by Ben Hewitt
“Why?” we asked him.
He raised his walrus-ian eyebrows into inverted V’s. “To see what happens,” he replied.
We jettisoned the barrel in a shallow depression at the edge of one of the playing fields, after which followed a sleepless night listening to the Bad Brains and fretting over the legal ramifications of creating counterfeit toxic waste. What special sort of wrath might the law reserve for a couple of sixteen-year-olds with an old barrel, a can of spray paint, and an ingrained sense of mischief? At two thirty A.M., in the lonely darkness of my childhood bedroom, my imagination ran toward long years of solitary confinement in the sort of juvenile facilities that are, at some point in the distant future, revealed to have been riddled with abuse.
The following morning, the barrel was gone. Django and I waited anxiously for news of its discovery, but none came, and for reasons I still do not understand, this delighted Tom.
Despite these shenanigans and despite the pleasure I derived from my creative writing class, the prevailing theme of my truncated high school career was one of simple boredom. And with it, a sense of my time being wasted, of my life slipping through my young fingers. In class after class, I slumped in my chair, quietly seething at my captors and, more broadly, at the unquestioned assumption that I should be held captive in the first place. Where was the relevance in what I was learning? In what ways might it inform and improve my life outside the context of school? It felt to me as if the entire experience was unfolding in a vacuum and that, once I graduated, the seal on the vacuum would burst, and I would be helplessly sucked into the real world, for which my schooling had done little to prepare me. I think this feeling frightened me, although I doubt I would have admitted so at the time.
Restlessly, I would shift my gaze from the algebraic equations scrawled across the chalkboard to the fields and forest and sky that for the majority of my waking hours remained achingly out of reach beyond the classroom’s plate glass windows which, for all their transparency, felt like nothing so much as the bars of a prison cell. What was I looking for? Nothing in particular, frankly. Nothing more than simple escape, a refuge from captivity, where the information I was being forced to memorize and recite (as if the latter were proof of having learned something) felt as if it mattered only against the backdrop of school.
Out there was the world I wanted to know and understand. Out there was the tangible world, the world where knowledge and experience did not depend on memorizing what I was told to memorize, what the regulations told me I must learn, but on doing. I wanted to be out there, immersed in a world that made sense to me, that had not been reduced to formulas, equations, and rules. I wanted to explore and try and understand my connection to this world, and my place within it.
I recognize some of this only in hindsight, of course. The truth is, I was no more insightful than any other angst-ridden teenager trying to find his place in a world that seemed unaccommodating, if not inhospitable. It was not that I knew precisely what I wanted, because I did not. But I knew that what I’d been offered and compelled by both law and tradition to accept felt unnatural to me. It cut against the fibers of my being in a way that left me abraded and raw.
In his book Free to Learn, Peter Gray, a research professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College, describes school this way:
Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it. It’s not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential . . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told to do than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.1
I do not think every child feels this way; indeed, some children seem to genuinely enjoy school. These are generally the same children that excel within the context of what it offers, and it’s hard for me to discern which comes first, the excellence or the enjoyment. In other words, do they excel because they actually like what school has to offer them? Or do they like what school has to offer them because they excel, and are thus the recipients of all the associated benefits of their ability to comply and perform? Or maybe it is both.
Truth be told, I never was one of those children, nor did I have many, if any, friends who excelled in school. But it was not difficult to see how that cycle worked: The children who performed well in school received recognition and honors from teachers, parents, and the community at large. This recognition and these honors felt good, and so these children sought more of the same—who wouldn’t? And as they continued to excel, they got better at excelling. They learned how the system works, and they trained themselves to perform in the context of that system. Furthermore, they took comfort in the knowledge that excellence in school foments a degree of security, both economically (admission to a good college and beyond that, whatever career path they might choose) and socially (more recognition and advancement based on that recognition).
My success or failure in school was dependent on my ability to follow a curriculum that felt as if it had very little to do with me as a human being. Certainly, it had not been designed by me or by anyone who had so much as met me. It was designed to a common denominator, and that common denominator was the assumption that someday, in the not-too-distant future, I’d graduate high school, continue on to college, and then, ultimately, settle into the career that would define what I would do and be for the rest of my life. Or until I got sick of being defined in this manner and found another job. It all felt irrelevant to my experience as a person.
