by Ben Hewitt
The self-motivated nature of my writing practice makes a comparison to my sons’ learning all but inevitable. I sometimes wonder if I’d have the same confidence in Fin and Rye’s ability to direct their learning if it weren’t for my writing, because it was through my self-directed pursuit of it that I learned to have similar confidence in myself. Clearly, there were influences that helped me cultivate that confidence. My father wrote poetry, my mother wrote children’s books, and for a large swath of my childhood, there was no television in the house. There were all those predawn hours spent reading, escaping into stories in which I was not an overweight, unpopular child. And truncated as it was, my high school education did include a handful of writing classes, the brief periods of my schooling in which I felt as if I actually belonged. But it wasn’t until I’d left high school that I truly began to understand what writing could do for me. What I could do for myself.
The funny thing is, I strongly suspect that if I hadn’t dropped out of high school, I’d never have discovered writing as a profession. In dropping out, I had by default shifted the trajectory of my education in a way that was not likely to include college-level learning (after earning my GED, I did complete two semesters in the Vermont state college system), and therefore freed me of the financial burden such learning would have placed upon me, to say nothing of whatever expectations might have evolved in the process. Certainly, college was the presumed outcome for me. My father had earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins; my mother had graduated from Iowa’s Grinnell College. In a delicious bit of irony, at the time of my dropping out, my father actually worked for the Vermont Department of Education. Mine was a family that didn’t merely believe in structured education; we were fed and sheltered by it.
The transition from writing as a hobby to writing as a profession was not rapid. For many years, I continued earning a living by alternately working construction and repairing bicycles, all the while amassing a collection of published stories in minor periodicals. This continued until I awakened to the dawning realization that maybe, just maybe, I could support myself full-time through my writing.
Every so often, I allow myself the indulgence of imagining my sons’ future. I have no right to such imaginings, although so long as I do not allow my imagination to become a breeding ground for expectation, I suspect it’s a fairly harmless indulgence. For their part, the boys seem rather certain of what the world holds for them. Not so long ago, I overheard Fin and Rye talking, and there was something in their tone that made me listen more carefully than I might have otherwise, an earnestness suggesting that matters of great and lasting importance were being discussed.
“Rye, if you could have any three things in the world, what would they be?”
My eight-year-old younger son did not hesitate for even a moment:
“Traps, a donkey, and a cabin,” he replied emphatically, and at that moment, I felt a small ache. Part of it was happiness, the recognition that a boy can still be drawn to such things in a world that has all but forgotten they exist. But there was sadness, too, because I knew how unusual my sons’ three wishes were. “What will the world do with a boy who grows up wanting traps, a donkey, and cabin?” I thought. And then: “What will a boy who grows up wanting traps, a donkey, and a cabin do with the world?” When I expressed these concerns to Penny, she paused for a moment before replying. “Well,” she said, “it’s probably a lot more realistic than growing up wanting to play third base for the Red Sox.”
Like all parents, I must live with this uncertainty, although I suspect my sons’ unique interests exacerbate it. Traps, a donkey, and a cabin. Penny and I do not have the comfort of our children sharing the commonplace interests of their peers. But we are not comfortless, because every day we observe their resourcefulness and adaptability as they go about their self-directed tasks. Every day, we see them transform the unknown into the known, and we witness the constellation of experience, success, failure, and satisfaction that results from their learning.
Every time I consider the boys’ futures, I remind myself of this. And I remind myself of my own journey, and how I have come to understand that even events most would consider limiting became opportunities. Not opportunities in the way our culture has come to think of opportunities, as being about advancement and recognition, but opportunities in terms of illuminating a different path. Maybe the boys really will live together in a cabin, eking out a small living from the land, riding their donkeys into town on the full moon of every third month for supplies. Maybe, like the old woodsman we recently read about, they will allow so much time to lapse between changing clothes that their body hair will grow into and eventually through their long underwear. “That’s how I want to be!” Fin chortled, when he heard the tale. Or maybe they’ll become doctors, or bankers, or something that defies such easy categorization.
The truth is there are so many permutations of what it means to live a good life, and I often wonder if all I really want for my children is the ability to determine which permutation is right for them.
HELD
In the middle of August, after he’s taken the second cutting of hay off the hilltop field that borders the long row of maples towering over our shared fence line, Melvin turns his milkers loose to graze whatever fringes the mower missed. At four thirty every afternoon, my boys duck under the fence and step onto Melvin’s hayfield to drive the cows down for evening milking. It’s a quarter mile or more to the barn, down the steep hill that not so long ago was home to a ski tow Melvin’s sons had rigged up by suspending the front end of an old car at the hill’s crest and wrapping the tow rope around one of the drive wheels.
