Unfamiliar Ground

I only applied for jobs near the ocean, in places where I could surf. I took a position teaching at a boarding school in Brevard County, Florida, with students from Serbia, China, the Dominican Republic, Granada, Togo, France, Georgia, the Turks and Caicos, Russia, and Greece, in addition to the local American students. I’d avoided going to high school for 27 years. That was my joke, anyway. In truth, I was homeschooled, so the first “real” school I went to was college.

After I accepted the job, I called my parents on speakerphone.

“Did you tell them in your interview that you were homeschooled?” my mother asked.

“No.”

“Are you going to tell anyone?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

My mom taught me and my seven brothers and sisters history, literature, art, and math. We went to co-ops for science and took online classes in Latin, Greek, archaeology, and mythology from the Lukeion Project. The curriculum was self motivated. I read the encyclopedia. Since our house was so small, I did most of my schoolwork outside.

When I recall a subject, it’s often tied by memory to a location, many of them far-ranging and coastal. Biology is reading on a flat-topped rock near a New York pointbreak. Math is a leaning South Carolina live oak, sections of two-by-four nailed to the trunk as a ladder, my feet dangling from the plywood seat, and a backpack balanced precariously between its branches. History is the ancient coracle that the Yates boys and my brothers and I researched and built out of Naugahyde, saplings, and rope, then paddled down a brown Georgia river until it sank.

On my first day at the boarding school, I sat in a swivel chair at orientation, listening to the principle and the dean. I was trying to understand how to do my new job at the same time as I was trying to decode a social environment that had a long-understood way of operating. 

I didn’t know what a permission slip was, or if students would read on their own if I didn’t assign homework. I didn’t understand the mechanics of sending someone to detention. What worried me most was how often the teachers talked about classroom discipline. I wasn’t going in blind—I’d taught college classes while in grad school—but my only knowledge of what high school was like came from movies and television. 

After orientation, I walked to an old building that was under construction on the edge of campus—my temporary home. In through the door, past my surfboards in the corner, sat boxes of flooring, a pressure washer, a ladder, a trashcan filled with Sheetrock debris, and a disconnected washer and dryer. It had rained that day and the empty pineapple cans I’d placed across the floor were full. I dumped them out the window, then put a board in the car. The waves were blown out, onshore garbage but at least I would be in the water. 

I’ve always been fascinated by the state of mind I enter when I’m surfing. I think riding waves looks and sounds different for everyone. For me it’s a sort of drumbeat, accompanied by washes of color and texture. I keep a wave journal to capture the sound, feel, and look of the instinct-only, lizard-brain moments of my life. 

I spent most of that afternoon trying to make sense of the dynamics of high school—and their implications for myself—rather than trying to read the windswell hitting the sandbars. I was out of position and frustrated. 

An excerpt from my wave journal from that afternoon: 

Eventually found wedge on sandbar. Paddled into a nice, thick section but it stood up fast—too fast. Drop, stomp back foot, and carve up into it, then the lip hits me and I’m down and under and caught inside.  

***

On the opening day of school, the first period seniors filed into my classroom. I handed out the syllabus. Standing behind the podium, I waited for the general chatter to quiet. It did not. I raised my hand. Some quieted down, some kept talking. I said the first name on the roll. “Angel,” and the next, “Bangtai,” all the way down to, “Xiran.” As soon as I finished the students resumed talking.

By the end of the first week I lost my voice. “New teacher voice?” one of my coworkers asked Friday morning at the copier. I just nodded. 

Saturday morning the wind was offshore. I paddled out toward the rising sun, the lead-grey surface cut by orange light. My mind was hectic, my thoughts racing and disjointed. I was angry about the notification from Google Classroom I saw on my phone in the parking lot: another late homework submission from a student. I was angry at myself for how it felt like the students weren’t interested. I was angry at myself as a teacher, that I wasn’t doing more to make the fiction and poems I’d assigned interesting. I was angry at the essays I had to grade. 

