Transcription of Ted Coffin for the show Prioritizing Peace #165
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Lisa: Maine is to not only many individuals who are dedicated to remembering people who have served our country and our state and ways big and small but also amazing mountains so when you combine these 2 things, amazing mountains, amazing people you get The Summit Project and today we have with us Ted Coffin who is a volunteer with The Summit Project. Thanks so for coming in and talking to us.
Ted: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: I want to talk about The Summit Project but first tell me a little bit about yourself. You are from Portland, you went to Deering High School and you now live in Raymond.
Ted: Yes, I met my old wife 18 years ago and she lived in Raymond. I moved up there and love being out in nature. A little bit away from the city but close enough to get into the city and still have some of the nightlife in the restaurants and what not.
Lisa: For you being outside is really important.
Ted: Absolutely.
Lisa: You’ve been a hiker and you’re an endurance athlete so that’s how you got involved with The Summit Project.
Ted: Yes. I met Dave Cote who’s the founder of The Summit Project in 2013 at the Run for the Fallen. A few of us we’re training for some of our endurance events and honoring the fallen. We had a heavy backpacks, some extra sandbags on top of that and Dave Cote came up like the whirlwind that he is and introduced himself that I need some good, strong hikers like you guys.
He handed me his card and off he went. I was a little bit shocked, stunned and didn’t know what had just happened. I went back home after the event and researched and said well, this guy, he’s the real deal. His heart is in the right place and volunteered for the inaugural hike on Mt. Katahdin and told him I want to stay involved and do anything that you need done. I’ve been working very closely with him since then.
Lisa: Describe The Summit Project, what is it for people who are listening that don’t know.
Ted: The Summit Project is a living memorial. What we do is we collect stones from the families of the fallen and they’ll take stones that have sentimental meanings. They’ve come from farmers field, from fire pits, from riverbeds where they’ve done some fishing or from mountains that they’ve hiked.
They get the stones to us, we get them engraved and the stones are housed at the maps, the military entrance processing station in Portland. They’ve got a beautiful room. Each stone has its own little shelf that sits on. You can check out the stones and we take these stones on tribute hikes.
There are several posted events where we’ve climbed Mt. Katahdin and Cadillac Mountain. We carry the stones, carry them to the summit and bring them back down so that other people can do different events with them. We learn about the fallen soldiers that we’re carrying. We think about them as we’re hiking and at the end of the hike, the end of the hosted hikes we’ll meet the families.
We’ll hand the stone back to the families. We’ll have that personal connection and when all that’s done we’ll reflect on what it meant to us, what the hike was, what we thought about and we’ll write a letter back to the families and just keep that personal connection with the hopes of making Maine the smaller community that it is.
Lisa: For you what is the connection between the stone and the hike and the fallen soldier? How do all of these things connect?
Ted: It’s amazing to me just to hold this stone that a family actually went to look for found and that stone is their soldier. It’s their son, it’s their daughter, it’s their brother and sister. You can see that when they’re holding it. When you get that stone and you hand that back to them, it’s more than a hug. It’s more than a handshake. You’ve actually carried a burden for just a little bit for them. It’s an amazing experience and it’s an amazing connection with people that you may not otherwise have known.
Lisa: It’s a way to have something, have a tangible reminder of someone but at the same time I think it’s interesting you used the word carry the burden that the sense that having lost someone dear to you that becomes a heaviness. For you to take on that heaviness and journey with it for a while and have it become part of you is important.
Ted: Absolutely. It’s more than a name on a wall or a plaque or something like that. To me it’s not just a stone, it’s a living entity. It takes on different forms for the hiker, for the family, for people that research it and see it online. I’ve been involved long enough and done enough with the different stones. I see the stones and I know who the stones represent and I know who the stories are surrounded around them. It’s a very, very unique and amazing idea to bring everyone closer together and help the healing process as much as we can.
Lisa: You said that you first met the founder at the Run for the Fallen.
Ted: Yes.
Lisa: How did you first get involved with that project and why?
