Adrconicg to eprxet oniiopn lses tahn fftiy pcernet of the patlpuooin wlil be albe to raed tihs, and olny twtney pcernet wtih any seped. Leartite aseltcenods wlil bset altuds. I’m gsnieusg taht the pcernetgaes wlil be hgheir hreh on Giaa. We wlil see.

I am trierlby bsuy, but usntnadred taht I am lninareg so mcuh mroe aoubt jsut how azinamg the biarn ralely is so the bdreun is bbarleae. All rghit, I wnat to aovid finyrg my own biarn so I wlil stiwch to ‘naorml’ lteter seuqcene. Bdeseis, my selpl ckceehr is ninareg mowdletn.

I’m in this training, you see. Orton-Gillingham. And it’s a challenge intellectually, physically, and emotionally. I’m thinking of language and learning differences 24 by 7 and am in class for eight hours a day and have about that much reading and homework to do each night. I’m working with my first ‘demonstration’ student,’ a big old Iowa farm boy who speaks with clarity and ease on complex agricultural and business topics, but who cannot read or write above the second grade level. His eyes light up when I tell him that our goal is to get his reading and writing up to the same level as his speaking. I remind him of this at the start of every class. The first time I told him he said that that’s what he’s always wanted and started to cry. It turns out that his public school classmates made fun of him for years and called him Dim Tim. With a WISC full-scale of 145+ he’s not dim by any measure.

The fact that the ‘teaching the teachers’ class I’m in is being taught by an ex-partner of mine, an ex of the wifely persuasion and the mother of my daughters, is exceedingly strange. For whatever difficulties this person may have with close relationships, she is a gifted teacher of the first rank. I understand why her students, child and adult, think so highly of her. I always thought her writing was overly dense, even pretentious, but her knowledge of the language, and her ability to analyze and synthesize complex issues in this domain and come up with perfect examples on the spot, is astounding.

Three of my old group graduated the school’s ‘regular’ program Friday, regular in the sense of wilderness, academic, and therapeutic elements combined. It was a surprisingly emotional experience. I’m beginning to understand how teachers feel when they send their charges off into the world and wonder how they’ll do, wonder if they learned all they need. I’m going to miss them, and I know they’ll miss me. <sigh>

On top of all that, the school asked me to do the engineering and installation of a new fiber-optic computer network on campus. I’ll have help but most of the work will fall to me.

So between now and July 21, when I’m officially on the academic side of the school, all I have to do is complete the OG training, work with my demonstration student, see another of my guys graduate, and engineer and install a fiber optic data network.

Piece of cake.

I’d write more but I’m gonna go do a nap-in-advance now.

Yesterday afternoon I found myself watching a DVD of the old Bill Moyers Skywalker interview with Joseph Campbell. I’d just met some new friends and it turned out that we are all Campbell fans, so, crammed on a couch, we watched the interview start to finish. One thing I always take away from Campbell is the idea that myths are a necessary part of what it means to be human, and that specific myths are central to every culture – that if they don’t exist at some given point in time in that culture’s history, they will eventually because they must.

So true. There are two boys in my wilderness school who brought this home last week. Thirteen year old John, a severely ADHD tactile kind of person, and Ivan, fourteen, a boy of precocious genius and a profound thinker. John is an extraordinary fire-starter and can get a roaring fire going within minutes using nothing but a bow-drill and some tinder, a skill admired openly by his peers. Ivan constantly amazes me with his insight and depth of thought.

Wednesday morning Ivan came to me and said:

“Mr Krupp, I had an amazing dream last night.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Okay. We were all in the cabin and we were wet and freezing cold and it was snowing. We tried and tried to start a fire but the wood was all wet and everybody was freaking out and thought they were going to freeze to death. Then John said ‘don’t worry’ and reached up and took a piece of the sun and got the fire going and we were warm and okay.”

“Wow,” I said, “Prometheus.”

“What?”

“You never heard of Prometheus?”

“No.”

“Oh, double wow then.”

…to be sent here.

I ran across this gem from J.K. a few minutes ago. So I did a little research.

I asked myself, “Is this little guy (below) really afraid of women’s underwear, not to mention of what might occasionally fill said items?”

Than Shwe

Well, I don’t know about you, but I think he has ‘panty-fear’ written all over his face. Probably kills peaceful monks too because he’s thinking that’s what they’re wearing under those sissy robes. D’ya think?

