Listen to Episode 62 on Jam.ai
Last Tuesday an iconic item on our Los Gatos campus met an unfortunate demise. The Dragon that oversaw students as they crossed over the bridge into the Middle School was destroyed by a branch during a recent winter storm.
According to one of our alums who visited a couple of years ago, Hugh Parker, the Dragon dates to the late 1970s and was built as part of a school play called “The Scaly Tailed Yurd,” which was about a dragon. The play involved all students from grades 4-8. According to Hugh, they all called the dragon, at least in the early years, the Scaly Tailed Yurd because of the tie to the play. Art teacher Jeanie Aikman oversaw the creation of the dragon as far as we know.
For more than 40 years, the Dragon watched over our campus. It saw thousands of children pass by it daily, survived the remodeling of the campus during the early 2000s, occasionally had years where it became a bit lost amidst the overgrowth, and yet always remained one of the most noticeable things you would see as you headed over into the Middle School. It had a birds’ eye view these last 15 years into the Multipurpose Room, watching its evolution from a meeting space to a rainy-day lunchroom to its current incarnation as the music classroom. It survived the hottest days and the coldest nights, the years of drought and the rare – but not unprecedented – times when water levels in the creek rose so high they nearly touched the bottom of the bridge.
Oh, don’t I wish that the Dragon could talk and share stories from the last 40 years perched in that spot. What would it tell us? I would like to think it would talk of the joy it experienced each and every day on campus, the children it saw playing in the creek during the day, the wildlife it saw drinking from the creek at night. Perhaps it would lament the balls that so often rolled by, or applaud the ingenuity of those who finally installed a fence a few years ago to keep the balls out. Maybe it would reflect on the unusual year not too long ago in which everyone, including the dragon, put on a mask.
As we often note, our Los Gatos campus is a magical place to be a child, a magical place to grow up in your early years. The Dragon added its own little bit of student-designed and built magic to the natural magic all around it. When I heard the news and saw the photos of the damage, I felt a genuine sense of loss. I have to believe that the Dragon, if it could talk, would tell us how grateful it was to have been a part of our community.