Ted: I’ve never been very patriotic. I have a grandfather who was in the military and now has a cousin that’s current military. Doing some of the endurance events that I do there are military based endurance event. I’ve just met other people that are like-minded that want to push themselves a little bit. Met some different military people and Run for the Fallen it started out as just it was another training day.
It was another race that we could do under some heavy weight. It started out with 4 of us that we had heavy backpacks. We’re carrying bricks in them. 2 guys brought extra sandbags to carry and as we got rocking and then we rock a little bit and we walked a little bit and we get down to the part where the signs were for all the fallen soldiers and their families by.
At that point, we were swapping the sandbag around a little bit just sharing that extra weight and extra burden. When we got down to where those families were we were actually fighting over who got to keep the sandbag. We all just wanted to carry that extra burden a little bit farther after seeing these families and seeing the shock on their face, the surprise, the happiness that people would do something like that to one of their fallen.
This year, we actually carried The Summit Project stones during for the Run for the Fallen. We know whose stones we had. We saw the families out there interacted with them and when we told them that I’ve got your son’s stone with me. They were just blown away and they love it.
They’re amazed that we would take on just the very, very slight burden that we take that on for their soldier and tell their story and make the connection with them.
Lisa: As you were describing this, you got very emotional.
Ted: Yes.
Lisa: This happened a while ago. This is something that … And you’ve done it now twice it sounds like.
Ted: Yes.
Lisa: You still carry these emotions associated with the action of connection.
Ted: Yeah. When we carry the stones to the top of the summits, we do a ceremony where we all talk about the stones. There’s some rules with The Summit Project. You need to learn about the soldier. You need to read what’s on the website. There’s some videos posted. You watch the videos and then you need to do some other research about the soldiers.
You need to talk about the soldiers, talk about their families. You need to tell other people, make sure that the Maine heroes aren’t forgotten. At the summit we’ll do a little ceremony where we talk about the soldier and we’ll place a stone. I have yet to get through that without getting choked up and just thinking about some of the hikes that we’ve done. I get choked up. It’s very emotional when you hand the stone back over to the families.
That’s harder than any hike that I’ve ever done is handing it back over to the families and knowing what that means to them and the connections that you’re making and then writing the letters back it takes some time to collect your thoughts and actually get that out on paper for the families to see.
Lisa: It must be very hard for these families to have this gap in their lives. There must be some part of them that really wants to make sure that their soldiers that their sons, daughters, grandchildren aren’t forgotten because then otherwise it seems like such a waste, such a waste of life. Do you feel like what you’re doing is speaking to the preciousness of these lives that have been lost?
Ted: That is the number one goal if people don’t get anything else out of what we talked about that The Summit Project, the number 1 goal is making sure that Maine heroes are not forgotten. We need to tell their story. We need to make sure that they don’t end up just being a name on the wall.
They’re a person. They had a great life before they went to serve They had a great life as they were serving. A lot of these soldiers did some amazing things. There’s a lot of them that saved a lot of lives through their actions. They’ve given us the freedom to be able to do this, to be able to talk about this. It’s amazing. Obviously you can’t ever fill that gap for the families but if we can just help them in any way, shoulder the burden for just a little bit that’s what we want to do.
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Lisa: Are there any stories that you can share with us about experiences you’d had without causing any problems with confidentiality?
Ted: I actually just went on, it was a non-hosted hike this weekend and the Lake Region High School, they actually built a 6-week curriculum around The Summit Project. I hiked with 19 high school girls and didn’t really know what to expect and I wasn’t planning on going. I had a trip that got cut short so I was able to go. I originally just wanted to go just to meet the girls to help them get the stones loaded and everything and turned out I was able to hike with them for the day.
Just from the beginning of when they were picking up the stones with how much reverence they were showing to the stones, to just hiking up the mountain and talking to these girls. I was blown away. I was amazed. 3 of them were our foreign exchange students that were there to carry the stones. It’s amazing.
One girl was from Germany and this is just how small this world is and that’s another mainstay of The Summit Project is just making the connections and making the community a lot smaller. She lives in Germany. One of the stones from Captain Jay Brainerd just came over from Germany 2 or 3 weeks ago. I had the honor of carrying that stone on Cadillac mountain 2 weeks ago.