The boys covet this task. Fin and Rye have reached the age at which they are eager to prove they are growing into the young men they will become, and there is perhaps no better proof of such a thing than successfully driving a herd of thirty milk cows across a high, green hayfield and down into the barnyard below. Perhaps, like me, they recognize that at sixty-five, Melvin is approaching the end of his milking days and they can sense that some year in the not-too-distant future, it is likely there won’t be any cows to drive to the barn for evening milking. Still, I suspect that’s not much of a factor; they’re only eleven and eight, after all. They’re too young to be motivated by sentiment.
I, however, am not, and so one late-summer evening around six I traced the boys’ path to the barn, ostensibly to relay to Melvin my sons’ account of how one of his cows had spooked during that afternoon’s roundup and pushed through a weak section of fence. But a phone call would have sufficed, and the real reason for my walk (although I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time) was no more complicated than the simple fact that I know it won’t be many more summers before I won’t have such a ready excuse to stroll across that field. I won’t have such a ready excuse to tromp down the meandering path cut into the hillside by the force of literally hundreds of thousands of hoofprints over all the years Melvin’s cows have shuffled their unhurried way up and down that slope. I won’t have such a ready excuse to stand in our neighbor’s barnyard, him on one side of a windowless window frame and me on the other, chatting about the weather and haying and pasture and all the meaningless minutia of our day. Meaningless to anyone but us, that is.
Living between two dairy farms has proven to be one of the greatest unanticipated and unplanned blessings of our existence on this hill. We did not buy this property with such a thing in mind; we would not even have known to look for such a thing. And yet now I can’t even imagine anything else, and I find it literally impossible to express the ways in which it has enriched our lives, perhaps because some of these ways defy logic or reason.
I don’t like to think of Melvin’s inevitable retirement, although of course I want what’s best for him. But when I see Fin and Rye coming back from herding the cows down to evening milking, walking along the hayfield’s ridge, nothing visible behind them but sky, as if one false step would send them plummeti
ng off the edge of the world, I just want time to stop. When I stand in on one side of that windowless window frame with Melvin leaning against the other side, the late-day sun washing us both, and behind him the soft outlines of his cows as they stand for milking, I want time to stop. I want time to stop because in these moments, I am certain of the rightness of the world and of how I fit into it. I am certain that everything I need—have ever needed, am likely ever to need—is within my reach.
But here’s the thing about time: It keeps on going. Kids grow up, dairy farmers retire, a hayfield turns to forest and then back to hayfield. Things change, both in ways that can be anticipated and in those that can’t. Someday, Melvin will stop farming. Someday, my children will no longer herd his cows, either because he no longer has cows or because they are no longer interested. Either will be difficult for me to witness, and yet given the passage of enough time, both are inevitable. It is only a question of which comes first.
In my life I have seen, time and time again, how things that were once within my reach move beyond it. I think about the people I have cared for who have died or simply moved or drifted away. I think about the passing phases of my children, how Fin no longer wants to hold hands the way he used to, how I can no longer hoist either of them atop my shoulders at will. I try to remember the final hand hold, the final shoulder ride. But I cannot.
Likewise, I have seen how things I could never have imagined needing have become things I can hardly imagine doing without, and to live with the knowledge of their eventual departure is to live in harmony with the grief their leaving will impart. Sometimes I think of these things as birds landing on a branch. They perch for a while and then, for reasons known only to them, take flight again.
Occasionally, I am visited by a sense of nostalgia, not for an earlier era or for some past event but for the future nostalgia I know I will feel for now. I suspect that is what I’m feeling in those moments I want time to stop: the storage of the present experience for a future recalling. My boys, etched against the sky. My neighbor, framed by the window opening of his dilapidated barn. The cow-worn path, hard and rutted under my feet.
I know it is not merely my memory that is absorbing these small moments. It is my emotional core. It is my character. It is my spirit. It is everything that makes me me, and in the flickering seconds when I feel the influence of these moments on the very core of how I think and feel and perceive the world around me, I have this sense of being held in the palm of this place. Of here and now.
5
The Early Years
I OFFERED THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER’S incomplete history of my formal education because I have little doubt that it contains the foundation stones—or at least some of them—of our decision to educate Fin and Rye at home. Of course, Penny had plenty to say about this decision, and if anything, her resolve has been stronger than mine, despite having come closer than I to walking the prescribed middle-class American educational path of high school and four years of higher education. Indeed, she came remarkably near to fulfilling this expectation at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she pursued a degree in photography. Then came a summer spent working on a vegetable farm and with it the realization that a row of carrots held more fascination for her than a roll of film. Penny was not the first almost-college graduate to be derailed by seeds and soil, and she certainly won’t be the last.
Or maybe her unwavering commitment to keep Fin and Rye out of mainstream schooling institutions was not founded despite being immersed in contemporary educational convention but precisely because of this immersion and the recognition of its hollow rewards. Certainly, this commitment was forged in part by circumstance. Early in our relationship, I’d returned to Vermont for a summer, while Penny stayed in Martha’s Vineyard to work on the vegetable farm where she’d spent most of her days since leaving RIT.
