Scent ties to memory. The campfire smoke will wash from my hair in
another shower or two. The memories will
linger, blending with the smoke of other campfires, other marshmallows, other
children’s voices, other tents rustling and pulsing with barely contained
energy. The smoke will fade; the
memories will remain, tied with thousands of others to that smell.
Where there is smoke, there is fire. Cliché, fine.
And mostly true, but fire exists without smoke. Fire burns, but it also melts, cracks,
ignites, and metamorphoses. In the sixth
grade in the Waldorf curriculum, our children study geology. As the fires of change burn and erupt within
them, they discover the shaping of the earth through fire. For Waldorf schools in Northern California,
this means a field trip to Mt. Lassen.
There were classes from one other Waldorf school and one
Waldorf-inspired charter school besides ours on the mountain this week.
I wasn’t supposed to chaperone this trip. I should have been working, set in my
routine. But, this has been a period of
shifting for me as well. Our move, the
crack in my metacarpal bone -- the plates of our lives have jolted, reshaping
the routine. I was the working mother,
the one who never had kids over for playdates, who never volunteered in the
classroom, who rarely went on field trips.
My involvement with school came in bursts, projects that could be taken
home, completed in my isolated schedule.
That has changed this fall. This
morning I looked at my husband. “When
was the last weekday that we had all of our children and no one else’s?” “Monday.”
“No, last Wednesday.” “No. Wait.
That was the day we had…” We
finally realized that the answer was, ‘before school started.’ Years ago, when Caitlin was a baby, I attempted
stay-at-home-motherhood. I failed. Trapped, bored, depressed, I felt completely
inadequate – a failure. But, the fires
burn, the plates shift, the crust cracks.
This time around, things have changed. I am surrounded by people living similar
lives. My children and their peers have
progressed to stages of creativity, eloquence, and curiosity, making them
entertaining companions. And,
admittedly, I have the luxury of knowing that my hand will heal, and that this
phase of my life will pass into memory.
Though each of these moments with my kids –
playdates, haircuts, watching small legs pumping the swing slung from the tree
in the front yard – has meaning, the memories of this recent foray into the
woods will linger long. The sixth grade
is, and always has been, a special class.
Even within a school of high-energy, bright children, these kids are
well-known (notorious?). I have heard
them called a “challenging” class, with the tinge to the word that suggests an
adversity in the challenge.
Challenging? You bet. Like the mountains in which we spent the last
48 hours, they are volatile, rugged, beautiful, and dangerous to take for
granted. And well worth the effort to
explore. This is a class of leaders; few
in this group are docile, few are complacent, and few take anything at face
value.
But this is more than a class. Perhaps it is a result of the small class
size, maybe it stems from their active and activity-based curriculum, or maybe
it is just their nature, but these kids are family. Even now, as the hormones begin to surge beneath
the crust of childhood, my daughter and her classmates interact almost more as
siblings than as friends. The bonds, the
rivalries, the name-calling, and the support against the outside all have the
taint and glow of family. Though the
faces have shifted in the years that this group has been together, it is difficult
in this class to tell the biologic siblings from the scholastic ones.
And yet, the dynamic is changing. The make-believe games of a few years ago
have shifted into “Truth or Dare” and “Would You Rather.” On the second night of the trip, the dire
phrase “spin the bottle” emanated from one of the larger tents. (Further investigation revealed that the
proposed game was “hug spin-the-bottle” because “the real kind is just gross.”) Throughout the trip, the other chaperones and
I watched these kids surge between childhood and adolescence – debating the merits
of explicit vs. non-explicit downloads from iTunes one moment and finagling marshmallows
for breakfast the next. (If your child
claims to have roasted marshmallows in the morning, it is a vicious lie; no
responsible chaperones would permit that sort of thing!) They are old enough to sleep in tents without
an adult and young enough to need reminding to use the bathroom. They set up tents with minimal supervision,
yet can’t remember to wear shoes around the campsite. They can hike up a steep trail of cinder and
ash, but some are still confused about making (and packing!) their own
sandwiches. They are young enough to
brave the frigid waters of a mountain lake, but old enough to panic at the
scritch of a tent zipper while changing clothes.
Though many in this class have been together for
years, this is their first year with this teacher. Although the standard practice in Waldorf
schools is for the teacher to matriculate through the grades with the children,
through varying flukes of coincidence, this class has never been with the same
teacher for more than two years. Mike
and I tease Caitlin that Voldemort wanted to teach her class, and so there is a
curse. It is a natural fit, though, for
them to have a new teacher as they move into adolescence. With this new expansion and turbulence of
their minds and bodies, it is fitting, I think, for them to have a new guide,
and one who can combine a love of the arts with the strong background in
science that they need in order to make sense out of this chaotic world as they
shuffle toward the edge of adulthood. In
their classroom prep for the Mt. Lassen trip, the kids learned the science
behind the forces of magma beneath our feet, and then they created their own
myths to explain the Pacific Ring of Fire.
From donuts to a god named Tim, we were treated to skits based on these
myths on our first night camping near the base of a volcano. There were no lectures while at the
park. We visited a museum and
interpretive signs along the trails were pointed out, but the only school work
was a daily entry into their “field journals.”
Geology will continue in the classroom, and the kids will bring to their
studies the memories of their experiences – the smell of sulfur from the vents
of Bumpass Hell, the crunch of the trail up Cinder Cone, and the smoke of the
campfire.
