In which on a rushing snowmelt river I learn how to captain a raft. In a wetsuit, rediscovering the pain of a cold that doesn’t release its grip on your feet for hours. The beauty of a fresh river under a blue sky and only your team out there. Sometimes geese are floating by too, and mergansers, all buoyantly tossed in the whims of a flooded path. We gawk at fancy riverside houses that seem precariously close to the torrent we ride. With the river so high, the rapids are weakened, but we whoop and shout anyway. Except when I have to guide the boat, which is a thing I do now.

I groomed friendly horses, including a curly big guy and a miniature cutie, both of whose names I’ve forgotten in these busy weeks. Will report back.

After some on-the-spot coaching while watching the students ride, I dropped into a BMX course on a mountain bike. I rode the whole thing cautiously without stopping or dying or anything. I can’t wait to go again. And faster.

I had to manipulate some documents. It worked. I then studied real hard for my written and practical tests. Y’all, I am so chuffed: I can drive the short bus now.

Relearning teamwork, leaning into leadership, eating bagged lunches. Identifying plants and animals with clever, sassy, sometimes fully walled-up, always fussy teenagers. All of this among incredible adults, most of whom are genuinely interesting (to me). Enduring difficulties among these people, with them—physical pain, fear, conflict, resolution, frustration. Et cetera.

I went to prom and requested Mmmbop, then danced my face off to it. That song is longer than I recollected. The DJ played the Macarena and a whole game of limbo; I participated in one of these. (Real friends will know which.) The kids all looked darling and danced wonderfully. I wore my t-shirt with a tuxedo screen print, which had been gratefully sent from Maine just in time to avoid stressing about dressing for the event. It’s my DC9 Night Club New Years uniform: the whole staff wore them every year. I spent prom incongruously sober.

Unrelated to school except that I was feeling emboldened by accomplishment, I ventured onto my almost-neighbor’s porch with a plan to ask yet again that they shut off the lights that shine into my own windows. I realized immediately that no one was home. In broad daylight then I surprised myself by unhesitatingly mounting the railing there to successfully unscrew the offending bulbs.

On my own I walked up to a deer family accidentally in the dark. They didn’t move except to continue eating the newborn grass in the springtime evening.

---

* I work at a charter school for at-risk teens called Southwest Open School, or SWOS. A massive part of our curriculum is outdoor education.