IHT Ep 010 School

Fresh Notebooks

When I was a kid, the best thing about school was getting new notebooks. Man, I loved ‘em. All those crisp, blank pages just called out to be filled. Some kids like to draw, and yeah, I had a fair number of doodles in the lined leaves of my Steno 5-subject, but that wasn’t the real reason I loved all that fresh paper. And, yeah, I also wrote the occasional story in the back pages of my math or my science notebooks, but that wasn’t really it either. The big reason I got so stoked every August for back to school shopping was  … for actually taking notes.

I know, right? Nerd from the womb.

But it’s true. I took notes on everything–my classes, of course, but not just them. I’d take notes on library books about the rise of the Roman Empire, on the birds I saw at the feeder. I took notes on what Garfield did in the Sunday comics, and schemes for the most efficient way to clean my room … and dinosaurs, of course, lots and lots of dinosaurs.

That might seem like a weird thing to love, I know, but it’s not that different from those fans of Mary Kondo or the self-help section of Barnes and Noble. There is something deeply satisfying, about everything having its place, something seductive about the thought that this wild and contradictory and complicated life could all somehow make sense if we could just get it organized. I just happen to have always been the guy who liked to organize ideas into instead of towels and linens into closets. 

After buying fresh office supplies, my second favorite thing about school was getting textbooks, especially if they were new, and I was the first person to write my name on the little plate on the inside front cover. “Name Ben Lord, Condition: new.” I had barely gotten them covered with those trusty paper shopping bags before I’d start flipping through the pages, looking at the math symbols I didn’t understand, or the diagrams of a cell or the timelines of world history. Now here were some programs you could sink your teeth into. You could learn everything there was to know, all you had to do was start at page one and work your way through step-by-step. 

All of this is to say, I guess, that if anyone was ever set up to love school, it was me. Maybe it’s destiny or maybe it’s DNA but there is something in me that is uniquely and inherently built for school. What better place for a guy who loved programs and systems and step-by-step directions. 

So why for most of my schooling was I so abjectly miserable?

This episode of “I Heart This,” like all of our episodes, is a love story–the story of my love affair with school. But this story is a troubled one. It’s not just the feel-good rom-com kind of tale; it’s less Bridget Jones diary and more Charles and Camilla. It’s a story of youthful dreams and disappointment. Of being excluded and of finding my place. And it’s a story about what happens when one of your favorite things … is taking notes. It took me a long time to appreciate school for what it really was. Here’s how I got there. I’m Ben Lord. You’re listening to “I Heart This.”

Middle School

On my first day at Joseph A. DePaulo Junior High School, eleven-year-old me walked into an auditorium so full that I couldn’t see an open place to sit. My last school had been a tiny affair. Its entire student body would have easily fit in the first few rows here. And, on top of that, it had been in another town. So … in all of that giant room’s hormonal pandemonium … in that crowd of hundreds and hundreds of teenagers, I saw not a single  … familiar  … face. I knew nobody. I’m sure I was standing there, frozen, wondering what to do, when a deep-voiced teacher bellowed over at me to hurry up and find a seat instead of clogging up the aisle. 

Once the staff had finally gotten everyone’s attention, an administrator in a suit welcomed us from a podium on the stage and proceeded to lay down the law. Junior high school was different, he informed us. It was more serious. And we were expected to step up. No irresponsibility would be tolerated. This junior high school had rules to encourage us to do what was right. And if you didn’t do what you were supposed to, there were punishments. Fail to bring a pencil to class? Detention. Homework not turned in? Detention. Late to class? Detention. And to be clear, you were late to class if you weren’t in your seat ready to go when the bell rang. Maybe this approach actually worked to curb the delinquency of my peers. I don’t know. What I do know is that the terrified gerbil of my heart was so scared that for all of 7th grade I ran through the halls to my next class for fear of being late.

To be honest, I don’t remember much of seventh grade … at least, not in terms of actual events. What I do remember is the tight, writhing, clawing anxiety that radiated out from my abdomen for six and half hours straight almost every single day. And I remember how much energy it took to hide just how frightened I really was. It wasn’t the fact that there were rules that made me anxious. I liked a program. I was so with the program. The problem was the draconian punishment for making mistakes that I knew I would inevitably make. I lost my pencils all the time. And sometimes I left my homework on my desk at home instead of remembering to put it in my backpack. I was eleven, after all! 

And that’s why I ran from class to class. And everybody else noticed. 

I’d always been a social misfit. In elementary school, I was the kind of kid who tried so hard to make friends that I tended to make a fool of myself. But in 7th grade, I reached a new pinnacle of awkwardness. I was nearly a year younger than any other 7th graders and six inches shorter than most. I wore glasses and was in desperate need of orthodontics that I wouldn’t wear until high school. And most damningly, I’d spent the last seven years wearing a button down dress shirt and clip-on tie to school as part of Our Lady of Mercy’s uniform. So, in the early days, I wore collared shirts and plaids and sweatshirts with wolves on them. I had no idea how to dress myself like an American teenager in the late 1980s. And everybody noticed that too.  