Next on the cogitation trail, of course, is answering the question “What potential leader in Myanmar doesn’t fear panties?” I came up with this:

Suu Kyi

Not only does it look like she doesn’t fear panties, but I’ll go out on a limb and hazard a guess that she occasionally wears them. At the very least I suspect that she doesn’t want to kill monks because she imagines that they might be wearing them.

For those of you who are wondering what on earth panties have to do with modern nation-state leadership, I can only say that they have everything to do with it. ‘Nuff said.

Now, if it happens that Shwe slips the surly bonds, or slips on a banana peel, or starts wearing slips, whatever, and Myanmar finds itself with Kyi as her new leader, please do not stop sending panties, preferably unwashed, to the above address. Kyi plans to hold them in reserve in case a new panty-fearing General comes along, when she will simply issue them to the monks and have them chase the bad guy back into the jungle.

Lastly, there’s this post by Vladimir Chang on the ‘Guns and Butter‘ blog. The last paragraph is particularly apt:

Myanmar to crack down on kittens, bunnies next

RANGOON – Fresh off a bloody crackdown on more than 2,000 peaceful Buddhist monks, Myanmar’s ruling junta announced today that it was targeting kittens and bunnies next.

“After last week’s fun in Rangoon, I was quickly left bored and listless. I found myself wanting some other group to crush ruthlessly, and I wondered, ‘What could be even more defenseless and wholesome than a Buddhist monk?’ And I thought, “Kittens!” said Senior General Than Shwe, head of Myanmar’s government. “So I decided to kill me some kittens. And after that it’ll be bunnies.”

Myanmar’s army won’t even have to use its own weapons for the kitten kill. China is contributing submachine guns and ammunition, while Thailand has sent thousands of hungry dogs.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that if Myanmar ran out of its own kittens, he would gladly supply Russian ones.

The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning the act, but saying that it has no jurisdiction over hostile acts against felines and rodents. And even if it did, the council declared, it wouldn’t have the authority to act. And even if it had the authority, it would just sit by and watch because at this point that’s all it knows how to do.

Hey – all’s fair in love and war!

What’s most amazing is the feeling of partaking, being more than just an observer, the utter clarity of it, and the absolutely effortless remembrance of it in its entirety.  And it all happened in the course of an evening’s nap.  A lifetime in a microsecond.

I’m within my familiar Escheresque staircase dream, the one where I know I’m dreaming, where I explore my dream like I’d explore an island I’d never been to.  Ever upward, darkness giving way to light, women in plain white cotton dresses, educators, path lighteners.  A door opens off the staircase and I step through onto a grassy field.  A woman and a man stand there, naked, beautiful, eyes glinting with mirth, sorrow, power, and vulnerability, all at the same time.  The man sits yoga like and smiles, the woman speaks but I can’t understand her even though I know she’s using English.  “Patience,” she says.  That one word I do understand.  I  remember thinking, though, knowing, that what I beheld was surface, not substance.  I think they’re aliens and remember the woman in the movie “Cocoon” and wonder if this woman will peel her skin off and reveal the light too.  I remember in my dream Star Trek’s “law of convergent evolution” and feel satisfied that they can look just like me but be wholly different as well, even truly alien.  The woman sits near the man and both beckon to me to sit with them.  I wonder if they’re sexually compatible (with me), if they think of things the way I do, and sit with them.  Each puts a gentle hand on my forehead and I fall back and sleep within my dream.

In my sleep within my dream I dream anew, a layered dream that my dreaming self is fully aware of.  In my dream within my dream I am sleeping on a jet bound from Alaska to Tokyo (this part actually happened in the 70′s) via the polar route.  I awaken to the sound of the Captain’s voice over the intercom saying: “It’s sunny and beautiful, and also a balmy 77 degrees below zero outside the aircraft.  I watch hour after hour as frozen mountains slide under the belly of the aircraft.  I shift to a room where I’m reading a book about the doctor at the South Pole who developed breast cancer (dr = Jerri Nielsen, book = Ice Bound – I actually did read it).  The C130 aircraft sent to rescue the doctor, even though it was fitted with skis and special ultra low temperature equipment, could not rescue the doctor until the temperature climbed above 55 below zero.  (They had to wait several weeks.)

