Hello friends!
I am back in the states, and what a scene to return to. How are we all doing out there?
I have so much to say about Collioure, and I hope to share some stories in the coming weeks, but I find that sometimes these things need to percolate a bit. I am too close to the beauty to make sense of it. All I am sure of is that I am aglow with gratitude. It was a truly magical experience, and one that will carry me for quite some time. Thank you for all of the wonderful well-wishes, and for accompanying me on my journey. You are the greatest community I could possibly hope for.
Alas, this story has been bumping around in my heart this week, so of course I had to listen and share it, because what other choice do we have, really? We need to let them breathe.
All my love,
Kendall
Imagine for a moment that you are thirteen years old, and you’ve just arrived on an island off the coast of California, fresh off the boat with your seventh-grade class, on the most epic four-day field trip of all time. Can you feel the jittery anticipation in your gangly body? The ecstatic buzz? The nerves? The prickle on the back of your scalp and the laughter and nausea that keeps bubbling up when you look around at all your friends and foes and realize you’re far from home, on an island, and anything at all could happen? Anything at all??
Imagine stepping off the boat with a duffle bag slung over your shoulder and a sleeping bag under your arm, shuffling down a long pier in a river of students, your eyes scanning the length of the rocky beach, tracking the wooden dive deck stilted alongside it with long rows of dripping wetsuits above, a line of colorful kayaks below, the lopsided company of boats bobbing behind you in the bay, the clusters of adobe buildings nestled into the shadow of towering hills, and just there, to the left, is that a climbing wall?
Do you remember what it feels like to be young and to feel as though the excitement of a thing is much too big for your body? Remember being overcome by the urge to flap your arms about or scream or spin in circles to help alleviate the exquisite agony of not being able to contain such a wave of joie de vivre?
OK, now imagine that you’ve dropped your things off in your new dorm, you’ve been assigned a group, and you’re standing in a circle on a large grass field with your new instructor, and you’re doing an ice breaker of some kind. She’s trying to get all your names down. She seems chill, not mad rizz, like that one blonde guy with the surfer vibe, but low key cool, you know?
Mostly you want to know what you’re all going to be doing first. You didn’t have to put your swimsuit on, which kind of sucks, ‘cuz you know you’re not going to be snorkeling this afternoon, but that climbing wall is lit. Or maybe you’ll be heading out on one of those boats tied up to the float— that would be dope. Or maybe you’re going to pet a shark or something; someone said that was a thing.
But then your new instructor tells you that your first class of the afternoon is something called plankton lab.
Ugh. What a short straw. Plankton is lowkey dead. The epitome of mid. And adults trying to hype up copepods and diatoms? Cringe. What a try hard.
This lady. You’re not sure about her anymore.
OK, OK. I also didn’t love starting things off with plankton lab. I mean, algae lab was even worse, but only marginally so. Labs, in general, were a tough sell on that first afternoon. We tried to stack them so that the kids got some kind of high out of the rotation— we paired plankton lab with invertebrate lab (where there were all kinds of touch tanks and they got to feed an octopus) and the boat rotation (a trip out to sea on a flattop, with the possibility of seeing bow riding dolphins)— but still, just about every kid wanted to don a wetsuit and dip below the glossy blue water.
I mean, could you blame them? A whole universe beckoned out there.
Alas, someone always had to start with plankton or algae labs, and this time, it was me.
And there’s this kid in my group— his name is Evan— who clearly has no f*#ks to give about plankton lab. I’ve already been pulled aside by the chaperone who put his hand on my shoulder and loudly whispered in my ear that Evan’s going to walk all over me if I let him. He’s a class clown, a troublemaker. I’m told I can send him to the head teacher if he’s too disruptive.
I shrug my shoulder ever so slightly to get the guy’s hand off me, stepping into the small classroom.
Ok, game on.
It’s not that you’re an asshole. You really aren’t. It’s just that all the grown-ups think you’re an asshole ‘cuz you say what everyone’s already thinking, and it gets you some laughs, and that feels good.
It’s just the thing you do. You don’t know when you first started, but at some point, it kind of became your deal, and now everyone expects you to do it, and so you just do. Better than being bored, right?
The instructor lady seems nice or whatever, but she’s trying to get everyone excited about little squirming blobs on a microscope and you’re not feeling it. You can hear other kids screaming and squealing outside, thumping around on the dive deck, and you’re not about to pretend that the blobs are worth your time.
I mean, it’s kind of cool that they’re projected from your microscope up on the wall really big, and they do kind of look like freaky aliens, and she just said something about catching prey with snot or something but come on.
You’re not buying it. Lame.
Evan’s face is propped up on his open palm and it’s slowly sliding down and melting off it like a Salvador Dali painting.
“This is so dumb,” he groans, to the snickers of a few kids nearest him.