There were a million reasons to make fun of me and my fellow students who found every goddamn one.

The cruelty that these things inspired in the kids around me was on a scale that I had a hard time comprehending. It was like a vast conspiracy. Somehow, every single one of the six hundred kids in that school seemed to know that I was an acceptable target for whatever frustration they were feeling. How that could happen when most of them didn’t even know my name still mystifies me. 

Kids would point and laugh and jeer at me in the halls for no reason I could fathom. They would grab my backpack as I raced through the halls to trip me up. They would knock piles of textbooks out of my hands. Name your stereotype of a bullied kit, and I experienced it. Right down to the kick me sign taped to my backpack and the thumbtacks on my chair

I was so friendless and alone that in 8th grade … when, for the first time in over a year, a few kids started talking to me like I was a human being … at first, I didn’t even answer them because I was so sure that they were just setting me up for some kind of torment.

I should have been loving school. It was a well-equipped school on a nice campus in a prosperous town. My classes were mostly good. My teachers were mostly kind. I was working hard and learning a lot. But a school isn’t a building or a curriculum. It’s a group of people. No matter how good your attitude or how much you’re a team player … no matter how much you might love to learn, or how willing you are to go with the program … school is miserable if people are cruel to you. It is its own kind of hell.

Another Reason

But even though that isolation was the most painful part of junior high school, there was another conflict growing between me and school as well. One that would grow over time. One that would cut right to the very purpose of school. 

It started with types of conversation that adults would have with me. Neighbors and extended family and acquaintances of my parents who would ask me about school, and then, in short order, ask me “So what are you thinking about doing?” And by this they only meant one thing. What are you going to be doing for work? 

This wasn’t unique to me, of course. The messages were everywhere. Some classmates would get paid for every A they earned. Parents exhorted kids to take school seriously because, they said, “school is your job right now.” The message was clear … all of those classes and rules were there for one thing–to turn us into workers. I was awakening to a suspicion that school was just one incarnation, one facet, of a society that destroyed its environment and treated its members like cogs in a great money-making machine. 

I don’t really know what my fellow students felt about this plan, but I found this collective obsession about my work destiny to be maddening. I was not excited to join the workforce. Most of the adults around me seemed stuck in lives of meaningless drudgery. They were consumed by worries and schedules and responsibilities. It was like a hypnotic spell that had somehow captured all the grown-ups around me. 

But I didn’t want to grow up only to molder away in a soulless job to pay for an oversized house, only to spend the weekend mowing the lawn and worrying about what the neighbors might think. I wanted to travel light. I wanted to follow my heart. I wanted to see beautiful places. I would stay true to myself. I wanted to read great books and maybe write some of my own. I wanted to find a life of adventure. 

If school was about the terribly serious business of making a living, I wasn’t sure that I wanted much to do with it. 

Tom Brown 

As you can probably tell, my relationship with school about halfway through my 7th grade year, was at a low point. That’s when I was admitted to the school’s gifted and talented program. I’m not exactly sure how it was determined that I was gifted, or what I was gifted with. But the fact that I was had ramifications for the rest of my life. Practically what it meant was that I could go twice a week to hang out with Mr. Cipollini, (whom everyone called Cip) a good humored computer geek who would give us codes and ciphers and math puzzles to solve. Or Mrs. Bourjian, who would help me write stories, and tell me about how much she loved Mark Twain.

It was Cip who gave me a copy of the book that would have the most profound influence on my young life, and most importantly for this tale, deeply affect the way I thought and felt about school. 

“I bet this would be right up your alley,” he said one spring day and handed me Tom Brown’s field guide to nature observation and tracking

That night, I settled into bed to read it. By the second paragraph of the introduction, I had thrown off my covers. And … omigosh … By the third, I was jumping up and down like I had found a secret map to Shangri La.

The book was a wild mix of tall tales, old fashioned natural history, Boy Scout skills, and homespun new age philosophy, all dressed up in a bunch of appropriated Indian tropes. But the way Tom Brown tells it, he was taken on as an apprentice by an Apache tracker who he met in the pine barrens of southern New Jersey. He studied under this mentor for ten years, and learned from him how to stalk so stealthily that he could creep up on and touch a deer … how to track animals and people so well that he could find the traces of their passage across bare rock … and how to survive so effortlessly in the wild that he could be at home anywhere with nothing but a pocketknife. And by following the exercises in his books and putting in enough dirt time, I could learn all of that too. 

Someone else might have read that same introduction and written him off as a huckster or a cult leader. But I was not someone else. I was a lonely outcast 12 year old boy who loved nature and books and notetaking and methods. And here was this method, this perfect method. As badass as any secret shaolin kung fu training. 

If I followed this method I could become a magician. I could be the Daniel-san to Tom Brown’s, Mr Miyagi or the young Skywalker to a master Yoda … and I could climb my way out of an ordinary life to become somebody wise and powerful. But this wasn’t just about mastery. It was also about purpose and meaning and … most of all … freedom. 

Freedom. 