An excerpt from that day’s wave journal: 

Glassy, thankfully. Two sets, two good ones. Paddle back out and wait for bigger one. A few other peaks up and down the beach. Some other guys getting them. Sun burns its way out of the clouds and the colors change. Big set slowly incoming. Wave stands, green with light through it, little pod of mullet streak horizontally. Tail lifts, the water stands up. A low, slow carve right as the wave bowls. Cross-step forward across the green-blue wall, weight even, balanced, then back and crouching as energy rushes downward. Drumbeat. Just joy. My mind immediately set right. 

***

One day that fall I gave the students a poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats.

“Where is the speaker?” I asked after everyone read it.

“In the city?” Juan said. 

“Yes. And how can you tell?”

Silence.

I asked him to read the final stanza out loud.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, 

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“The pavement is grey,” Veronika said.

“Exactly. So…”

“He’s by a road,” Juan said. “But he wants to be on this island.”

“And what does he hear in the deep heart’s core?”

Tedra raised her hand. “The lake water lapping.”

“Exactly,” I said, and we went on. “Now,” I said, “your task is to write a two-page response by the end of class.”

“A response about what?”

“About the poem. I’ll write the prompt on the board.”

“Two pages front and back or just one page written on both sides?”

“You can write on both sides of one page.”

“Mr. Eppes, I’ll never be able to write this in 30 minutes.”

“Is this graded?”

I had answered that question at least three times already.

“Every piece of writing you turn in is graded.”

“Does this count as an essay?”

“It counts as an in-class writing exercise.”

The sky was dark out the window. I hadn’t planned it, but the discussion for “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” coincided with an incoming hurricane swell. The flag was stiff with the afternoon onshore. Some students got down to reading and writing. Most talked about how they couldn’t get the writing done in time. 

I sat and graded essays from the previous period at the desk, which was made of wood with an aged orange-yellow tint. The cinder block walls were painted white. The floor was white-and-grey flecked linoleum. I checked my phone and saw a text from my friend Steven about how much fun it’d been that morning. 

Two minutes before the bell rang I collected the half-finished responses. I packed up the essays in my briefcase and walked out of the classroom. High school felt less like a place where people were motivated to learn, and more like a place where people waited until they could leave. I’d been doing the same thing while leading the discussion. 

This place, a courtyard: white stucco colonnade, boxwood bushes, a live oak that hung over the library. Main parking lot: buses, students loading up with headphones, backpacks, and that type of conversation unique to high school—an awkward, mean, and earnest form of dialogue. A mockingbird on a telephone wire, the faculty parking lot. 

I missed the best sessions from the swell. There was an afternoon that fall, though, when a cold front made its way down and quieted the onshore winds. It passed, and the rain it brought left a layer on the ocean that smoothed everything out. 

An excerpt from my wave journal from that afternoon: 

Air drop, feel the fins catch. Pump out onto the face. Wave is too fast. A step forms from the refraction. Another drop, little jolt of fear. Beautiful curl of sandy water sucking off the bar, arcing up to my right. Under cover for an instant. There is joy in this. 

***

Teaching became easier after I found a rhythm. Everything is this way. I’m convinced that if I could have four or five trial runs at dying, I wouldn’t be afraid of it. 

By May I had a routine, late but better than never. Two weeks before graduation, the seniors came in, class block by class block. We had ten minutes of “mindfulness” (which was the only solution to solve “classroom discipline”). We answered two riddles. I wrote the word of the day on the whiteboard and every student read aloud their example sentence. We read a Wole Soyinka poem and a Seamus Heaney poem and discussed both. Then, they left. One. Two. Three. Four. Class period after class period. Another kind of drumbeat.

At the end of the school year we had a goodbye gathering for the graduating seniors at a beach park. Three other teachers and I drove two busloads of students to the beach. Coming over the dunes, I saw the first decent day of surf in weeks—clean, glassy waves held open by light offshore winds. I took the bus and went back to my apartment and got a soft top. I spent the morning pushing the students into waves. At lunch they went up to the pavilion to eat and I had the board to myself. 

An excerpt from my wave journal: 

Paddle, feel the tail lift. Slide forward on the board and feel it go quick, then up and going left, drop right knee and grab the rail with right hand and trim, slightly, into the wave face. Ride left along the ramp of water—green-blue, standing, pitching—at the end of which I can see the beach, scattered with dots of color that become people. Students, finished with lunch, in the water. The wave loses power. I hop off and remove my leash. They clamor for the board and take it.