The girl from Germany had choose that stone because of that connection. She lives a half hour away from where Jay Brainerd’s wife lives now. She hiked that stone. She’ll make that connection. No doubt they’re going to interact, meet when she gets back to Germany in a few months and just really meet.
Just some of the words that she said, she said if we share this in Maine, if I can share this in Germany, if everyone around the world can see this stuff and know who these soldiers were and know that these soldiers are dying maybe soldiers don’t have to die anymore, from a 16, 17-year-old girl. That was astounding.
Lisa: From a 16, 17-year-old girl who’s from a country against who we fought in World War 2.
Ted: Yes, amazing and astounding. Just so many stories like that this weekend with those girls, it was incredible. They weren’t stopping to take selfies and they weren’t posting on Facebook. It was just amazing. They’ve already done an essay. They did the hike. They’re going to write letters back.
They’ve got another program that they’re going to do for the school reenacting the hike, just amazing. There was a couple of the Gold Star moms that were there that we were hiking in their stones and they met them and that was just amazing to see the connection there when these girls met the moms, just amazing.
Lisa: A Gold Star mom is someone who has actually lost a child.
Ted: Yes.
Lisa: I think I had a brother, a sister. Maybe 2 brothers and a sister that were serving in the Middle East and my mother had the flag that has 3 blue stars in the window and this is a way to show that you have a child that is serving. Everybody came back and those stars stayed blue but to have the gold star that means that transition has occurred.
Ted: Yes.
Lisa: It’s not something that everybody in current society knows about.
Ted: Yes, and I didn’t know about it before getting involved with The Summit Project, meeting the Gold Star families. Just that term means so much more to me now than it ever could before. I’d seen it before, I’d hear it before but just never paid attention to it.
Lisa: I’m thinking about my experience with the conflict in the Middle East and how the first conflict occurred while I was in college and then it died down and then we had this other conflict that has just gone on and on and on and on. People are still dying. There’s still a war going on. There are still people who are sending letters to their children over there to serve.
Yet it’s easy to forget that this true. It’s easy to just live our lives on a daily basis. What you are trying to do, what The Summit Project is trying to do and what the Run for the Fallen is trying to do, all of this is to remind us that this is still out there. That these people are still fighting, they’re still serving, people are still losing their children and that life is still valuable.
Ted: Yes. That’s one of the things that at the military entrance process station when you go and see this room and the shelves that are all hand built by the volunteers. To see all of the stones there and just let it sink in. These are the soldiers, just the soldiers that have died since 9/11 and these are only the soldiers that the families have come forward to donate a stone.
There are some families that they’re not in the right place to be able to do that. It really brings it home when you see that. The first time we loaded all the stones out to bring to Baxter State Park for our first hike last year, last Memorial Day, we emptied all of the shelf and I just looked back on it. I think I said to Dave, I said I think The Summit Project is a great thing but I’d rather that those shelves look just like that and there wasn’t a stone up there at all.
We can’t do anything about the soldiers that have passed to bring them back. We can make sure that they’re not forgotten and hopefully this does bring some awareness to limit some of the casualties that we have moving forward.
Lisa: Ted, how can people find out about The Summit Project?
Ted: Just do a Google search, The Summit Project or the website is also Mainememorial.org. Lots of information on there about the different posted events we do. There’s a lot of information on individual stones and videos and testimonies and letters from the family and then letters from the hikers back to the families are also posted there, lots of information there.
Lisa: Ted, I appreciate the time that you have spent remembering those who have fallen and also connecting with the families of those who have fallen and as someone with many military members in my family, fortunately all of whom have arrived back on American soil safely I know how important this is so I appreciate for work that you are doing and the work of The Summit Project. We’ve been speaking with Ted Coffin who is a volunteer at The Summit Project. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Ted: Thank you for the time.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 165, prioritizing peace. Our guests have included Tim Wilson, Moses Small and Ted Coffin. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit the Mainemag.com/radio. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For preview of each week show, sign up for our our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as @doctorlisa and see my daily running photos as Bountiful One on Instagram.
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