This was an escape route from the soulless destiny of the Connecticut suburbs. If I could live “at one with the Earth” as Tom promised I could, then I’d never need to get a job. I would always be able to get what I needed. I would be free in a way that the people around me could scarcely imagine. 

Over the next few weeks a plan formed in my mind. 

With Tom Brown’s magical books in hand, I would practice my outdoor skills until I became the veritable Kwai Chang Cain of wilderness lore. I would free myself of the wage slavery that everyone else assumed was destiny. I’d use the woods behind my house as a training group and build secret, camouflaged shelters back there and learn to hunt and forage for my food. And then, when it came time for me to leave home, just like the David Karradine character from the old Kung Fu series, I would wander like the wind wherever my heart was moved to go. 

And I wouldn’t just do this for myself. I would do it like some wilderness bodhisattva for the liberation of all. I would be a wilderness evangelist, a traveling missionary of the woods, teaching people the things that would make them just as free as I was. 

I asked my mom to buy every single one of his field guides, and then the books that were sold as memoirs and, as you do, I filled notebook after notebook with outlines of each one.

I recognized this as a kind of education too, but the education that Tom Brown described was so different from what I was experiencing in school. This wasn’t about earning a mark or remembering some words for a quiz. This wasn’t about bells or schedules or course sequences or prerequisites. According to the stories, Tom’s mentor guided him with hints and tricks. He would teach Tom only when he was certain that he burned with a need to know. As Tom says in the Tracker, “When [he] gave us a test, it was not a test in the sense that it could be graded. It was a way of knowing what to work on next. The importance of the test was not the results, but what we did with them.” 

As you might guess, this new aesthetic was not exactly sympatico with the reality of my school life. And as junior high school gave way to high school, the tension between my view of education and society’s view of schooling would grow into one of the biggest fights of my life. 

School as Control & Domestication

With this new perspective, I began to notice all kinds of things about school that I’d previously taken for granted. 

And I began to see that school wasn’t just about learning. It was also about control Its bells. Its hall passes. It’s prison-like plan for exactly where every single student would be at every second of the day. Its endless lists of rules which were as inflexible as they were absurd. When my wife, Laura, was in school, she ended up in detention because she’d been absent when the new sign in procedure to the library had been introduced. And so she hadn’t signed the right paper at the right time while she was there, she’d was marked as having “cut” her class. Which, I have to point out, wasn’t even a class. It was the freaking library. And despite the fact that 10 other students and both librarians could testify to the fact that she was there and had been there for the whole period … no exceptions could be made. While serving this detention, she sat next to a kid who was there because he was setting the pocket of his lacrosse stick with a butter knife to hold the ball in place. He was there … Get this … for bringing a weapon to school.

My brother, one of the quietest and most compliant kids who has probably ever lived. Once got detention for being late to school … when he had taken the bus. I have no idea if the bus-driver had to serve a detention for this, but everyone else on the bus he drove had to serve one … despite the incredulous calls of our frustrated parents … rules are rules you know. 

Meanwhile, in an act of Orwellian doublespeak that would have made Big Brother proud.The high school administration instituted a program for continuous school improvement called Q + … designed to “give students a voice in their school.” This radical and progressive policy basically amounted to … a glorified suggestion box, which of course students stuffed with profane and frivolous suggestions. A few heartfelt ones that called for sensible changes (like maybe it would be nice if students could eat their lunch outside once in a while) were summarily ignored without official comment, and one idea (I think about motorcycle parking) which.was easy because it only involved painting some lines in the parking lot was actually implemented. Our principal could trot it out every time he talked to the school board about our blue ribbon school.

School, it turned out, was easy to criticize. It would have been so simple just to hate school in a storm of teenaged pique. But as my high school career progressed, it was a place that I increasingly enjoyed … despite myself … and for reasons that I could scarcely have predicted. First, high school just wasn’t junior high school. It was huge and anonymous. But now these very things that had terrified me about junior high were now golden opportunities to remake myself. Suddenly I was surrounded by kids who didn’t know that I was the designated nerd and whipping post. And in high school, gods be praised, all of my classes were tracked. AP. honors. standard. and  remedial. We all got sorted into levels based on test scores and last year’s grades. Say what you want about the classist injustices of the system. I have no doubt that they are true, but being in honors classes saved my life. Most of the bullies who had tormented me for three long years (20% of my short life) ended up somewhere else. And I found myself in classrooms full of smart, ambitious kids who weren’t afraid to take school seriously and didn’t see those things as a fault in me. For the first time since the 6th grade, I had people who would talk to me, whose company I enjoyed, and as the semesters went by, I even came to call friends. 

And on top of it  … I loved learning things and reading and writing essays and taking notes. I was good at learning. And that, as it does for most people, it made me feel good about myself. 

My heart was perplexed on the matter. On the one hand, what a sublime delight it was to have friends after years of being shunned and humiliated. On the other hand, we were also stuck in this atmosphere of rigid convention. On one hand, I had excellent teachers and challenging classes. On the other, school itself was a heartless machine twisted and bent around its own arbitrary rules, like the Pharisees.

