The walking track at the Unity park in better days. Dana Wilde photo

A few years ago, one of the uncannily huge windstorms that have been ramping up in frequency and fury lately toppled the enormous old pine tree standing on the shore of Unity Pond at the Field of Dreams park. It lay bisecting the small, stony beach, its branches in the water.

When I saw it, I thought, “Well, before you know it, it’ll be taken care of.” The forestry students at Unity College will be down here with their roaring energy and chain saws to seize the opportunity to take the tree apart, study its decrepit insides, figure out ingenious uses for the wood and just clean up the mess.

That pine had been sort of iconic, in my eyes anyway. I used to wander down there when the whole lot just outside Unity village was a big, overgrown field with a two-wheel track running down to the little beach, where the tree had overseen its domain for a good solid hundred years. The track was made by vehicles from the college hauling canoes and equipment to the beach for outings to collect water samples or launch camping expeditions for classes and research projects. Sometimes, the students would party there by campfire.

Around 1990, college co-founder and philanthropist Bert Clifford arranged for the undeveloped lot to be transformed into a community park, with baseball fields, tennis and basketball courts, a soccer-lacrosse pitch, a kids playground, a walking track and access to the little beach. Plans were drawn up, baseball fields were created. Canoes were launched by industrious students and community members. For about 25 years, through a couple of changes of hands in which the college reemerged as the owner, the park was kept trim and true every summer.

So when that old, iconic pine tree overseeing the lake blew down, I figured the students would be taking care of it like flies on toast.

Well, I was wrong. The students never came with their chain saws. The corpse of the tree is still there. It got blown around in another calamitous windstorm, and is now blocking the beach completely.

It’s a sign of the times, like we say.

I think the main reason the students never came to deal with the tree is there are hardly any students left. The management that took over just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit has basically deserted the campus for a headquarters in New Gloucester. Rumor has it there are about 50 students on campus at any given time during the school year, but even that might be an exaggeration. The rest — in an irony fit only for the bleakest emptiness of postmodern life — are online students.

In case you don’t get irony, it’s this: Unity College used to be the ultimate hands-on, four-year college. The science students got into the water as often as they got into a classroom. The outdoor recreation students slept in bug-infested wilderness areas as often as they pored over homework. The conservation law enforcement students spent more time trekking the woods than they did writing papers. But at the renamed Unity Environmental University, you get your degree in animal science not in the woods, but on a computer screen.

The Unity Environmental University campus in Unity, shown June 22, 2023, now sits mostly unused after the school moved operations to New Gloucester and transitioned to online instruction. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald file

The jettisoning of hands-on learning in favor of sitting in front of a laptop or a cellphone also jettisons the fundamental value of the education the college nurtured in the decades before and after I taught there, which was around the time the park was constructed. You can’t learn about the woods in front of a computer, which I say with firsthand knowledge of the alarming hollowness of online college classes, having taught them in another gig for several discouraging years.

For the administrators of the online university, success is measured with dollar signs. Unity Environmental University now has thousands of paying students, where Unity College had to work hard to keep 500 students enrolled. Now there’s more money. But it’s hard to believe there’s anything remotely resembling the rough-and-ready, sometimes slightly goofy synthesis of books, backpacks, chain saws and camaraderie that made Unity College valuable.

When money is the measure of all value, communities get hollowed out. The acquisition of money becomes its own moral universe, and actual, living moral and ethical problems get set aside, as if they’re separate universes.

If you go down to the park now, you can see they’re not separate universes.

The fields and open areas used to be mowed and weed-whacked practically daily by regular grounds custodians. The fine gravel of the walking track was dragged level regularly. The plastic or chain-link fences got repaired fairly promptly when weather battered them. Dogs were not allowed on the grounds.

In the past few summers, contract groundskeepers swoop in every couple of weeks and race around the open areas on high-powered lawn mowers. They do almost no weed-whacking. Most places out of range of the big mowers are overgrown with grass and weeds. The kids’ playground is surrounded by ragged-looking tick and mosquito habitat.

The walking track is not maintained at all. Where people used to stroll side by side with wife, husband or friend on level black gravel, now much of it has devolved to single-lane footpath, the rest patchy with weeds. People walk their dogs undeterred by unenforced “No Dogs Allowed” signs, leaving piles of feces here and there around the 1-mile track. The white plastic fences are in ramshackle disrepair. Grass grows so thick on the soccer pitch it’s hard to kick a ball, even after it’s been mowed. The pitch itself is long since neglected and too hilly to hold even a kids soccer game.

This winter, a giant old poplar uprooted near the little beach, and lies half in the water, unattended near the corpse of the old pine. Near the railroad tracks, a blowdown of pine trees planted by Gary Zane and a squad of college students 40 years ago lies unattended and rotting after another hellacious gale whose existence was greased by climate change, which is greased by carbon emissions, which are greased by oil company executives’ love of money.

The park now evokes for me memories of the weedy, rusting, neglected parks we saw in Eastern Europe, where the recently ousted Communist governments had destroyed the social economy. The communities’ will to keep things spruced up had drained away.

The college was created 60 years ago by a group of people who wanted a community resource for Waldo County. A place where local kids could get a decent college education, local people could work decent jobs that fostered a decent community. The founders committed a lot of time, energy, property and money to it.

Unity College never made money, but it made a community. It became invaluable.

That value is well on its way to drained away. The college’s specialists and students could have played a significant local role in cleaning up the PFAS disaster. A former student who now runs an environmental lab recently told me his network for hiring interns and employees has practically collapsed with the exit of the college.

On a midday drive through campus this week, at a time when Unity College used to be bustling with students and professors, I did not see a single human being at Unity Environmental University.

The college’s abandonment of northern Waldo County is a bitter betrayal of the community and its history. It drains the social and economic opportunities the founders set out to create. You can see what that drain looks like with your own eyes at the park.

Dana Wilde lives in Troy. You can contact him at dwilde.naturalist@gmail.com. His book “Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods” is available from North Country Press.  Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.