities, and I wouldn't have become nearly as conscious about all the rights of First Nations people if I hadn't done that trip with Matthew — it gave me a sense about what it really means to be living close to the land. That was a formative experience. I think about it often.”

Matthew’s Baxter Award excursion to India was not just his first trip to Asia, but basically his first trip out of the country. It would not be his last.

“I couldn't believe that I was a kid from Kansas working in Yosemite National Park to begin with,” says Matthew. “To make my way to this small Himalayan village...I don’t think you can get more on the other side of the world than where we were. Without the Baxter Award trip, I couldn’t have started on that path of exploration. Since then I’ve traveled back there, ended up going to Nepal, Tibet, China, India — it allowed me to go straight to the biggest mountains in the world.”

For some, a Baxter Award inspires endless new adventures; for others, it provides invaluable, life-long memories. 

“I can't tell you how much life it breathed into mine and my dad's relationship,” says Hagit, now NatureBridge’s Director of National Operations. “We were on a mission, driving around Poland and my dad would just tell stories that I’d never heard before. It was so special. It's changed our relationship forever. We still talk about it all the time.”

The trip also changed her relationship with Poland. Initially, Hagit wanted to unearth the details of her family’s murder; to understand the history of her family in a country that her father had never wanted to talk about.

“I went looking for death and I found life,” she says. “We found the house where my dad was born, and walked through the downtown area where my grandparents lived. It was really moving. And I also realized all the foods and music of my childhood that came from my grandparents and Israel...they were so influenced by Poland. Gefilte fish and kugel are Polish. Klezmer music? Polish! I felt so torn between feeling like Poland was home and then seeing these shattered cemeteries and old swastikas; feeling like I didn’t belong, yet feeling so strongly that I did. That’s what changed the most.”

The Baxter Award’s ripples spread further with every conversation and trip that occurs. Each year, more NatureBridge staff members ask themselves the tantalizing question: what would my Baxter be?

“It’s a rare, rare thing to have that kind of opportunity within an organization,” says Andy. “I don't know anyone else who does it.”

The award has become much like Matt Baxter himself: larger than life. The power of the individual transcendent experiences that happen each year as part of the Baxter Award have coalesced over 25 years to create an unbreakable spirit of community and adventure. It has become integral to NatureBridge and also represents the best, unique qualities of the organization. 

“I chatted with at least 10 past recipients about the essence of the award and I talked with Kristina about who Matt was when I was in the application process,” says Sonia. “Their support was incredible. I can’t say enough about the Baxter community.”

“The connection to the Baxter family means a lot to me,” says Hagit. “Whenever I see them, they always ask how my dad is doing. I think there’s forever a special connection there.” 

When I asked Sonia, Andy, Matthew, Hagit and Kristina what they would say to a NatureBridge employee considering submitting a Baxter proposal, their answers were uniform and unequivocal: do it.

“What would be your wildest dream? I mean, wow,” says Kristina. “If somebody were to ask you that, what would you say? What would you do?”

Ask yourself that question aloud right now: what would be your wildest dream? What would your Baxter be?

Then heed their advice: do it.