I don’t think these contradictions bother other kids the way they bothered me. If I ever voiced these ideas to the other kids in school, they were met with a polite nod. Or sometimes a skeptical eyebrow raise. How else would you do it? But in general my misgivings about civilization in general and of school in particular, couldn’t have mattered less to my classmates. 

But my parents were a different story. I think they were kind of terrified. And all of that came to an explosive head toward the end of my junior year, when everyone started talking about college.

The Old College Try

College would have been the death knell of my dreams. Not only would it mean four more years of school with all that time for wilderness training wasted, it would also mean something even more terrifying … student loan debt. At sixteen, here’s how I understood student debt. 1.) You couldn’t get a good job without going to college. 2.) You can’t get into college without borrowing money. 3.) If you did borrow money so that you could go to college and get the job, there would be no way out of that job once you were there because, 4.) that job would be the only way you pay back your debt. Student loans weren’t student assistance. They were a trap, a malicious catch-22. They were the papers of indenture that would lock you into the system until you were too old and too tired to break free.  

Up until I was 16, I had always been a pretty obedient kid. I was the kid who bought into the program. I’d mostly skipped the teenage rebellious angst that had lots of other kids rolling their eyes about how unreasonable their parents were. I’d never fought with my parents about anything big … but I fought with them about college. Everything that I wanted out of life seemed to hang in the balance. 

It started one day when I was in the back seat of the car while the family was driving somewhere or other, and my Mom said something that started with “When you go to college…” I don’t remember what the rest of that sentence was, but I remember my response, “Well, what if I don’t go to college?” And the air in the car got this prickly electric charge to it, and I could see my mom’s spine stiffen. There was this long silence before she answered, “But what are you going to do instead?” And so, I told them all about my plan to become the Luke Skywalker of wilderness lore.

To be clear, my parents were as loving and patient as any parents could be given the circumstances. But they were now in uncharted territory. Their oldest kid had just announced that his lifetime ambition was, basically, to become a homeless bum. What the heck do you do with that? The college conversation lasted for months, and it settled into this uneasy stalemate. My parents would gently suggest that I reconsider, but I would not. From my perspective, I had no options. I couldn’t compromise. Student debt, and the indenture that it consigned me to was an all or nothing deal. My parents saw no other options either. From their perspective, what I was suggesting wasn’t possible. And even if it was, where would I go? The wilderness was gone. There weren’t enough wild places left for someone to get lost in. I was studiously and stubbornly refusing to see reality. 

In the interest of harmony, we would both drop the subject for weeks. The glossy college brochures kept arriving in the mail, full of students sitting in lawns with books and perfect teeth. And I would wander in the woods behind my house and go back to my room and pour over my books looking for the secret of how to escape civilization and live a life that was wild and free.

The tension finally broke in what was the biggest fight we’d ever had.

The Fight

It was a late summer night between my junior and senior years. I knew a reckoning was coming. Applications would be due in a few short months. There was no more road down which to kick that proverbial can. Mom and dad sat me down at the little table in the atrium. I’d brought a notebook with me, with all.of my disjointed arguments written out in hopes that I could convince them not to make me go.

At first, it was just like all the other conversations that we’d had over the last few months. We said all the same things. But with deadlines looming, there was a new desperation on both sides. Then my mom asked me, “So even if you don’t go to college, you need some kind of plan. What’s your plan?” She already knew that my goal was to live this wild life. But she was asking about execution. How was I possibly going to pull this off? She was trying to listen, trying to see things from my perspective.

And that’s when the cracks began to show. I tried to explain what I wanted to do– to find some kind of teacher to apprentice with. To learn skills from a master. And then after years perfecting them, maybe I’d start my own school somewhere. It was a plan long on dreams and short on logistics. And as I was talking it through, I think I came face to face with just how flimsy it was. How I hadn’t thought that such an apprenticeship itself would cost money and that I’d at least need a car … and that a wilderness skills schools would actually be a business that would require money to get started and to run. And it would need advertising and capital. It would have to pay taxes. But that wasn’t the worst realization. The worst realization was that the end of high school was only ten months away … and I had no idea how to live by myself in the woods. Because living in the woods, like living anywhere was really, really hard. So much harder than I’d thought. After three years of practice, I wasn’t even a novice survivalist; I was basically a pretty good camper. Until that moment, I’d blamed my stalled progress on not having a teacher. But as I spoke I realized there was another serious flaw. I’d avoided the messy, frustrating work of actually learning. Instead of going out and trying to start fires and turn acorns into something edible and keep myself warm on cold winter nights, I’d sat on my porch and read my books and taken lots of notes. As much as I wanted to be free, I hadn’t done the work that it would take to cut the umbilical cord that connected me to civilization.

And I felt despair … and anger … most of it directed at myself. I had missed my chance before it had even come. I was trapped just like everyone else.

Even as all of that was happening inside, I kept talking … by this point I was standing in the middle of the room and gesticulating … ben even I could hear the incoherence in what I was saying … And my dad interrupted … the frustration of months of arguing coming through in his voice. “But you can’t just walk off into the wilderness, Ben. There’s not enough wilderness left.”

