The following tribute to Harold Snyder was written by Dr. Fred Van Dyke.

There was no fanfare when a group of young men from Grand Rapids, Michigan traveled north to Kalkaska County and purchased 65 acres of land on the shores of Big Twin Lake in 1956. Their leader was Harold Snyder, a high school biology teacher. Harold’s vision was to create a "science camp" for junior high boys where they would, in his words, "Learn God's word in God's world." In this effort, Harold was driven by personal experience and Christian faith. In his experience in teaching science, particularly biology, Harold found that students remembered little of what he said to them in lectures, but nearly all of what he said, and what they discovered, through outdoor experiences in nature. His faith was grounded in the Bible. Nature and God were separate things because nature was a creation of God. Nature was not divine, but it bore God’s mark, and that mark was there for all to see. Many have affirmed these ideas in theory. Harold believed them. It took courage to act. But belief without courage is no belief at all.

By 1962, after several years of leading the “Au Sable Trails Camp for Boys,” Harold had earned a PhD and accepted a position on the faculty of Taylor University in Indiana. It was not long before he saw the value of expanding Au Sable’s curriculum to include college courses, and told his administrators that every biology student at Taylor should take such courses at Au Sable. When they replied that this would be too impractical, too costly, and too unpopular (especially with the premed students), Harold made another courageous decision. He negotiated a contract with Ferris State University, not far from the camp, and told his superiors that he would work for Ferris if they didn’t value Au Sable. For Harold, better Au Sable without Taylor than Taylor without Au Sable. The administrators gave in. Au Sable began a college curriculum.

Over time, Au Sable would expand its curriculum to Christian colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada. Such growth was a product of the vision of Au Sable’s first Executive Director, Dr. Cal DeWitt. So Cal is to be rightly regarded as the father of the Au Sable Institute. But before it was an Institute, Au Sable was a place, one that bore the unique conviction that God would work through His creation to inspire and instruct those who would dare to learn in it and from it. Harold Snyder was the father of Au Sable. It was Harold who had an abiding certainty of its place and purpose.

First coming to Au Sable in May of 1984 as a not-yet-30-year-old faculty member, I knew this purpose, but it was at Au Sable that I first saw it manifested dramatically. The ideas I spoke of in lectures were now richly revealed, by acts of God, in the places that we went, the works of creation that we saw, and the life borrowed from the Creator that we would hold in our hands. And I began to learn that prayer was the primary agent of “collaboration” with God in teaching, asking Him to reveal what I could only talk about. My requests were granted again and again, and with revelation came unspeakable joy. What the poet Edmund Spenser described in verse (The Faerie Queene), I witnessed in power.

The fields, the floods, the heavens, with one consent
Did come to laugh on me, and favour mine intent

The genius of Harold Snyder was not only that he knew that God would make such revelations, but that He would place His signature of joy on their discovery, and the knowledge of nature’s life would become a commitment to the preservation of nature’s value. Through Harold’s faith, the place called Au Sable would repeatedly “favour his intent” and bring the joy of its laughter to the process of education.

When I was no longer an Au Sable professor but its Executive Director, I often visited Harold in his home, literally “across the pond” (Louie’s Pond) from the Au Sable Campus. I did this to keep him informed of our current work, receive his counsel, and elicit his support, but perhaps, more than any other reason, to enjoy his company. It has been said that the house of worship is the place where God’s space touches our space and the Sabbath where God’s eternity touches our time. In Harold’s house, I had an overwhelming sense of both. There was an unmistakable “peace” there, not because stillness was present and strife was absent (though this was so), but in the place itself, and Harold with it, both “rooted” in something of inexpressible depth, unchanging and unmoving. And as for time, that currency which we find so precious in modern life, there seemed no limit, something that could be spent lavishly (though never wastefully). And so, whether speaking or listening, Harold never appeared hurried. He seemed to have plenty of time, so much so that he didn’t appear to be thinking about time at all.

Harold’s wealth in time was not bound to his home. He carried it with him whenever he called on me on campus. In these visits, Harold never displayed the vanity of “you’re not paying enough attention to me,” even if he arrived in the midst of pressing, and sometimes distracting, efforts. But just as he seemed in all circumstances not to be thinking of time, he also seemed never to be thinking of himself. Not that he was consciously trying to be “unselfish,” but that he had come to see, and invest his time, in me, and so released all awareness of himself for that purpose. And his counsel never took the form of prescriptions of what to do next or how to do it. It was invariably a word of encouragement, some expression of “You are capable of doing what needs to be done. God will help you see what that is.”

Harold displayed courage in coming to Au Sable, investing his personal and professional life in it (and, to Harold, I don’t think there was any distinction), and the same courage in forgetting the “value” of time and the pressure of protecting his “image.” But I don’t think Harold would have called these things “courage.” He would have called them “faith.” He knew that risks were real, but he never told himself a story of fear, of what “might go wrong.” He told himself a story of faith, a story of what God can do.

There is grief in Harold’s absence for all who knew him well. But to remember the life of Harold Snyder is an intense pleasure, and we complement our greatest pleasures with praise. Whenever any of us now think of Harold, let it be an intense pleasure for us, and let us complete that experience with praise. In whatever memorial services are held for Harold (I am sure there will be more than one), let that service be one of pleasure and joy. May praise be long, and make it loud! For Harold now knows the pleasure of the great commendation, “Well done, good servant. Enter into the joy of your Master.”

Fred Van Dyke
Au Sable Faculty – 1984-1999
Trustee, Treasurer, and Chair of the Au Sable Board – 2009-2011
Executive Director of the Au Sable Institute – 2011-2020