Serendipitously, through a series of word-of-mouth connections, I rented a bunkhouse attached to a rambling homestead known locally as “Resurrection City,” or “Camp RC” for short. Resurrection from what, and toward what end, I never determined, and it didn’t matter to me anyway. I wasn’t looking for renewal, just a cheap place to lay my head, and at seventy-five dollars per month, Camp RC qualified. Other than me, the primary tenant was a thirty-something fellow named Donald, who lived with his two young sons, Crescent and Orion. I don’t remember precisely how old the boys were during my bunkhouse tenure—I’m guessing somewhere in the five-to-eight-year-old range—but I do remember that neither of them attended school. Instead, they stayed home with Donald, playing and exploring and accompanying him wherever he went.
Donald always seemed to find work that made this possible. In the spring, he made maple syrup at a neighboring farm while Crescent and Orion played in the snow or skied laps around the sugarhouse. He took small carpentry jobs and, provoked by either desperation or inspiration (and possibly, some combination of the two) started a mobile burrito kitchen. The three of them hawked vegetarian burritos at festivals and concerts and pretty much anywhere Donald—who had an uncanny ability to ferret out this sort of information—determined there would be a sufficient quantity of burrito eaters willing to part with their hard-earned money.
I don’t know if Crescent and Orion were homeschooled or unschooled, or some combination of the two that’s not so readily defined, but I do know that they were unusual children. They had few toys, and seemed entirely unaware of this dearth, perhaps because to them, everything was a toy. Everything was a game. I vividly remember them playing for hours with two discarded lengths of metal pipe, pretending they were canes, then fishing poles, then crutches. They would have been no more satisfied with the most elaborate set of Legos money can buy.
More so than other young children I’d met up to that point, they possessed a sense of self and a unique degree of confidence and awareness that eluded most adults I knew. They were precocious—mischievous, even—but even that was charming, if only because their antics were those of children engaged with their world. There was an unguarded childlike quality to Crescent and Orion, and I realize how silly that might sound: they were children, after all. But watching them play and scamper and tussle, I was struck by the extent to which most children I’d known in my young life simply weren’t allowed such freedom of expression.
Whether this was because of a deficit of time and space or of simple patience and tolerance, I wasn’t sure. I was only sure—as was Penny, when she came for a visit and met the boys—that my small friends knew a degree of happiness and freedom that I would want for my children, if ever I had them. Penny had been the favored babysitter of her suburban neighborhood and as such was familiar with the variable characteristics of young children. But Crescent and Orion were originals. “I’ve never met kids like them,” she said. “They’re amazing.”
It would add a degree of drama to my story to suggest that we wrestled with a multitude of options regarding our sons’ education, but from the moment we met Crescent and Orion, we knew: if we had children, they would be schooled at home. True, we did not know precisely how that learning would unfold, or how our days would be structured. But we knew, with a confidence that belied our inexperience as both parents and educators, that our boys would not attend school. Such certainty is arguably naive and maybe even a little bit arrogant; after all, we’re talking about unborn children. To pretend to know what will be best for them a half-dozen and more years hence demands no small amount of hubris. But of course the same could be said of any assumptions regarding our children’s future, and perhaps there is no less hubris in our collective faith that a more formal educational path is the one our children should walk.
Despite not knowing the exacting details of how we would educate our children, Penny and I knew that we wanted to retain the ability to guide their learning in ways that would largely be lost to us if they attended school. Which is to say, we wanted them to have less guidance than school would provide; we wanted them to experience a degree of freedom and simple pla
yfulness that is increasingly imperiled in modern America. In short, we wanted our kids to be kids, to develop and learn at their own pace, and in their own style. We had felt, acutely, the suffocating sense of having a standardized education thrust upon us, and we wanted something entirely different for our children. We did not want them to suffocate; we wanted them to breathe, and we did not believe they could breathe unless we reclaimed those thousands upon thousands of hours they’d otherwise pass in school.
Still, our journey to committed unschooling began haltingly. Our early efforts at home education were modeled in part on the Waldorf style of teaching. Waldorf is based on the educational beliefs of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and founder of anthroposophy, which postulates the existence of an intellectually comprehensible spiritual world. According to Steiner, this world is accessible to anyone willing to cultivate deep perception and intuition. Waldorf is the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world, with more than a thousand established private schools in sixty countries.
The Waldorf philosophy appealed to us primarily because it emphasizes the importance of teaching basic skills via art, crafts, and other expressive activities. In short, the belief that all the rote information our sons would need to know—reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on—are best learned in the context of a child’s artistic pursuits.
This sounded swell to Penny and me, and so when Fin reached five, the age at which we deemed it necessary to introduce some structure into his learning, Penny established a schedule around their daily art-and-crafts endeavors. She set up a station at the kitchen table, which bowed under heavy reams of thick art paper, along with an expansive range of watercolors and pastels. It was a beautiful sight, particularly when the morning sun broke over the horizon and brushed everything with its honeyed light. It just looked so . . . nurturing.