And in that moment, I finally admitted it to myself. Even if someone could walk off into the wilderness, that. someone wasn’t me. 

Looking back years later, I.wish that I could have had the perspective to say something like, “You’re right. I can’t do that, but I really, really want to. I want it more than I’ve ever really wanted anything. And yeah, I know … I know my plan sucks. I know it. But I’m not even seventeen and I’ve never done anything like this before. And I need your help. I need your help.”

But that’s not what I said.instead, the tears I’d been choking back finally spilled over. And I tore the page from my notebook and hurled it across the room.And here’s what I actually said

“Fuck!” 

I shouted it.

I threw open the screen door and slammed it behind me so hard that I broke the latch.

I ran off the deck and through the yard to the edge of the woods and that’s where I stopped. I thought about going on … but wasn’t that just it? I didn’t know how. I was a coward and I was ashamed.

My dad came to find me a few minutes later. And not knowing what else to do, I turned my back on the woods and walked to the house.

Going to COA 

If this were a fictional story, this is the point where our hero would bounce back from disaster and despair. He’d have some kind of aha moment. A realization that would help him find renewed hope and go on to victory. But this was my actual life, not a story, and that didn’t happen. 

Mostly what happened was that I went back to my senior year of high school and avoided thinking about my future as much as I could. And mostly, that was easy, I was taking great classes, lots of electives. I joined the school’s drama club and got a big role in their play. I was scoring well on a whole bunch of AP exams. And, most of all, I had a wide network of friends. For the first time in my whole school life, I was comfortable in my own skin. I even looked forward to sitting in the cafeteria where I could always find someone who’d welcome me. And it was there, in the cafeteria, that my path took another fateful turn. 

It started with a crush.  

So I had this crush on a girl who I sat with at lunch. (This was nothing new. I had a new crush every month.) And like all my other crushes nothing was going to come from it. I was.horrendously shy. And, also, she was already dating someone else. And while I’d finally grown a bit taller and had gotten those badly need braces … I wasn’t exactly a heartthrob. But try telling all of that to my hormonal heart. I tossed and turned at night. I pined. I wittled little effigies out of balsam fir and thought about giving them to her as tokens of my infatuation. So when this girl said that she’d found the college that she wanted to go to, it’s name was seared into my brain, College of the Atlantic.

College of the Atlantic, or COA as everyone called it, was unlike anything that I imagined about college. First of all, it was tiny … not even 200 students strong. And … It offered only a single degree, a bachelors of arts in human ecology. So far as I could tell, this was some kind of home brew, interdisciplinary, self designed, liberal arts degree with an environmental bent. It held no classes on Wednesday so that students could run the college through a big town hall style meeting. Its campus was a row of old mansions right on Frenchman’s Bay just north of Bar Harbor. And it was literally just down the hill from Acadia National Park.

In short, this was the crunchiest, most patchouli-scented, hacky sack, granola school you could imagine. It was the type of school that your parents would be justifiably skeptical of … especially if they had two more kids to put through school … especially if it had a private school price tag and you had a state school budget.

But … maybe it’s the type of school that you visit anyway if you really, really want your kid to go to college at all and the only time in their life that they’ve ever sworn at you was when they were trying desperately not to go. Maybe in the calculus of parenthood, this is the type of compromise you make, especially when, after an eight hour drive, an interview, and a campus tour, your ornery, disgruntled, somewhat antisocial, not-quite-adult mutters that maybe he could go to college if he could go to a place like this. I applied only to COA and one other school. And I got in. And that’s just how it happened.

People who’ve met me later in life, shake their heads in disbelief at this story. I am one the most enthusiastic fans of school that you’ll ever meet. And can’t even talk about college with a wistful dreamy look in my eye. I am the type of person who would have fallen in love with college, no matter where I went. But my 17 year old self didn’t know that.

My 17-year-old self was enjoying senior year, but he was also still reeling from the dissolution of his dreams–sometimes still clinging to them, sometimes wondering what I was going to do with my life now if I wasn’t going to be a survival bum. But mostly, I was falling in love. Not the lunch-time crush who I followed to COA. (She would actually go to COA just like me, but she  transferred out after a year.) No this was a girl from the play I was in. Her name was Laura, and I actually talked to her … and asked out … and Holy Jesus she said yes. Can you even believe it? We shared a first kiss. 

And there is nothing like falling in love to distract you from pretty much everything else. So, yeah, the end of senior year was one of the best times of my life. 

And so when it came time to actually, physically, in-real-life go to college, it was a disaster on so many levels. Not only was it an abject defeat in the face of the societal machine and a reminder of my utter failure to start, much less accomplish, my life’s singular ambition. It was also and worst of all, it was 400 miles from the girl I loved. 

No Way Out of Debt, No Way to Do What I Want

If you had asked me that first year whether I was happy, I would have told you about how much I missed Laura. And how I only went to college because my parents “made me,”  (which for the record was totally unfair and was probably just something I said because I was ashamed of my own cowardice.) What was actually happening to me was something that COA kind of specialized in. 