I awaken back into the first dream asking myself “How did I fly when it was 77 below?” and feeling like I’d just been lucky, that the plane couldn’t possibly have flown in air so cold and should have crashed.  I feel my heart pounding a bit.  The naked man and woman are there waiting for me.  The man says “Patience” too, which I understand, but the rest of his English is familiar but incomprehensible.  Suddenly I’m back in the staircase and the floor is covered with three kinds of chess pieces: pawns, kings, and queens – no bishops, rooks, or knights.  Stepping on them my bare feet hurt, like I’m walking on sharp gravel.  I walk back down the stairs to full wakefulness, each dreaming step taking me closer and closer to the everyday world.  I hear a voice, again speaking an English I don’t understand, but it’s not a bad sound.  I’m awake.  I look out the window and see stars.  The bottoms of my feet tingle, even burn a little, like I’d just walked across sharp objects.

It was a good dream….

Robert drums; starts with an indeterminate whump whump whump which becomes a more elemental rhythm, then adds his own mantra to the dawn stillness, breaking the symmetry. Layla keens a sweet tonal lament of love and loss. It all adds up. Direction is meaningless; everything is the center, I sure am, each of us parts of the same. Time is no different. Memory of past is interwoven with memory of future. It all comes so effortlessly.

This is better than any drug, any sex, any secret ritual. Or maybe it’s all those things in synergy, been there all the time, mythic, worldly, inevitable. It depends. We sing on.

This is life.

I think of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, he, a creature of his world. I think sum ergo cogito or maybe sum ergo sentio, me, a creature of mine. But how can that fit within the illusion of time? The answer is there, right in front of me, of you.

A mosquito lands on my calf, a little vampire wanting to stay alive just one more day. I let it have it’s fill, hoping the sun hasn’t risen too high, that it’s not too late.

I think of the American attention span and quickly move on to something else.

Sarte lying in bed wrapped in sheets of Egyptian cotton. Before him de Beauvoir explains that double reciprocal incarnation has more than a sexual context, that it applies to all and everything. He’s so close to it, so close, but he doesn’t listen, the idea is fixed in his head, immutable. She gives up because she loves him and won’t willfully damage him.

Ram Dass knocks on the inner door, feet muddy from the walk. He has the system down pat, the oneness, the wholly outside otherness, but he has forgotten about the parts that make it up.

Some people fly above the surface, others dive below it, but each place is incomplete without the other. I know this because my grandmother told me it was so.

I sometimes think about her, my crazy grandmother. I say ‘crazy’ because that’s what everyone said she was, but then again they didn’t know her, not the way I did.

Her given name was Cora, but my sisters and I called her Gunny. I’m not sure how we came up with that but it seemed perfect for her. She was of stern Prussian stock, wore long dark dresses buttoned high on the throat, even in summer, and carried herself as though her spine was made from a single piece of machined stainless steel. She smiled often, but never with her face. She was fiercely intelligent, and fearless. People either loved her or were frightened of her, as though she were a bomb that might go off any second if things weren’t handled just right. But she never did ‘go off,’ ever.

This is the woman who insisted I wear white cotton gloves when I played, some kind of litmus test for playground dirt, and that I always carry a vial of eucalyptus oil with me. She told me to sniff the oil whenever someone near me coughed so I wouldn’t get a cold or whatever illness it was that they had. I probably didn’t get fewer colds than anyone else my age, but I did develop an inordinate fondness for the scent of eucalyptus. And I ‘get’ colds to this day. She told me that to ‘catch’ a cold sounded silly, like you had to run after one first.

This is the woman who, after a day-long spring storm, looked through the kitchen window and said “Our tree is hurting. Let’s help.” I was puzzled but followed her as she collected a hunting rifle and some 30.06 shells and headed outside through the mud-room door. The tree, a spreading maple laden with mounds of wet April snow, sagged to the ground, where a few large limbs already lay broken, litter for next winter’s hearth. Gunny loaded a handful of shells into the rifle, took aim, and shot several of the higher branches. Hundreds of pounds of snow obeyed the report of the rifle and the impact of the bullets and cascaded, glistening, to the ground below. The tree joyously raised its branches toward the sky, shaking off the rest of its burden, then shivered. “it’s still hurting,” she said, “but now it won’t uproot, it’ll live.” She was 82 at the time.

