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Let me tell you a little about this book. It isn't a manual, and it isn't a minute-by-minute account of teaching at the Penikese Island School. Rather, it is a journal in which I've tried to convey what itfeltlike (looked like, sounded like) to teach the boys of Penikese. It tries to open a window on life at a school for delinquents on a small island a long way from anywhere.
What follows is an account of a school which is less a school than it is a family, or a way of life, a rhythm, a discipline, a music, with many voices of boys competing with mine for ownership of the tale. Here are the words that found their way into my journal over the course of three years. But I hope you see it also as an American coming of age for this boy, who finally figured out what he'd been trying to see all these years, which was how his growing up had affected him, where his angers had their roots, and how to get out from under the weight of his youth, which pinned him still to the field.
We are in trouble here. We all know it. Our children have begun to kill each other, and recently our schools have become the killing fields. Every few months another tragedy leaps from the headlines. Why? How have we failed to bring our young people along? It is a societal failure, and traceable to the lineaments of our country, to the living rooms, with soft lights within, which line any road you care to drive down.
This book is about a small and specific school for juvenile delinquents on a small and specific island off the coast of Cape Cod. It is not about every boy who has lost his way in the great expanse of these United States, but it is about a few of them, and their story is, to some extent, every boy's story. This book is also about my experience of the island and the school, as a staff member, over the course of three years (eighteen months of which are detailed in this book). It is not about what everyone might experience out there, but I believe there is something of me in every American, and the other way too.
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where the school was born and from which its umbilicus still trails, is a way of seeing the world, a vantage, a scent, a thrust of land out into the currents of the North Atlantic, a warren of people and rocks and streets that somehow holds off the sea. It is home to fishermen, gardeners, merchants, caretakers, wacko artists, barkeeps, waiters, black dogs, teachers, old hippies, catch-as-catch-canners, scientists, and the wealthy who the former crowd have attracted in order to supply themselves with a livelihood. It is a three-sided peninsular end of Cape Cod, well-wooded and possessing a deep harbor, through whose fingers eddy warm waters born in the great Gulf Stream.
We all feelit,we who wander the streets here, as if the enormous energies moving just offshore were a pantograph generator flickering possibility in strong lines of power. We sit on the shores and observe the water, or go out even on the currents in boats and suspend ourselves on the ether of the sea, hoping, I think, for transformation. There is the feeling here thatitmight happen, that hopes dimly remembered, of brotherhood and sisterhood, of artistic elopement and self-reliance and ecstatic tolerance and the barn-raising of a community, might just happen.
It is a place where the best-known carpenter, who takes care of the Community Hall and the old schoolhouse -- still the spiritual heart of the village -- went to Harvard and then found a richer life in a chisel and mallet. There is some hardship in the town, to be sure, some existential angst and the inevitable hard-drinking crew at the Captain Kidd, the local bar. But there is money floating around, money to be made if you want it. Hell, I can get work as a second-rate carpenter at eighteen dollars an hour without a hassle. It is a place that has time to invent a school such as Penikese, to be open to what some would call dilettantism. I'm not saying that the school is a farce -- it isn't -- just that it wouldn't happen in many places, places where folks don't consider trying to survive on $17,500 (and a boatload of verbal abuse) per year because life is too damned hard to consider working so hard for a pittance. Life isn't that hard in Woods Hole.
Too, there is a remembrance of some of the New Deal, and the Kennedy idealism here, the notion that one should ask what one can do for one's country.
The central question of this book, however, is what makes a boy screw up, turns him toward the belief that he is outside the domain of what would save him, make him whole, safe, valued, loved, integral. When I trace the river to its source, wondering where the lives of the boys and my own have diverged, I come always back to the place, Woods Hole, and its main effects on me, to its green hills giving onto the sea, its eccentric elders wandering its streets, to its hounds, minstrel black dogs with brown eyes watching from the edge of the wood, to its rugged coast strewn with dories, each an advertisement of the easy pull with oars into bay and sudden ocean. More than anything else it was the place that kept me, this once boy, out of the mere.