Anyone who has spent even one semester at COA could scarce escape one of the central tenets of the school’s philosophy, most often expressed in the words of the late professor Bill Drury. 

“When your views on the world and your intellect are being challenged, and you begin to feel uncomfortable because of a contradiction you’ve detected that is threatening your current model of the world, pay attention. You are about to learn something.”

I was very uncomfortable, because I was a walking contradiction … and my model of the world was in mortal peril. 

But COA was changing me. Quietly. Surreptitiously. Without ever confronting me directly. It just kept whispering to me all the time. “Pay attention. You’re about to learn something.” 

That first week, I walked into the college’s art gallery and right into a yoga class that would change my life and introduced me to a physical body that I hadn’t even acknowledged the existence of. David Walker, the mild-mannered and compassionate teacher, would become a friend and mentor. 

COA attracts students with passion and vision. And every corner of the campus was filled with students who thought our little planet was beautiful and treated it like it mattered. They believed that the experiment of this funky little college mattered. Ask ten different people what COA was about, and you’d get 15 different answers, but everyone thought it meant something and whatever it was that we were up to, could make a difference. I began some of the closest friendships I would ever have, and they began slowly to widen my thinking. 

It was a core assumption of my survivalist ethos that technology was evil. Something that only led to more destruction of the planet. But one night my friend Steve blew my mind with the beauty of geodesic architecture, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure. 

Many of these students carried their own deeply held dogmas, but ones so different from my own … radical feminists, Earthfirsters, acid-dropping devotees of Terrance McKenna and Timothy Leary, poets, artists, peaceknicks, back to the landers, radical vegans. COA had me reeling. The world was so much bigger than I’d thought.

On Wednesdays I would sit in the college’s great hall with a hundred other souls in the all college meeting and listen to people debate whether to allow pets on campus and should smoking be prohibited. I joined the Academic Affairs Committee and spent most of my time on it, trying to understand what the heck everyone was talking about. I said a whole bunch of naive and unrealistic things there, but the committee chair always listened, no matter how naive and unrealistic I was, and took what I said seriously.

Instead of the ludicrous and seemingly intractable edicts of my junior high and high school, suddenly governance seemed very messy … with good points being made from all sides. And what before had seemed like a lack of conviction on the part of my elders began to look more like the careful deliberations of thoughtful people who wanted to do good but knew that the world was full of unintended consequences.

And then there were my professors. 

One day Gray Cox held class on the pier. We were talking about economics, and I wondered out loud why we needed private property at all. Wouldn’t it be better if we all just took what we needed and shared the rest? And Gray, with a playful twinkle in his eye, grabbed my backpack and held it out over the water. “So, it’d be alright with you if I just dropped this into the ocean right now? You’re not using it right now.”

Another time, in a literature class, I argued vociferously.that a certain short story was all about the triumph of spirit over science. While some avowed scientists across the room argued just as vociferously that no, that story was about the triumph of science over superstition. And, Karen Waldron, our professor, listened quietly, scrawling some notes on her pad and sipping her mug now and then until she stopped us and directed us to a passage where the main character, a scientist, puts his colorful flasks full of various concoctions in the windows of his laboratory and  the light in the sunlight shines through them. “What if it’s not either-or,” Karen asked, “What if it’s both-and?”

And suddenly that story opened like the blossom of a flower right inside me, and I remember thinking that even though I’d thought I learned all there was to know about how to read, that I had so much more to learn … and that here sipping her tea next to me was a true master. I had crash landed on Dagobah, but Yoda wasn’t who I expected he would be. And neither were the lessons of the Jedi.

“Pay attention. You’re about to learn something.” 

I would spend many delicious hours taking notes and reading great and challenging books in a giant armchair of the COA Library that overlooked the Porcupine Islands while winter winds threw ice against the windows.

But still, I struggled. I had sold out. I was getting soft. There was a real world out there, and here I was reading books. And month after month the debt kept growing, like cement poured around my feet or like Jacob Marley’s chains, invisible, until it was too late. Maybe I should just stop, leave school now before things got too deep. Maybe I could go and live at the yoga center in Massachusetts and wash dishes there and just meditate for a while to figure out what to do with my life. At least I’d be closer to Laura. 

That spring, I would have left COA.   … I almost did. I think I would have … except for two conversations.  

School is More Than I Thought

The first was with my uncle. Jamie had always marched to the beat of a different drummer. He wrote poetry and lived in a cabin and made his living as a hiking guide, driving from one park to another in an old van. Jamie had always been a friend and a mentor … but also a kind of a hero … Someone who had found a way to stay true to himself despite all of the pressure to settle down and get a real job. And when he came to lead a trip in Acadia, he bought me dinner at a pub in Bar Harbor. And I told him of my indecision about what I was going to do with my life. “What am I going to do?” I asked “I don’t know what I’m going to do?” And Jamie smiled and said, “Ben, you don’t need to know what you’re going to Do. Not capital D, do anyway. All you need to decide is what you’re going to do next.” 