This is the woman who, when I was six, took me to see an animated Christmas diorama and thereby challenged how I look at things. As I pressed my nose to the cold window and stared in wonder at Santa and the elves and Rudolph and everything Christmassy Gunny whispered: “Imagine that those figures are what’s real and that they’re only here to look at us. Imagine that it’s us, you and me, who are like marionettes at the end of long invisible strings, acting out some play.” That perspective scared me then, and I cried. “Don’t worry,” she said, “what is simply is, just don’t make assumptions, or at least try not to trust them.” She spoke to me like that, even at six.

This is the woman who dropped a two year old me out of my second story bedroom window into the waiting arms of a neighbor as the family farmhouse burned down around her. She leaped after me, breaking both her legs. A few years later she explained gravity by saying “Don’t put too much stock in ‘up’ or ‘down’ because they can switch places in an eyeblink.” She kept newspaper clippings about Albert Einstein in her nightstand. She never went to university, having been evicted from her homeland by the churning political tides of World War I, but she knew more than most who have.

I was only eight when Gunny got sick one last time. I wondered then if she’d forgotten to carry her own vial of eucalyptus oil. I still wonder about that. On the day she left we all visited her in the hospital, arriving just after my uncle had given her a bunch of ripe bananas, her favorite fruit. She had thrown them back at him, yelling: “Are you trying to poison me?” “Dementia,” the doctors said, but they didn’t know Gunny either. After a short time I found myself alone with her, everyone else having invented reasons to be in the hallway, trek to the cafeteria, whatever, just something to be away from impending death. I didn’t mind, really. After all, she was still alive, and still Gunny, my Gunny. Suddenly, without warning, and those are two very different things, she opened her eyes, found me, and said “Remember you have a third eye. Don’t lose sight of it.” It was like her to make a joke out of serious advice. Then she closed her eyes and lay there, breathing gently, mouth slack. Later that evening, sometime just before the day gave up and ripples of purple spread across the heavens, she went away. Everyone, doctors and family, started talking to her, calling her name, with the doctors adding mysterious rituals using needles and ancient machines. It all seemed very silly to me. It was so obvious that she wasn’t there any more. I didn’t understand what the big fuss was all about about. I couldn’t understand. I had seen her go. It was okay.

So she’d named the tiny spot way in the back of my eyes, somewhere between a dream and the sharp prick of torn flesh. I don’t know what it’s made of. Sometimes I think maybe it’s iron, an unyielding thing smelted in some hellish furnace. Other times it’s more like a knowing crystal grown in a cool dark place, but one with edges bleeding into softly bounded facets. I’ve known about it ever since I first counted myself among the conscious, but it was Gunny who told me what to call it, it was she who taught me how to use it, how to ‘see’ things in their interdependence, how nothing exists in isolation, except for everything, and maybe not even that. It was she who told me that this is the thing that makes us human, that creates the reality we only think we are a small part of.

Her gift is with me on the day I think these words, the day I sing. Subsets and supersets, each thing extended, unlimited.

I sing on.

I think, I am, of things integral, of consilience, of unity and one.

My ass gets soggy, the ground is a bit dewy.

I get up, hungry. Breakfast awaits. I turn toward the camp, the others too. Daylight, then thunder and rain. We walk.

I sing on.

No more DuPont or EDS or ArvinMeritor. Yesternight I quit them all, completely and forever. Good riddance.

You see, I’m crazy in love again. It’s a great feeling. My school, my wilderness boarding school for boys with learning and/or social difficulties, is my new workplace, my new focus, and I’m absolutely in love with the whole experience. I think this one is for keeps.

It’s kind of odd though, and somehow karmic in a very good way, that I would find a place, a purpose, helping to mold the minds of boys, showing them a new way to see themselves, all the while learning a few things about myself and the human condition. Odd because I never was one of them. Oh, I was a boy all right, at least at one time in my life, but one who went from being twelve to being a little shy of twenty overnight. Poof! Unintentionally and quite unwillingly I missed those intervening years. Boys that age always seemed like an alien species to me. My own boyhood truncated by harsh visitations, I grew up with no brothers, but I did have sisters, and all the neighbor children were girls. Me and an even dozen girls who basically ran the daily affairs of three remote dairy farms in the stead of three sets of absent or distracted parents. When I grew up I fathered two daughters. My sisters bore daughters. My friends had daughters. I had absolutely no experience with boys.