His eyes light up at that, a little spark ignited, and he suddenly jumps off his stool and starts dancing in the middle of the small room, “Look at me, I’m a stupid oikopleura!” he sings as he dramatically flails his arms around, accidentally hitting a girl on the back of the head.
“Ow!”
“Sooorrrry.” He mocks, to more guffaws and barks of laughter.
“Evan!” Growls the chaperone, his body stiff and unyielding. “Outside. NOW.”
The boy rolls his eyes so hard, it’s possible he blacked out for a second.
“Don’t worry about,” I say, “I got it.”
The chaperone raises an eyebrow at me somewhat incredulously, tilting his chin down in the universal facial expression for “Seriously? You sure?”
I nod.
“Come on, Evan. Outside.”
Evan throws his head back and drops his shoulders as he stomps toward the door. The universal adolescent gesture for, “I hate everything.”
You know just exactly how this is going to go down. Something about respect and consequences and one last warning or some bullshit.
You heard the chaperone guy telling her about you earlier. Adults always think they’re being so discreet, like whispering doesn’t immediately draw the attention of within a mile radius. He called you a clown and troublemaker, blah, blah blah.
This girl has definitely already made up her mind about you. Adults always believe other adults. Whatever.
You stand with you hip thrust to the side, looking anywhere but at her face, ready for the lecture.
Game on, lady. Game on.
I mean, he called himself an oikopleura. Which happens to be my favorite zooplankton of all time, a larvacean that makes a balloon-like mucous house around their body to trap prey until it gets clogged, and then they abandon it and make a whole new one, sometimes several times a day. It’s pretty impressive that he remembered that name. He even pronounced it correctly.
He looks so checked out, staring at the dive deck with that let’s just get this over already look on his face.
I like him. I like him a lot.
“Hey,” I say, turning to look at the dive deck with him. “I bet you’d rather be out there than in this stupid lab, huh?”
He rolls his eyes again, not looking at me, not buying the lets-bond schtick. Fair enough.
“Listen, Evan. It’s Evan, right?” I say, and he flicks his eyes at me.
“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re like at school, and I don’t really care. Here, on this island, you’ve got an A+ in my group. Everyone starts with an A+.”
He shifts on his feet, listening while pretending very intently not to.
“And here’s what I think. I think you’re really smart, and I think you sometimes get bored in class, and I think the other kids look up to you.”
Now his eyes meet mine briefly, warily, with a side of something else buried underneath.
“And honestly, I could use your help. I don’t know anyone in this group yet, and we’re going to be doing some things that might scare some of them. Night snorkels and catching sharks and stuff like that.”
Now he’s interested. His eyes flick across my face.
“If you’ll be my right-hand man this week, I think we could really help some of the nervous ones. I think they trust you. What do you think? Will you help me?”
Here’s the moment. The hand extended. The fragile, gossamer thread quivering between teacher and student, adult and child, authority figure and havoc-wrecker.
He swallows hard and nods.
“Yeah, I can do that,” he says quietly, straightening up, looking down at his feet and then up at me again.
“Cool.” I say.
We weave narratives about other people all the time, to protect our hearts and our egos. We think that if we’re cynical, we’re savvy. We think that if we assume the worst about other people, we won’t be disappointed when they prove us right.
But what does it do to a person, sitting on the seafloor like a closed oyster shell, impervious to any external irritants? Well, I suppose nothing gets in there, which is safe and predictable. But also, there’s no chance you’ll make a pearl.
The next stop on the rotation was invertebrate lab. After a quick talk about taxonomy outside, we marched into the salty, aquarium-rich wet lab and made our way over to the lobster tank, flip-flops muddy on the slick floor. I thrust my hand into the icy water and trapped a spiny lobster under my palm, feeling the sharp sting of its thorny carapace in my skin.
I lifted it up, legs waving, antennae crisscrossing in front of its ancient face, to chorus of appreciative ooohs and ahhs from the students.
Evan stood next to me, eyes on the captive creature, listening as I talked about how they can live to be a hundred and they pee out of their faces.
This elicited a shock of laughter from the group, as always, and one of the boys across from me began pantomiming peeing on the girl next to him, who was pressing her body into the girl next to her, squinching her face up with her arms crossed protectively across her chest.
“Hey! Cut it out!” Even barked. The room went silent. “Kendall’s talking.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat.
I bumped him with my hip behind the tall tank, subtly enough not to be noticed, and offered him the lobster.
His hand closed around it, and he held it proudly in front of him like a glimmering pearl.
Game on, my friend. Game on.
Lucky Evan. I bet he still tanks about you to this day. You’ve provably heard that study where a teacher is told a mid-level group of students are actually gifted. After a year of teaching them under that false info, guess how those students performed? Exceptionally, of course.
And this cracked me up, such a funny way to visualize boredom! “Evan’s face is propped up on his open palm and it’s slowly sliding down and melting off it like a Salvador Dali painting.”
Love how you saw the pearl in the making.