An Interview with Norval
Norval and camper circa 1982 at the Manice Education Center.
Norval Soleyn is the 2025 Living Legacy Honoree. We celebrate his years of service to Christodora. Learn more about Norval in the interview below.
How did you first discover a love for the outdoors?
When I was 9, I joined the Children’s Garden Club at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is where I was introduced to the secret life of plants. At the age of 12, I was selected by my school to attend a camp session at the Alice Rich Northrop Memorial Camp. I spent the month of July that year in the woods of Mt Washington, MA, and that introduced me to the true wonders of nature.
Campers at Tannery Falls, circa 1982.
What was your initial experience with Christodora, and how has it evolved over the years?
When I was a sophomore in college, my mother had me take my brother to a presentation about Manice at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. The presenter was Ted Elliman, who was looking for campers for Manice’s second summer. It turned out that my brother was too old, but I approached Ted about the possibility of join the camp staff. A couple of months later, I was driving a Rent-A-Wreck van full of JHS students from the Academy of Environmental Sciences up to the camp in Florida, MA. I worked at Manice for the entirety of the next 2 summers and parts of the 2 summers after that, helping to chaperone the first two alumni wilderness trips. Many years later, Judy Rivkin, Christodora’s executive director at the time, asked me to do presentation workshops over the course of several summers with campers at the program at the Yale Great Mountain Forest Camp in Connecticut.
As an adult, how has your relationship with nature changed?
Nature continues to evolve as a result of my growing appreciation for my place in it through observation and more considered interaction. The verb should not be in the past tense; it should always be in the present progressive.
What is a piece of advice or wisdom you have for future Christodora campers?
There is probably more about what you will experience at Manice than you could ever know, so never stop asking questions or turning away from things that are new, because the journey will last a lifetime. And it will last longer if you can share what you've experienced with everyone else in your life.