Ah, but therein lies, perhaps, the advantage. To have little surety of a situation is liberating. I couldn’t carry any baggage into this new job because my preconceptions were immediately dashed on the rocks of a mistaken shore; I had no history to draw upon. I was, and am, as blank a slate as my charges are. Yes, they do learn from me, and I am making a positive contribution to both the individual and collective lives of my students, but at least as important to me is that I am learning also at a sometimes breakneck pace. It is one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.

I wrote about my first forays into this new work relationship in several earlier postings, and I won’t repeat that here, but know that the students in this wilderness boarding school present behaviors ranging from ODD through OCD to ADHD, with severity from mild to severe. Also know that the names of the boys have been changed to protect their identity and the name of the school cannot be revealed in the context of my posts.

Here are a few glimpses into this new world:

Last weekend Quentin, a student in my group, asked me if the Spanish word for ‘fish’ (we were fishing for our dinner) would mean the same thing it does in English. We have several Hispanic students which I thought might have stoked his curiosity, but I didn’t quite understand his question. “Sure,” I said, “’fish’ is ‘pescado’ in Spanish.” “I know the word but that’s not what I mean,” he said, “I want to know if when Hector says ‘pescado’ he has the same thing in his head that I have in mine when I say ‘fish.’ Does it mean the same thing to him? When I can’t control my anger do I have the same kind of image (his word and emphasis) in my head that Hector has in his when he acts like me? Would I be calmer if I thought with calmer words and would I then act more calmly?” I was stunned by this quiet fifteen year old boy’s sophisticated question. That his thought process could even implicitly recognize the ties between language, his internal mental landscape, and his worldview was astounding to me. I didn’t think of it at the time but Rapunzel’s post reminded me of an article I read recently and of a great quote: ” To have a second language is to have a second soul .” We talked for over an hour, touching on how language is both a reflection and creator of perception, exploring the distinction between meaning and significance, and, at his behest, diving into the waters of positive self-direction and individuality in a social setting. Oh yes, we also talked about the best way to prepare and cook the perch we caught. They were delicious.

A few days later I accompanied my group on a rock climbing expedition and enjoyed a similar experience. Allen, one of my students and a boy I was just starting to know, was hanging off the side of a boulder, maybe twenty feet above me, when he turned and said: “Mr Krupp, want to know what I was thinking about?” Without waiting for a reply he continued: “Human beings are a renewable resource, but individual human beings, you, me, Mr Sever, the other guys, we aren’t renewable at all.” He had a look of elation on his face as he chewed and digested the sustenance of his own thought. Then he turned and continued upward. Fortunately my being twenty feet below him meant that I was standing on flat ground and in no danger of falling other than over. What an insightful comment, and one of special import and value to its maker. Within Allen’s mind that day two powerful self-images were contesting for his future; the old one, of an angry and defiant young man, one who had little value for the rights and prerogatives of others, and the new one, of someone who recognizes the validity of social contracts and simultaneously rejoices in the individual. The outcome of Allen’s internal struggle is important – to him, to me, and to you. I have read Allen’s testing results, absorbed his background reports, memorized his profile, and I interact with him as often as I can, but the one thing that stands out in this vast sea of information is the simple fact that Allen is a leader, make that Leader, one of the highest magnitude. He’s the kind of person, who through sheer force of personality, commands attention regardless of the age or gender or social circumstances of those with whom he interacts. I’m happy to write that since this day the latter self-image seems to be ascendant. Allen is not ready to graduate the program at my school yet, but I have no doubt that he will be ready sooner than many of his peers. If he turns himself to the task, and I believe he will, he will rise to a position of influence in whatever endeavor he chooses. He has the potential to make positive change in the world we live in. Remember, you heard it here first.