And the second happened on a bright spring morning not two weeks later when Karen Waldron found me walking slowly up the steps to the red brick after class, and I told her I was thinking of leaving, and that I doubted that this bookish life counted for anything real. About how I knew I couldn’t run to the woods, but that I still wanted to. And how what I really wanted was to be free. 

And the next day, I found a photocopied poem by Elizabeth Bishop in my mailbox.

Continent, city, country, society, the choice is never wide and never free.

And a handwritten note at the bottom that said, “Keep the faith.”

What I Chose? 

I stayed at COA for all four years. 

It’s like I’d given myself permission to accept the choice I had made to be there, to really be there, to admit to myself that I had always loved school, even in those darkest days of 7th grade. 

In the end, school surprised me. It wasn’t any of the things I thought it was–job training, a torture chamber, a tool of the man. Or maybe it was all those things, but it was also so much more. Looking back at it now, I think, that this insight wasn’t just one realization, but several overlapping ones. Even now, I find it all hard to sum up, but right now, with this telling, I’m thinking of four important ways that my perspective shifted that spring. 

First, School is not primarily about job training; it is about beauty. 

First, When my uncle Jamie told me that all I had to decide was what I wanted to do next, I realized just how much I’d been treating school as about “getting a job.” I don’t think that I’m the first person to make that mistake. But look at my schooling and you tell me what it prepared me for. I learned to read Shakespeare and Toni Morrison. I learned to conjugate a few beautiful French verbs. I learned to name constellations and to laugh about how negative exponents actually made sense despite my conviction that they never would. I learned how evolution so perfectly shaped the body of a whale. I learned to write essays, like this one, to explain how a few lines of poetry can change the course of your life. 

What profession could possibly require this random admixture of skills? There is no job like that! It is certainly true that school can and does prepare us for satisfying work. But that is not what school is for. What Karen gave me with that poem wasn’t career advice, it was a treasured insight into the important work of being a short-lived human on this green Earth. 

Science and history and math and poetry, each have their practical value, but that is not why we do them. We do math because it gives us a window into the mind of God. We do science because we ache with curiosity in the same way that we sometimes ache with love. 

When I shifted from thinking about what I wanted to DO to what I wanted to do next. School changed from a very serious business … to a gift. Suddenly, all around me I saw these people who were saying, “Look here. Look here. These are the most beautiful things that we have ever found. These are the best things that we humans have ever done.” And schools, especially public schools, give those things away to anyone who wants them. I cannot think of a more fitting monument to the generosity of our species. 

School (and learning) do not happen on their own. They are a social endeavor. 

So that was my first realization. Here’s my second. School is not a building. It is not a campus. It is not classrooms. It is not a system. A school is a group of people. My late-night conversation about geodesic design with Steve  wasn’t incidental to school. That was school. 

In seventh grade, I had thought that I wanted all those jerks to go away. But while that might have been safe and comfortable, that wouldn’t have been a school at all. You can teach yourself trigonometry from a textbook, but there is a reason that human beings gather together to do that with each other. Math, science, art … all of these disciplines are just conversations. They are conversations that have been going on for centuries, and they require people to converse with. Because all human knowledge is just one big collective exchange of ideas. And it doesn’t just make us smarter because we “stand on the shoulders of giants” as Newton said, and so don’t have to reinvent the wheel every generation. It makes us smarter because it brings us face to face with all kinds of minds, all kinds of ideas. Especially ideas we disagree with.

My dream of a wandering life lived “in harmony with the Earth” was a beautiful dream. But it was small. It was the dream of a kid who really only considered two options–the cul-de-sac or forest–because that was all he really knew. School introduced me to a big, rich world. It introduced me to people who wanted things I hadn’t even imagined. It opened doors not because it gave me job opportunities but because it gave me new dreams. 

This, I think, is why despots and zealots and demagogues have always feared school. Or have tried to control it. Because dreams are even harder to control than people. School doesn’t foment revolution. School is revolution. It is a group of people seeking to learn the truth. 

Humility–I might be wrong about this. 

Beauty and fellowship. Those two great gifts of school transformed my life. And here’s a third. Humility. When I started college, I knew everything that was wrong with the world, and I knew that civilization was going to destroy itself, and I knew that it was only the people who could live the pure life of true survival who would inherit what remained. I was a fundamentalist. But lesson by lesson, school reveal my self-righteous judgements for what they were. Gray Cox holding my backpack out over the water at the pier. Karen showed me that I hardly knew how to read. Self-governance taught me how to listen before I spoke. “Pay attention. You’re about to learn something.” I came face-to-face over and over again with my ignorance. With all of our ignorance. 

My degree was in human ecology. And the central metaphor of ecology is a web–a vast tangle of connections. A focus on the fact that the world is more complicated than all our algorithms can compute.  And after four years of living every day with the implications of that idea, I found in myself a growing sense of my own fallibility, this mantra in the back of my mind that “I might be wrong about this.” 