In winter, a kid, with a six-month sentence and a court order remanding him to Penikese in his pocket, along with four cigarettes and his auntie's phone number, rolling into Woods Hole on a Greyhound bus and seeing for a few torturous minutes the world through my eyes, would see first a little cup of a harbor off to the south, across the highway, down a hill and on the far side of the old rail line, with a line of Coast Guard cutters and buoy tenders along its western edge. Then the bus would pass the white bank building, a one-story affair in white, vaguely Georgian in feature, then the strong-piled stone walls of the small library on the right, then the incongruous Pie In The Sky Bakery, in its '50s stark cube of pillar and glass, where one watches Manny the baker massive-forearm-kneading pastry dough behind the counter, and then the post office, in old brick, a room of combination boxes and an open window onto the profane and gustily friendly back room of the postmen, then several smaller stores, and the heart of the village would be glimpsed as the bus hung left and dropped him at the ferry terminal. He would have seen the drawbridge for a moment, the short fat bridge which crosses the channel into Eel Pond, and around which hunker the Community Hall and the old Firehouse and the Fishmonger Cafe and the bar, The Captain Kidd. He would get off the bus and note the expanse of Great Harbor reaching away from the ferry terminal toward the Hebridean Elizabeth Isles, and he would be met by a Penikese staffer and escorted along Luscombe Avenue to a right on Water Street and a left on School Street, where he would pass soon the old four-room schoolhouse looking out over Eel Pond, and then a low place in the road where he could look out again over the pond and see the village crowding its shores, the buildings of the great scientific institutions in brick and cement encircling it halfway, and the wood frame houses circling the other way, with lobster boats and various floating things hunting around on moorings in a fitful southwest breeze. This was where I grew up. This was what saved my ass. And if my childhood hadn't been lived around questions of abandonment and living on the outside of the establishment, I might not have been pulled toward Penikese at all.
My father and mother split in Pittsburgh when I was three, and my mother and I wound up, by the time I was seven, in Woods Hole, in an old and crooked house on the shores of the pond around which the village gathers.
The dream of a day as a boy of seven began with breakfast by the pond in the ancient kitchen (built around the time of the war with Mexico), with my mother trying to warm the porous house with oil or wood, her dishing up eggs and toast or cereal as several cats milled around outside in the warming morning, then my walk of two hundred yards along the eastern edge of the pond, through dank and smelling mud, past carcasses of fish, undisclosed sea beasts, garbage, an occasional bird, under piers, through a litter of old moorings and abandoned marine filigree, to the old schoolhouse, gray, built and opened in 1864, two stories and wood-framed and square, solid, a good-natured building on a low hill overlooking the pond.
In the school there lived (as far as we students were concerned) four teachers -- Mrs. Edwards, Mrs. Perkins, Mrs. Eckhardt, and Mrs. Barrows -- whose life's purpose seemed to be to know each of us village kids for five years, to fill us with as much knowledge as they could, and to send us home at three each day never having mentioned the possibility that any of us might be destined to fail. We all lived, within those walls, in a state of mutual admiration and accomplishment, most of the time. It was a cloister in which I learned of how things might be: it was a village school.
Without its large windows and broad-boarded floors, its old bell rung (with a long rope disappearing into the dim belfry) for recess, its lumpy schoolyard lined with old oaks, its calm old rooms, each of which held an entire grade, I might not have made it. There were two other things which contributed, in the main, to my doing all right: the aforementioned town, with its grounding effect, and the steadiness of my mother's home, whose roof never leaked and whose walls offered refuge always.
Without these steadying effects, I might not have loped easily into college and work and teaching, for my father was hardly around, and there was the unmistakable sense in me of having been left behind -- which is the lowest common denominator among young men in trouble. They, not knowing where they fit in, and lacking a guide, get angry.
Copyright © 2001 by Daniel E. Robb
Excerpted from Crossing the Water by Daniel Robb
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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