And then there’s Michael, a younger student from another class who is occasionally placed with my group for logistical reasons. I had been told by other staff that Michael was admitted to the school primarily due to behavioral issues rooted in OCD. However, in my few interactions with him I had not seen that diagnosis present itself, until one day…. Michael is a renowned hacky-sack player. He can keep the footbag moving for a very long time and perform amazing feats of acrobatics and balance while doing so. No one else at the school comes close to his level of expertise. While waiting for a campfire dinner to be prepared one weekend I watched as Michael performed his wizardry. I was captivated by the skill he exhibited and the graceful beauty of his moves. After about ten minutes he missed and the bag tumbled to the ground. He started again. Missed again in ten minutes. Started again. Missed again. Then he picked up the hacky-sack, threw it into the woods, scrunched his face up, and sat on the ground crying. “Why’d you do that?” I asked. “That was wonderful.” “It wasn’t perfect,” came the anguished reply. I asked what perfect would be and was treated to a twelve minute routine, perfectly choreographed but sans footbag, of what he was trying to do. “It’s only twelve kinds of kicks in twelve groups going forward and reverse twelve times in twelve minutes, and I can’t get it right. I can’t get it right. I’ve been trying for a year. I can’t get it perfect. God hates me, God completely hates me.” He was attempting 3,456 kicks in twelve minutes, many of high difficulty. When another student told Michael that the world record for five minutes is only 1,019 kicks Michael responded that he didn’t care about world records, “I want perfect.” I’m not an expert in how OCD manifests itself, but for the rest of the evening Michael was withdrawn and walked around the campsite miming his moves and talking to himself. Falling asleep that night I heard noise on the opposite side of the bunkhouse and saw him flicking his legs and arms, perhaps dreaming of hacky-sack perfection. “Don’t worry Mr Krupp, he does that all the time” chimed another student. I’m taking every opportunity to talk to Michael, to learn more, and happily heard that he is working with both the school psychologist and psychiatrist.

A few days ago another of my students asked: “Hey Mr Krupp, why does everything bad I do have a name, but everything good I do have none?” Alex cannot seem to complete a sentence without an obligatory “fuck” or “shit” or some other socially restricted word. What he presents is not a tic, such as in coprolalia, which someone once told him he had, and which he believes he has, but a looser thing, I think one of background more than of pathology. Once again Rapunzel’s post, and Ted’s question, got me thinking. I checked the DSM IV TR (Thanks Krissy!) and sure enough, there is no word for someone who utters good things. Why not, I thought, create a new word? If coprolalia translate literally as ‘feces tongue,’ let’s use “eulalia” for ‘pleasing tongue.’ (‘eu’ – the Latin prefix for pleasing.) So that’s what I do. Every time I hear Ted say something ‘good,’ I say, “There you go again with your eulalia. I always get a smile. A couple of the other students have started using it too. Now for the staff.

I’m not slow at these things, and I always wondered if anyone could engage me to the degree my daughters had when they were this age. My students not only keep up, but in many cases they flat out challenge me to keep pace with them. I think the greatest thing I can do with my life right now is to contribute to the future of our little spaceship through working with these budding adults.

Crazy in love indeed.

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“Ah. If you’re that Ed, then who’s op from the op-ed pages?”

“Oppenheimer, the Bomb guy. Physics doesn’t pay the rent so he moonlights.”

Edward was my friend, and he was more alike Oppenheimer than anyone else I ever knew. Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit so that he could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. Upon finishing War and Peace, Edward said he was sure reading it in the original would be a good idea. Six months later, self taught, he was ready. “Yeah,” he said, “translations don’t do Tolstoy justice. Next time you read Thomas Mann or Günter Grass read them in German.” Edward liked handing out daunting tasks.

He played bagpipes so beautifully the hair on the back of my neck stood up. He was kind, compassionate, funny, and devilishly clever. He worried about population dynamics long before the Club of Rome tackled the issue. He understood that the world is a collection of things and systems, all interdependent under the umbrella of Gaia. He exchanged letters with James Lovelock.

Edward’s personal cosmology was vast, his mind first rate, and his soul wise. He was 29.

“Catch you for lunch?” “Sure, I’ll be there.” Heeding inner demons known only to him, Edward took another path by his own hand that day and never made it to lunch. I’m still hungry.

That was forty years ago today. I promised myself then that I would always remember and tell people about Edward.

For two days I got to play at working with my maybe, perhaps, just might be, new job at a wilderness boarding school for adolescent boys who have adjustment difficulties ranging from ADHD to ODD. I’ve written about this before so I won’t belabor the details, but two experienced counselors and I were given the responsibility of working with ten boys aged 14 to 17. The school’s main campus has all the modern amenities but the boys do not live there. Depending on age and program progress each of the boys is assigned to one of five campsites which are remote from each other and from the campus.

