We Must Take the Current When it Serves

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,

which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in the shallows and in miseries…

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures."

—Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene 3, 218–224

On Thursday we were deep in the Ripton woods, on old logging trails, under the gold canopy of tail-end brilliant leaves. The clouds gray and steel, bruised blue and low. We passed through small fields “no bigger than a harness gall,” grasses dry and pale yellow, we walked on leafy paths, under rotting deer-stands, through dense hard-wood groves, over beds of sodden moss.

Three groups set out, each at different pace, each with compasses and GPS units, back packs, mud-boots, and some food. The goal was to find “Stopping By Woods,” a geo-cache up near a beaver pond to the northeast of school. We had been there once before, three years ago, at this time of year, then, as now, trampling through woods and surrounded by our own voices, calling out, “We’re over here!” and shrieking as we sank deep into the mud and cold waters filling the bogs.

The younger students are giddy, laughing, hugging, trampling about like new born lambs. Or, sometimes, or intermittently, they are confused, overwhelmed, and unsure, trying, to find a way in, trying to connect, wondering who their friends will be, trying to fuse into the new scene. Wide-eyed, a little panicked by the brightness of the light, wondering how they might ever imitate some older student’s capable, inspiring ways. Trying to keep up, they hang on.

Brutus’ words in Julius Caesar make me think, however, of what the ninth graders are moving towards. They have been around long enough to understand the difference between the shallows and the depths. This thing of the necessity of taking the current when it serves, of not wanting to lose one’s ventures. The older kids going deeper, leading, venturing, and being able to say what venturing is. They are looking back to when they were first wandering in the woods, first wading in, on their first hikes, not knowing what to bring or how to be prepared for the weather. Two years ago they might have been shivering and complaining and wondering, “What in the Sam Hill are we doing out here?”

Now, they are cycling out into bigger thoughts. There are times when they seem deadly serious. They are less distracted by minute matters, more drawn to larger motions— of their own thoughts, their own aspirations. When we go gallivanting into the woods they know what we are looking for. And it’s not about material goods, or the cache, or a treasure, but about the spirit of motion and going forth with striding glee. It matters not if they get wet. They plow straight forward, in love with the going. Water spills into their mudboots and they exclaim, “THIS is AWESOME!”

Is it just they get out of the classroom in the fall to walk in the woods, or something more? They are aware of so much now. They think about the going more than the prize at end. This is hardcore, they exclaim. I love my school, they call out. Our class is the best, the say to each other. They are aware, it seems, if you press them, of everything: the textures of the land, the reflections of the leaves in the steely black water, the scent and smell of the muck, and of each other.

We climbed over a beaver lodge. We held out our hands to pull each other over the deep currents. We smelled decomposing leaves and made clouds of black silt rise from the waters. We trampled over mosses as green as gold. We stepped over old refuse piles, bent fenders and syrup and oil cans and bald, cracked tires half hidden in piles of leaves, the front suspension of a Model T Ford poking out like a tilting orange-rusted grave-stone.

They get wet, but they don’t get grumpy. They get muddy but they don’t complain. They get cold, but they are so busy chattering and laughing and asserting their hardcore status that that don’t feel the cold. Or they do, but the fun and the motion is more important. The cold and wet becomes part of the reason we are here. They say, afterwards, in the quiet of the class, “I felt closer to real life.” Out of dry caves to where the water soaks through. We will remember this day in middle school, perhaps more than all the others.

Last year we talked what a “religious feeling” might be. What feeling made one feel the presence of invisible power? When one felt invisible power, what was the feeling? Had we ever had one? Was a religious feeling simply seeing straight into certain moments and apprehending the moment’s significance? On Friday, after the hike, some of the kids talked about religious feeling: of walking ahead and the silence they found in the water pooled behind a dam; of seeing geese exchanging the lead as they flew over the mown fields at twilight. Of no longer caring about being wet, of forgetting the materials we toted—back-packs full of manufactured objects—and becoming subsumed in the cold flow, up to the neck, and truly falling in.

This week many of them spoke about having gone to Marrowbone: And we read Aylee’s description of being at Marrowbone when she was four. Then, she was an excited little girl, more interested in the leaves she collected on a sharpened stick than the silly poetry and singing going on behind the trees. Her little sister was asleep in mom’s lap, oblivious to all except the bodily warmth of a parent. A little ways off Aylee was excitedly squirming about, listening, smelling the woods, collecting leaves, peeling bark off small twigs, finding the most beautiful leaf in the world, over and over. She wanted to scamper on, to find more leaves, and to find the next trail, the next path, and find her way into the clearing where there was cider and sun-light. Aylee, at age four, did not want to leave one leaf behind.

And then, in class this week, there were students who’d just gone to Marrowbone, the students sitting in our classroom, talking about being at Marrowbone eight falls ago, talking about being at Marrowbone just days ago. They see themselves growing up before their own eyes. Then, as Bryn said on Monday, at Marrowbone this year she tried to remember words and ideas from every act. She didn’t want to forget what she was hearing. It was so different, she said, from when she was little. She told us she had even begun to write down quotes on her hand, trying to save the big thoughts which, she has learned, are worth keeping. Thoughts are the golden leaves, and she was trying to save every one.

When they are like this, circling ever further out and seeing more, I see them as Orpheus, who was so hungry and devoted to love that he would be willing to go into the underworld to try to sing a heart of stone back to life. There is in my students a similar desperate passion, a growing belief in the power of words, music, images, and belief in, even, treading through bogs. That is a faithful, questing spirit, and in our most exalted moments, when they are shouting in the woods, I believe they still do have the spirit of westering. In The Red Pony, Jody’s Grandfather says he believes the spirit of westering has died out in men. And yet we see it in a hundred ways every day. Adolescent westering. Wanting to find words for the unnameable. Confronting mysterious feelings. Arriving at an impasse together, and stumbling about, trying to find a direction, trying to re-orient, re-position, or reset the coordinates.

Their exuberant surging forth, at the time when the leaves are coming down, just before the snow flies and the swamps freeze over, is a spectacular collision of forces. I feel them trying to wring meaning out, in laughter, shouts, and still, sometimes, through sorrow-full tears. Robert Frost has a small poem in which he talks about a walk late in the fall, called, appropriately, “A Late Walk.”

When I go up through the mowing field,

The headless aftermath,

Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,

Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,

The whir of sober birds

Up from the tangle of withered weeds

Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,

But a leaf that lingered brown,

Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,

Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth

By picking the faded blue

Of the last remaining aster flower

To carry again to you.

Orpheus believed completely that he could sing so well that he could make the dead come back. In another time, in another season, we see the hope inhering in bringing a last aster from the withered gardens of summer, in bringing back the last color in the time of dying. The older kids have looked long enough to know that there are fortunes of faded asters “not far from our going forth.” There are flood currents, and they are making motions towards riding on them, and that is a motion of becoming.

Miles read a poem by Keats on Friday: “The Cricket and the Grasshopper,” which begins with the line, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” In the swamps and bogs, taking our measure by the co-ordinates of going and finding, the poetry of earth is never dead. It flows and flows, and we are deep in it.