I cannot remember precisely when I began to feel this way. Perhaps it was earlier than high school, but in any case, I would not have been able to articulate this sense of irrelevance. In grade school, where I was overweight and therefore unpopular, the proverbial (and in most cases, literal) last kid picked for any student-selected group activity, I still strove to meet the terms and conditions of my school-based identity. My desire to fit in was enormous, a hunger that could never be satisfied. I did not expect to be popular—few fat kids do—but I thought that if I worked hard enough at being relevant in the context of grade school’s social mores, I might at least be accepted. So I wore the clothing I was supposed to wear, listened to the music I was supposed to like, and clumsily tried to play the games and sports I was supposed to play.
It never really worked, of course, perhaps in part because I bore the social burden of my weight and whatever awkwardness it had instilled in me, but also because my true interests lay elsewhere. I loved reading above all else, and most mornings I’d set my alarm clock to wake me at four thirty, which gave me two full hours to read before I had to gather myself for school. And despite my girth, I loved riding my bicycle. I made jumps in the driveway and rode over them for hours on end. I fantasized that someday my parents would move us to California, where I could ride year-round and where I’d blossom into a professional cyclist.
I cannot recall this period without circling back to my sons, whose freedom to immerse themselves in their true passions and identities occasionally delivers to me pangs of envy, as if there is still a piece of the outcast boy I was three decades ago trapped inside my chest. Or maybe there really is a piece of this boy inside me. Whatever the case, I find tremendous comfort in the knowledge that Fin and Rye are not burdened by the expectations of their peer group. No one tells them their pants are funny, so they unself-consciously wear the clothing Penny brings home from thrift stores: faded jeans, frayed jackets, socks with floral prints. No one tells them they’re too fat or too skinny, too short or too tall, too slow or too w
eak, so they do not regard their physical characteristics and capabilities as being either flawed or lacking flaws, and I rarely hear them speak of others in these terms. No one tells them they should have a particular cell phone, or that they should watch a particular television show or movie, so they are free of the burden of desire for things they do not need or want. It is true that as they’ve grown older, they have become more aware of the material goods and cultural icons that captivate many of their peers, but they just don’t seem to care. They are genuinely flummoxed that some of their friends choose to pass waking hours playing video games. “What’s that about, anyway?” Fin asked me once. He’d just returned from a friend’s overnight birthday party, where at the age of ten he’d played his first video games. “Seemed pretty boring to me,” was his conclusion.
By high school, I had mostly shed the desire to identify with my classmates, and I had begun to understand that a meaningful life could be crafted outside the social mores and status of school. Does every high school student experience the internal turmoil and frustration I experienced? Of course not. Does every high-achieving student perform only for recognition and advancement? Of course not. I have no doubt that some students enjoy and perhaps even love learning in a structured, standardized fashion, and are fulfilled by what school can offer them. But my personal experience and observations—however anecdotal they might be—suggest that many, many more do not love learning in this manner and feel as if institutionalized learning does not honor them as people. If there is value in the standardized, performance-based curriculums utilized by the vast majority of schools, that value is realized primarily by the institutions themselves and by the economic and social structures that are fed by standardized learning.
The popular notion that these curriculums serve a so-called “greater good” is itself rooted in the flawed ideology of that greater good. What if that “greater good” isn’t so good, after all? It also assumes, perhaps not overtly, but certainly inadvertently, that children have no other meaningful way to contribute to the portion of their community that exists beyond the classroom walls beyond fulfilling the expectations of these standardized curriculums. The irony is that the more we distance children from their broader communities by forcing them to attend school for the majority of their waking hours, the fewer opportunities they have to contribute to society in ways that cannot be measured by classroom performance. Consequently, the fewer opportunities society has to witness the ways in which children can contribute beyond the classroom. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.
To their immense credit, my parents were accepting of my decision to leave high school. I think they recognized that I was spinning my wheels. Were they disappointed and concerned? I know they were, and my mother still remembers the very moment she was able to relinquish control over my destiny. “Mom,” I said at one point during our discussions about dropping out, “just let me make my own mistakes.”
It was decided that I would leave school following the first half of my junior year. In Vermont, the “school-leaving age”—the minimum age at which a person is allowed to quit compulsory secondary education without a state-approved alternative plan—is sixteen. I turned sixteen on November 23, and my parents’ only real request was that I finish out that term, which ran until the Christmas break. I agreed, and spent the next four weeks cutting as many classes as possible.
You’d think I would remember more about my last day of school, but I do not. I suspect I was excited, and probably more than a little nervous. I didn’t have any grand ambitions; I knew I would have to find work, that I was not about to embark on an extended vacation. I possessed a modest amount of construction experience, which is to say, I had a basic understanding of how a hammer works and intimate knowledge regarding the pushing of brooms. Beyond this, I did not think about how my life might unfold, and while I am not entirely comfortable recommending that others emulate this path, I am often struck by the extent to which not adhering to rigid planning has freed me to live as I want to live now, rather than living in a manner intended to serve my assumed future interests.