The campsite I was assigned to is the most remote; perhaps two or three miles over difficult trails from the school’s entrance, and in the late afternoon sun, fully provisioned for the weekend, we set out for the site. The trail followed the shore of a sparkling lake before it climbed to the top of a ridge, plunged down the side of a deep gorge through a series of switchbacks, and ascended the opposite side. Once across the gorge the going was a bit easier, a distance where mountain laurel formed a living tunnel, brighter glades were lined with pink lady slippers, and towering oak and maple giants, energetic with their new greening, blocked out direct sunlight. As we neared the camp the boys became quiet and increased their pace, as though they were intent on getting there without delay.

We rounded the final bend and I had my first look at where they lived. I understood their eagerness, instantly and completely. On an alluvial fan that terminated the gorge we had crossed earlier they had built the only home they would know for the one or two years they would spend at the school. Trees covered a high ridge on the far side of the site, and a bold stream raced downhill between them and the camp itself. There were three buildings, each showing the workmanship of the earnest but inexperienced young hands that had built them. A raised composting latrine was located off to one side, while a lean-to shed with a fire pit constituted their kitchen and dining hall. They cook and eat in that shed whenever they aren’t at the main campus for academic classes, doctor visits, and like things. Snow, darkness, cold, rain, wind – it doesn’t matter; that’s where perhaps 50% of their meals are taken. Near the center stood the bunkhouse, a rustic thing on stilts, uninsulated, but heated by a single wood burning stove. No electrical power. No running water other than the trickle from a hand pump. No televisions or computers or PS3 games. Nothing but the greening of things, the rush of water through the stream bed, and the whisper of wind through the trees.

Between the buildings the boys had built a beautiful and extensive rock garden, a frog pond complete with lily pads, a group meeting place, and had sculpted a dozen faces into large pieces of driftwood which they then hung like a huge wind chime. Twisting trails cobbled with stream-rounded rocks wended between all these things so that they might be better admired close at hand. When we arrived the sun had just reached the top of the far ridge, and the entire site was bathed in that beautiful late afternoon golden yellow glow so prized by photographers.

This is a place of power. In the Celestine Prophecy there is a place in this part of the state that is called so. This isn’t that place, but it has to be a close second. I think I know what the first person to discover Machu Picchu must have felt like. I encountered something that has to be what and where it is. There is no better place for this camp.

To a person, the students are highly intelligent and in various stages of dealing with their internal impulses. One of the younger boys is working on, among other things, controlling his language. At the campus he had trouble constructing sentences without at least one “damn” or “fuck” in it. This is a problem because one of the other boys takes immediate offense and open warfare ensues. When we got to the camp I noticed that he had toned things down and complimented him. He asked if I wanted to see what made him completely calm and beckoned for me to follow. At the edge of the stream, behind a tree sat a little stone statue of The Buddha. He leaned over it, rubbed it’s belly, patted its head, turned to the stream and started singing, first the Beatles Let It Be, then the refrain from Gloria in Excelsis Deo. “It works,” he said, “I’ll be fine the rest of the night.” He was. Another boy, really a young man and the oldest in the group, appeared very well adjusted and I told him so. He said “You should have met me when I got here a year and a half ago, you wouldn’t say that. The kids who are new here would never understand it if I told them that I’ll miss this place, this camp, when I graduate in a few weeks.”

Before dinner was cooked over an open fire – pasta with tomato or marinara sauce, salad, dense bread, peas, corn and beans – everyone attended to their assigned chores; sweeping out the bunk house, adding wood chips to the latrine compost pit, tending to the frogs and plants, pumping water for washing, gathering firewood, and generally pushing back against the tides of entropy. As I watched and participated I couldn’t get images of Wendy’s Lost Boys or thoughts of the denizens of Lord of the Flies out of my head. It was so appropriate.

After eating and cleaning up everyone had time to read by flashlight before the ten o’clock curfew. Maybe it was a special night, but there were no problems with any of the boys, something the experienced counselors say isn’t all that common. Sleep came swiftly to all of us.

Morning found the temperature at a brisk 38 degrees and, after a bit of groggy stumbling around, the boys cooked a breakfast of eggs and veggie sausage. After food we headed to the campus for a science class and then on to the lake to fish for that night’s dinner. At first I thought it was my imagination, but as we walked away from the camp the boys became less relaxed and started showing some signs of the behavior that had got them into the school in the first place. But no, it wasn’t imagination at all. The other counselors said they see it all the time, and to prove their point, when we returned to the campsite later that day the metamorphosis was repeated. Boys who had been unruly and difficult on campus started to mellow out just as thy had only a day before.

