The Schoolhouse Museum sits across from the town hall on Maine Street in Poland, a small white building that once rang with the recitations of schoolchildren and now holds the town's photographs, records and relics. On Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 6:30 p.m., it will hold something else: a neighbor's account of standing beneath the third-highest mountain on earth.
Madelyn Given, who lives nearby, will present on her trek to Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalaya Mountains. The Poland Historical Society is hosting the talk, and refreshments will be served. Admission is free, and anyone curious enough to come is welcome. For more information, the society can be reached at 998-5268.
Kanchenjunga rises on the border between Nepal and India and is the third highest mountain in the world. Its upper reaches are considered sacred by the people who live around it, and climbers have traditionally stopped short of the true summit out of respect for that belief.
Given did not go there to climb the summit. She was invited to trek to the mountain's remote east base camp by Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the head guide of the IMAX Everest Expedition and the son of Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Hillary. The route took her through country that few outsiders see: camping on the Zemu Glacier, visiting monasteries, and eating in the homes of the Lepcha people.
That invitation was not the beginning of Given's adventures but a chapter in a longer story. She was a longtime elementary school teacher in the Lewiston area, where she chaired the Master Teachers program and served on the school system's certification committee. She was inducted into Who's Who of American Teachers. Then she retired, and the second life began.
She through-hiked the Appalachian Trail for the first time after retiring. From there she went on to run a marathon on each of the seven continents, becoming the first woman in Maine to do so, and to climb a high-altitude mountain on each continent. She wrote about all of it in a 2013 book, "Outstanding Feats by An Ordinary Woman," published under her own imprint, MKG Adventures LLC. The book's premise, as she frames it, is that you are never too old to try something new.
Given has told this Kanchenjunga story before. In April 2011 she gave a slideshow and talk about the trek to the Maine chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club, in the Morrell Room of the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, following a potluck dinner. The Poland presentation will cover the same ground for a hometown audience, with photographs and firsthand detail about the glacier camps, the monasteries and the families who hosted her along the way.
The setting suits the subject. The Poland Historical Society has built a reputation for a busy calendar of talks, drawing on the town's own residents and their far-flung experiences. Earlier this year the society put out a call for help identifying more than 100 unidentified photographs from the town's past, some dating to the 1800s, and invited residents to the Schoolhouse Museum to put names to faces. President Jack Rozos and vice president David Tedford, one of the society's founders, have made that kind of public participation a priority, on the theory that history only gets preserved when people bring it out into the open.
A neighbor who ran marathons on seven continents and camped on a Himalayan glacier is exactly the kind of history a small-town society can put on display. The talk begins at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 1129 Maine St. in Poland. It runs about an hour, and the refreshments are part of the deal.