New Levels

“Is this Harry Potter?”

It’s the question most asked in the Boys’ Lodge, as boys of all shapes, ages, and sizes come trickling in through the heavy-falling snow, finished with their worship session and full of plans for the upcoming talent show. They blow in from the storm, shake off the snowflakes with whole-body convulsions as they stomp through the living room, and turn to the glowing blue of the TV, where three women, three tubs of cookie dough, and three foil-covered cookie sheets are working hard. We’ve been making cookies all evening, and having finished Prince Caspian a bit ago I slipped back over the path to the Girls’ Lodge, holding my breath through music and sermon to rummage through Erika’s bag to get the next feature of the evening, the next amusement as we bake cookies for 85 teenagers.

“Yep. Number six.”

“Six isn’t out yet.”

“Oh, right. Five, then.”

“Wait, are you making cookies? Can I have one?”

Erika emerges from the kitchen, where she’s been overseeing the erratic camp ovens with their precious treats, a steaming cookie on her spatula. The boys’ eyes widen, their hands extend like urchins’, and Erika tips the hot cookies into them with a grin.

“Enjoy!”

Soon we have gathered a number of disciples, and their comments are an amusing mixture of Harry Potter commentary (“Ugh. I hate that Umbrage lady!”) and requests for more cookies.

After almost four years as a small group leader for five girls at Bethany Community Church, this is my tenth winter retreat. I’ve come as a student, all mixed up in the thrill of going away and the drama of boys and learning to ski, and as a leader, full of enthusiasm and eager to draw everyone in to the spirit of frenzied excitement that seems so integral to all youth retreats. This year, for the first time, I am coming as neither: I am the cook. One of three cooks, actually, I have spent three days helping to prepare and serve food to kids and leaders from the city, reveling in the glory of time in the snow without cell phones.

This moment, like so many others this weekend, reminds me of something else, taking me so quickly back to being a child at another mountain retreat chalet, where I assisted my mother in silence while she prepared French bread pizzas or baked potatoes to the college kids listening to my father’s Bible teaching in the living room. I remember handing hot cookies to boys twice my height as they came in from the cold, when they patted my head and their faces bore that same amazement that these ones do tonight.

Still, as much as it recalls childhood, this weekend stands in striking contrast to more recent retreats. There has been no coaxing and cajoling, no confiscating of cell phones or odd games for which I exaggerate enthusiasm. There have been no kids hanging off me, no squeals of admiration or inside jokes. Indeed, this weekend has been quiet, time spent in the kitchen with adults, interacting with kids only as I serve meals. And, I’m surprised to realize, that has felt right. I know that I am doing something important here, even sacred, in providing for basic needs; it’s just different than it was.

I’ve been considering lately the expectation for Young Adulthood, where challenges and lessons pop up like obstacles on Super Mario, at predictable intervals, with a time-tested method for conquering them. But what happens in this game when the protagonist doesn’t go to graduate school or move around the world, when neither marriage nor parenthood looms on the horizon? Instead of having levels that change when goals are reached, does this game look like a long Career Staircase, begun at an early age and climbed for the rest of adulthood? Even if the Career is a good one, like teaching, might she get to the point where climbing is mastered and wish to ascend to some other level, grow in some new way?

I lean across the counter in the kitchen, pushing a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies out to the edge of it along with a frigid gallon of milk. A boy barely taller than the counter, who I’ve watched grow up from infancy to now, in a snow hat and wide-eyed and full of Harry Potter opinions, approaches the cookies. Closing his fingers around one and breathing deeply, with satisfaction, he turns back to the movie with a nod of thanks. I nod back, thinking how things change, how I change, without expecting or demanding transformation. I'm thinking of the myth of static circumstances, and the growth that is not only possible but completely inevitable to those of us who live with eyes and hearts open to the people and places in which we find ourselves. The challenges are different in these unpredictable levels, outside of seeming conventions I find in unfair comparisons. But there are twists here, too, because I am growing within my profession and relationships, changing in a place that is changing with me. And I’m thankful, all at once, for the moment and the kids and the life to which I’ll return from this retreat, one that is never the same as I wake anew each day.