A place of power indeed.

The wind started blowing in the early morning, and by noon was shaking the house as though it were made of nothing more substantial than cardboard. Sentinel trees, some having stood guard for hundreds of years, suddenly grew lusty for the wet earth, and heeding the dim memory of their kind, sacrificed themselves to the dream of becoming nurse-trees. It was a fey dream. They fell by the hundreds over a thousand square miles, most harmlessly, but not all.

A tree down the road fell across a power sub-station and darkened the homes of 9000 residents, mine included. No power, no heat, no television, no telephone, no Internet. I played cards and scrabble with my daughter by candlelight. I read by the light of a camper headset with the red LED light activated to conserve the battery. After several hours of doing that I would turn it off and everything glowed with the bright green light of an aurora. I threw out the entire contents of the refrigerator after two days, and I took very cold showers in a very dark bathroom. I wondered how friends I could not talk to were doing. I thought a lot.

After 5 days the power came back on. Another two days and the cable worked again, but because power surges had damaged my router the Internet and telephone (VOIP) were only restored today.

I had missed a lot, but I know my problems were trivial, nothing, bumps on a toad.

I didn’t learn of Virginia Tech until two days after it happened. It took my breath away and I have a lot of catch-up grieving in absentia to do. I’m still at it. I found out that in a town just to the west of me a tree fell on a truck and killed the driver. A man I know, a teacher at my youngest daughter’s school, was fly-fishing and was struck by a falling limb a foot in diameter. He’s still in the ICU.

There’s no big lesson in all this, no wisdom I’ve gained. Life went on, and death, and love and war, and commercials and everything else that normally goes on. But dammit, it did bother me to be disconnected from it, even for a few short days.

The set-up (2):
Your sacrifice is necessary even if it is
Your all.
Our lies are no greater than those told
By your parents.

The preparation (1):
Take this holiness and eat for this
Is your Body.
Take this holiness and drink for this
Is your Blood.

The preparation (2):
One-fifty-one and little white pills and it feels like
You can’t remember.
The future just a history not yet real
But it will be.

The preparation (3):
I will soothe you with my body for it may
Be your last.
My arms are wide open so come to me
And breathe the peace of Venus.

The learning:
Balsa, intrepid shield against an avalanche
Of ton boulders.
Squint your eyes against the nightly vision
Of torn bodies.

Getting there:
Slopes of pure white, vast, immense,
I adore you, goodbye.
Spots of green and brown on endless blue,
I love you, goodbye.

Being there (1):
Soft eyes of Catholic plea,
How can I help?
Just don’t ask me to save a choking child since
I don’t know the trick.

Being there (2):
Doe eyed girl of little past, skin like
Fresh chocolate milk.
It isn’t necessary, your ardor, unless
You really want to.

Being there (3):
Discovery of the other side, mine,  and what it means
Frees me forever.
Your sweat smells different but I love it just the same so thank you
Child of Mars.

Being there (4):
Brilliance with no peer and loving too, the thought of lunch
Makes you hungry.
You’ll catch up you say but you never do,
So why did you off yourself?

The Choice:
Want to go fly? It’s so cool at a click
Straight up.
No man, way too tired, I’m racking it so now I’m not but they
Are all dead.

R&R in the Morning:
Dress for the paddy and draw a .45 because you may need
To shoot someone.
It’s easy to find, no contest at all, just
Head for the smoke.

The witness – son:
Left thigh split open like a cheap
Pork hot dog.
Carnal howl forever frozen in
Timeless agony.

The witness – daughter:
One soft and pink, the other turgid and black
Your two breasts wink.
Impossible baby will suckle them for milk
That cannot flow.

The witness – Milo:
Your eyes are wide man, and your feelings
Stink of vomit.
Didn’t think it possible, did you, rich kid from the barrio
Of High Aspen?

The witness – me:
Falling through the vault of Heaven feeling what
I can’t imagine.
The screaming was just metal burning for
You were already gone.

The witness – God:
They are of me, and I of them, and that is everything but
They cannot see it.
I want to believe in them but
They wear me out.

Return:
I protected you – no not from them, those little farmers, but
From your masters.
The one domino that did fall hit me on the head and
Nothing will ever be the same.