You might think that when so many cherished assumptions were dismantled, that it would have freaked me out. And you’d be right. It always did. At least at first. But after a while … after the freak-out was over, and I just got comfortable being unmoored in a world that I knew I’d never completely understand. And great gift of letting go into that humility was a profound and playful curiosity. 

 I had been the guy who loved a system, loved programs. And school had always had plenty of that. But stick with any of them long enough, and the program always breaks down. If I wanted to keep learning, I’d have to let go. In my subsequent years at COA, I realized that all of my notes about wilderness survival had taken me as far as they could. And so, while I was there, I started actually messing about with bow drills and wild edible plants. I found friends who also dreamed of wandering in wild places unencumbered by all that stuff. And we would drive up to this old woodsman’s place and learn to make our own snowshoes and spruce bark containers. It was a lot messier than a collection of field guides. But I was finally ready for messy. 

School is not just for you; it is for something bigger than you. 

Beauty, fellowship, humility. And one final lesson–perspective. As much as I might want it to be otherwise, school wasn’t necessarily about me. All that talk about tuition and student loans had me focused on what I was entitled to from school. I had bought it. I was paying for it. But COA made me aware that while I was wrapped up in all of that entitlement, I’d neglected to ask what I might owe to school. 

At COA, an ethos of stewardship permeated everything. You couldn’t go a day without being reminded that our planet needed our wise protection as much as we needed its sustaining resources. I had already cultivated a real reverence for these things before. But school in general and COA in particular made me realize that there was another heritage that needed safeguarding. Science and art and learning were fragile and sacred traditions in and of themselves. And if I had learned to love them, it behooved me to take care of them too. 

If these traditions were, as I’d come to realize, a collection of ongoing conversations, then the only reason that I’d gotten to partake in them was because thousands of minds who had come before had passed that conversation along to me. And if the hearts and minds of the future were going to have them when they needed them, they were relying on me to do my small part in keeping those conversations going. 

School, for all its problems, for all shortcomings, is our first, best way of keeping the candles of knowledge lit in the great darkness of this universe.

Paying Off the Student Loans

The day before my graduation from COA, I sat in one of the booths of Take-a-Break, COA cozy little cafeteria, with the writer Terry Tempest Williams. She had gracefully accepted our invitation to deliver that year’s commencement address. We talked about writing and the environment and about ecstatic and transcendent experiences in nature, which had been the topic of my thesis. And mostly I tried not to be star-struck. 

And as I stood in the tent they erected for the ceremony out next to the rope swing on the north lawn, I was handed an embossed piece of paper to certify that I had indeed spent seventeen years as a student. And I could not think of a better way to have spent that time. 

For many people, that diploma is a personal victory, sometimes against incredible odds. But no diploma is the merely the work of the recipient. Behind every single graduate are the ghost of hundreds or thousands of people who had held them up to the light of learning. In comparison to so many stories of struggle, mine was privileged and easy. But it still would not have happened without so many. There was Mrs. Dombrowski who adapted Dolly Partons song to teach me “adding nine to five, that’s a way to make a fourteen.” There was, Mrs. McGinn, my seventh grade science teacher who, during my darkest days, once put her hand on my shoulder and told me that when I ran for president, she would vote for me. There was Fran Delafera, who stood up to the bullies who tormented me in the locker room. Mr. Cip who gave me life-changing books. There was Tom Brown and Annie Dillard and Elizabeth Bishop. There was Ms. Crowley who hosted the high school drama club and gave refuge to so many kids who didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. Karen Waldron and Gray Cox. My uncle Jamie. There were so many of the friends and fellow human ecologists who made COA my family as well as my school. And behind it all, there was an army of unsung and largely unknown lives that did the thankless work of mowing lawns and fixing leaky roofs and keeping the records and figure out how they’re going to keep running my schools despite the budget cuts. Because a school may not be a building, but it is awfully hard to hold school without one.  And COA, if you’re listening. You were perfect. I really couldn’t have asked for a better place to be. It is no accident that your address is Eden Street. 

And most of all for my mom and dad … who somehow knew how much I’d love school even when I couldn’t imagine it myself. Thank you for your wisdom, your patience, and your love. 

I still have the complete works of Tom Brown on my shelf, dog-eared and underlined, their bindings now as fragile as the family Bible. But these.days they are a little dusty. I did eventually learn to survive for weeks in the wilderness with little more than a knife. And a few weeks was enough it turned out. The world was big and so I came back from the wilderness  for more poetry, more experience, and more companionship than the life of a wilderness wanderer would afford.

I still keep a ridiculous number of notebooks. And there’s still many at night that I just write myself to sleep by diagramming lengthy sentences from a 19th century travel memoir or organizing French grammar rules by parts of speech. 

And I still find it troubling that we’ve developed a system where most students leave school with debts that will take over a decade to repay and that the cost of a college education is an insurmountable obstacle to those who stand the most to gain from it. But I also must say that when I wrote the final check on my own student loans I didn’t regret a single cent. When you find a Pearl of great price, you sell everything you have to buy it.