Our Islands

When you’re on a golden sea
You don’t need no memory
Just a place to call your own
As we drift into the zone

On an island in the sun
We’ll be playing and having fun
And it makes me feel so fine
I can’t control my brain

We’ll run away together
We’ll spend some time forever
We’ll never feel bad anymore

Weezer

"OK, turn your desks to the front, folks," I request. "We have time to hear a few stories. Let's hear them."

The kids have been writing disaster stories today. We began reading Lord of the Flies about a week ago, but today is the first lesson after wrapping up the endless details of a research project. Research, as it happens, is my least favorite subject to teach, and one of the only strict directives given to me by my department: "Ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, and all graders shall participate in a yearly research project. They shall be given class time for research, class time for drafting, class time for revising, presenting, cutting out pictures for their visuals. Yea, verily, this shall be done." And so we do it.

I've never loved research; it reminds me of these nights in college, when I would finish a paper full of quotes and citations, woven together into a peice of writing that was technically correct and clever, but lacking in voice or artistry. Research papers were chores, asking little of me but the synthesis of other people's facts. As a teacher, I've struggled to bring any joy into this process; even when I can get excited about the body of knowledge and the pursuits of curiosity represented by these projects, I'm filled with dread at the reality of mentoring ninety individuals through the dark valleys of paraphrase, citation, and commentary. So the great fair, a culminating celebration of tri-fold poster boards and wandering teenagers, is over, to our great relief.

The weary students have just spend the first half of the class writing their own versions of Lord of the Flies. Last year, I'd written the first page of a macabre tale in which I was transporting a select group of ninth graders to Australia when our plane crashed on an island. (In an early draft, I'd written that I had died, along with the pilot, in the crash, leaving no adult survivors. But, unable to deal with my own mortality even in fiction, I had bumped myself off the flight in Hawaii for the final revision.) I asked the students to imagine how they--the kids in the classroom around them today--would deal with the challenge of surviving in the wild.

There was something magical about wandering around a mostly quiet classroom for twenty minutes, watching stories take shape on the page. Later in the week, the poet who teaches my second period on Thursdays would talk about the energy of a group of people devoted to a common and creative process. I would remember this moment. When pens began to slow, I tossed out ideas for them. "Make someone fall in a hole," I suggested once. "Just throw in a twist. That's what these stranded-on-a-island stories are about. Anything can happen."

"Anything?"

"Sure."

"Like a dinosaur?"

"Yeah. Dinosaur. Good one."

And they kept writing.

When the stories are finished, the kids spend several minutes sharing them with one another in small groups. As they share, my intern and I pace the classroom, eavesdropping on the most interesting creations we've heard in weeks. Gone are the stale details of research writing; here are students devoted to the cause of creating imaginative catastrophes. Now they turn their desks to the front. They know what's coming next.

"OK, are there any nominations? Any stories that the rest of the class must hear?"

A hand shoots up at the back of the class. It's a hand I see often, a hand I like to see, because it's often attached to thoughts that offer surprising depth and nuance.

"Yes? Who do you nominate?"

"Um, me. Myself."

"Good. And do you accept this nomination?"

The young boy, who's lived in Somalia and London and Seattle, raises his eyebrows at me.

"Course! OK," he weaves his way to the front of the room. "Here it is."

The tale, beginning when my students wake up and realize that they are stranded without adults on a beach, whisks us away on the ferris wheel of fortune. First the ninth graders return to the remains of the plane to discover "party snacks, drinks, and a turntable." (I recall hearing this student, when he was first sharing the story with his peers, saying, "Oh, don't worry about how there's power on the island. That's not important.") The party is in full swing when a tyrannosaurus invades, and this heroic boy fights it until he "tripped over a limbo stick." The rest of the one-page story is a darkly comic descent into disaster fantasy.

As he reads, as my intern, my students, and I break up into cascades of laughter at each new plot turn, I'm thinking about the joy of shared experience. Though I've often thought of teaching as an isolating experience, in that there are few other adults with whom I work on a daily basis, I'm realizing that this is more of a community than I once expected. In a school where differences sometimes threaten to divide us beyond reconciliation, how beautiful to find these places where we connect, places where age and ethnicity, education and even language no longer matter. Stranded on an island, away from cell phones and schools and responsibilities, we are united in the unknown, even if the island is only in a book we're reading together.