The only thing I remember clearly from that day is coming down off the long hill next to the school. I was in my Rabbit, and as was my custom, I was driving too fast. It was cold, but I rolled down the window anyway to let the car fill with the December air. I passed no one, but if I had, they would have heard my still-deepening adolescent voice belting out the lyrics to my favorite song. “You control who I see . . . on Mondays.” “Not anymore,” I was thinking. “Not anymore.”
There came a period after dropping out of school when I was neither man nor boy. I was living with my parents and, as anticipated, performing a variety of menial duties as the lowest man-boy on the totem pole of a small construction outfit. I believe I was making eight dollars per hour, but I can’t be sure; it might have been a bit less or a bit more. I was not directionless exactly, but I was living less by design than by the slow accumulation of days.
In the spring after leaving school, I was involved in a freakish accident, whereby my best friend, Trevor, and I ran our cars headlong into each other. He was on his way to visit me, and I to visit him; unfortunately, we met somewhere in the middle, in a dramatic manner that left both of us stunned and speechless, with the exception of the two words we repeated over and over and over as we stood next to our crumpled-together vehicles (for the record, those two words were holy and shit). Neither of us was injured, but my car was severely damaged and never ran properly again. To replace it, I bought an old Cadillac for two hundred dollars. Almost immediately the head gasket blew, and I had to pull over every dozen miles or so to let it cool down and dump water into the radiator. To complicate matters, the alternator didn’t work, so every night, when I got home from pushing brooms, I had to put the battery on a charger. Then one day I forgot to refill the radiator and the engine seized.
I junked the Caddy and picked up a Volkswagen Beetle for seventy-five dollars. The fuel pump was blown, so I mounted a gas can in the backseat, and ran a gravity feed to the carburetor. The foot brakes didn’t work, but the emergency brake did, and I drove it like this—reeking of gas, reluctant to stop—for nearly two years without incident.
I took the Beetle to Martha’s Vineyard, stopping every hundred miles or so to fill my makeshift backseat gas tank. On the Vineyard, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment with three friends. I got the couch and a job roofing for a fellow named Ken. Ken specialized in asphalt shingles, and we worked ten-hour days in the heat of July, wearing only socks, because shoes damaged the half-melted shingles. Ken also specialized in the consumption of high-grade marijuana, but rather than relax him, the weed seemed to make him explosive. Or maybe he would have been even more explosive without the pot, but whatever the case, he was always screaming at me. Plus, my feet hurt. So I quit.
Another contractor took me on. This was a better gig, because he specialized in authentic period restorations of large estate homes. Trevor (the same friend I’d crashed my Rabbit into back in Vermont) worked for him also, and we fell into a schedule that saw us begin work at six A.M., so that we might knock off by two or three. I bought a motorcycle, and in the afternoons, I took long rides on it or on my bicycle. I was only nineteen, but no longer drawn to recklessness. I worked hard and saved my money, although I wasn’t sure what for.
One morning in early February, a woman arrived on the grounds of the estate where Trevor and I were working. It was an inhospitable day, not just drizzling but raining in earnest, and the temperature was in the mid-thirties. I remember hoping it might become cold enough that the rain would turn to snow. I’d grown accustomed to the distant ocean views from the upstairs windows of the house; I’d look out these windows often, grateful for the reprieve those views offered. On this day, I could not see the ocean, but I kept looking anyway, hoping to catch the transition from rain to snow.
That’s how I knew the woman had arrived. She was riding a bicycle, bundled against the weather, and along the frame
of her bicycle, she had strapped a pickax and a shovel. It was barely seven A.M., and the woman I would soon come to learn was named Penny had ridden her bike through the rain-verging-on-snow so that she could spend the day in the rain-verging-on-snow, digging a trench for the estate’s new sprinkler system. To say a woman who would do such a thing intrigued me is an understatement of epic proportions, and although I was the sort of young man who as a rule could not summon the courage to do such things, I soon asked her out.
Around the time Penny came into my life, I also began writing. On my days off, I’d wake up early to fill notebooks with stories and small observations, some invented, some drawn directly from my days. At the time, I did not see the parallel between my nascent writing habit and my grade-school reading routine. But I do now.
I had no idea that writing would or even could become a source of income and, eventually, the primary means by which I would support my family. I wrote for the same reasons my sons carve bows or boil maple syrup: because there was something in it that whispered to me, that fed some part of me that could not be fed otherwise. No one told me I had to write or even that I should write. Likewise, no one told me I shouldn’t or couldn’t write, or what I could or should write about.
