Day Four of EDTs, and we’re hoofing it down from Pine Mountain Lodge (where there has not been a lodge since the 19th century)–windy and cold, but last night, we were warmed, belly and heart, by hot uber-stuffed quesadillas for supper and rousing campfire singing. Our team of troopers (Julia, Ben, David, Carrie, Faith, Sydney, Michael and I, packhorses Traveler and Timber, and Guilla-the-dog) pass another another hiker on the trail, not too far uphill from Piedra Blanca. We scuttle by him as he affably takes in our group; then, as I’m about to turn the corner, he calls to me.
“So what are you? A family or a school?”
I lateral the question to Ben and Syd, hiking in front of me. “What do you guys think’s the best answer to that?”
Without missing a step, Ben calls back, “A little bit of both!”
His answer gets me thinking. We eight humans and three animals are a subset of an educational institution that believes in the value of being in the wilderness for six days and five nights, twice annually. On this trip, we are therefore all committed to fulfilling a piece of the institution’s mission. Michael and I, as leaders, know that part of our job is to educate, to instruct: leave no trace, pitch in, help others, don’t cuss, even if you just nicked your index finger with your too-sharp knife or one of the horses has stepped on your toes.
Ergo, school.
No, wait, that’s family, too–I mean, the educating part. (I’m not completely sure where the knife fits in.)
What else on this trip? We honor traditions. We sing “Domine” for grace at Patton’s Cabin. On the way up the back side of the Ridge, we pucker up on the vertiginous Pucker-Up Point. On the way down, half a mile from the outlet of Horn Canyon, we spit on Spitting Rock.
School. Well, this school. (I just figured out where the knife fits in.)
So which is it? What are we, indeed? I spend the next week thinking of all the ways Thacher feels like one or the other to me, and, like Ben, I keep straddling the fence. I remember that Michael came back from a conference this year and reported that he’d heard a speaker say that boarding schools are plumb wrong to pitch themselves as “like family.” For one thing, unconditional love is problematic for schools that have admission standards and rules that sometimes contain the word “suspension.” We don’t actually, literally tuck the kids in at night. And when, say, in a discipline situation, the needs of the individual are weighed against the needs of the institution, it’s possible that, given a particular set of circumstances, the latter will hold more sway.
But at our last Open House of the year, I walk through the rambly, packed house, picking my way around kids sprawled across the carpeted stairs and landings, hanging on each other at either side of the chess table, jostling six deep at the cookie racks around the kitchen island, dancing their posteriors off in the living room, wailing on ping-pong balls in one game after another out back, diving into pizza and wolfing down quesadillas–and I realize I’m watching a multi-generational mix of revelers: students of all ages, faculty of all ages, and faculty children of all ages who thread their way around the place.
Feels like home to me. Feels like family, baked into the center of a school pie.