Spring on Penikese, Part II: They're Back!

Of the many birds on Penikese, my favorites are the guinea fowl and the Leech's storm petrel. The guinea hen were introduced by the school for entertainment and tick control decades ago and live on the island year round. They climb down from their nighttime roost above the chicken coop each morning to squawk and scurry around pecking the ground for grain and small insects. In keeping with the season the guinea hen are now chasing each other around in amorous prelude to making adorable baby guinea hens that will be immediately devoured by the gulls once they hatch. Fortunately, they also mate and lay in the fall, too, a better time to raise their chicks with fewer gulls around.

The Leech's storm petrels couldn't be any different than the guinea fowl: migratory, nocturnal and elusive, they slip down the coast to Penikese from northern climes in late April and early May and then into their burrows between the cracks of the ancient rock wall near the leper gateposts. They mate and lay an egg or two before one of the mated pair will slip out at night to feed and fish while the other bird stays behind in the burrow, awaiting its chance to swap places. Only on moonless nights when the darkness provides perfect cover for these sooty, bat-like birds do we find out they have arrived this way: those awaiting their mates in the wall will emit their burrow call, a ghostly flutter and coo to attract each mate back to its proper nest, a sound that that has spooked more than a few students wandering around unawares in the dark of night. 

The petrels used to be much more numerous on Penikese but gull predation almost eradicated them back in the 1970's. The presence of the school, built in 1973, helped shoo away the human-averse gulls from the petrel's vicinity and, along with other efforts, preserved the scant remaining petrels, the ancestral thread of which somehow manages to make it back to the island every year, barely. Over my tenure, the petrels have become representative of renewal and affirmation, for the island and, especially, the school itself, also small and always working so hard to survive. Every year about this time I start worrying whether they make it back, whether this will be the year we don't hear them, and if so what that will mean. Each week I ask the staff returning from the island whether anybody has heard the petrels, and when I spend nights on the island I always make sure to get up in the wee hours to walk outside, to strain and listen for them as if by doing so I can will them back.

Last week one of our students, Anthony, got up and left the house to take a pee outside. It was pitch black, a new moon whose fingernail crescent had gone down hours ago, and as he walked outside and into the darkness to do his business he heard a strange noise coming from almost under his feet. "What the heck is that?" he asked himself. Then he thought, "The petrels! I've heard about those." 

They are back, and we are good for another year.

Spring On Penikese

In celebration of Penikese’s 35th anniversary, we submit this piece from the school archives, written in 2000 by David “Pops” Masch, founding school staff and eminent naturalist and folklorist.

Spring is bleak at Penikese Island — not a sign of green anywhere. The snow is gone, the rocks, carried here by the glacier that formed the island, are exposed. Days are usually grey and damply cold and windy, but today is neither. The sun has shown all morning, bluing the winter-grey sea. The wind is down and the temperature is in the high forties, almost balmy.

The boys are in a highly competitive basketball game, noisy and physical but so far harmonious. One of them asked me this morning why all of the roosters were crowing, and not just the “head honchos.” I gave the spring lecture on how longer days stimulate the gonadal development of birds and the resulting higher levels of testosterone that caused the crowing, the return of the killdeer, the red-winged blackbird, and the gulls to our island.

The longer days have stimulated sea worms to emerge from the harbor bottom and gather in great swarms to mate — hundreds of gulls are noisily gorging on this spring bonanza, and the guinea hens are chasing each other around in even greater hysteria than usual. The basketball game is getting old and the lads are starting to argue. Spring and testosterone are taking over: the kids want to dive into the frigid ocean to cool down and they will; they did yesterday.

Many years ago one of our kids, Joey - a small, curious, intelligent and ignorant - and I were sitting on the stone wall above the pig field on a day like today, enjoying the unfamiliar warmth of the sun when Joey asked, “Pops, is it summertime?”

“No, Joey, winter isn’t even over yet. It is just a warm day.” I answered.

“Oh, yeah,” said Joey. “If it was summertime there’d be all that green shit on the bushes, right? Flowers and shit.”

“That’s right, Joey, the leaves come in the summer.”

Joey walked away somehow pleased and seemingly satisfied. There is a lot to learn at Penikese Island for all of us. The first sailboat of the season has just emerged from behind the hill at the north end of the island, a red sloop heading eastward toward Quick’s Hole as a killdeer calls in the distance, the first this year. In fact, the first in this millennium. 

Note: Did you know? Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. This may be news.

The Struggle Is Everything

Dear Penikese Parent,

We are so glad you enjoyed your trip to Penikese Island the other day, and that the meeting with your son went well. My heart goes to your husband, a person doing all the right things for his family yet clearly feeling so frustrated and helpless where his son is concerned. When faced with such powerlessness, the urge to do something even if wrong can be overwhelming, but it usually accomplishes little except to make things worse. Taking drastic action is actually more about our needs and feelings of helplessness and loss of control rather than what is right for the child. Easy to see but so difficult to do the right thing…

Getting into it with your son about his choices and behavior will succeed only in making all this about you and your authority, which for developmental and other reasons he will oppose no matter what. Clarifying your expectations, outlining the possible outcomes and then sitting back to let your son to make his own choices will instead put his behavior back on him. In time, circumstances eventually will bring him to that place where he has to start thinking about how well his behaviors are working out, and whether he might want to do something about it.

There’s another reason why we discourage the scorched-earth control strategy: even if your son doesn’t readily see this, the most important thing he needs is to stay connected to you, and drastic actions often have the unintended consequence of blowing things up, often beyond repair. Those parents able to choose the path of less-is-more and stay connected tend to have the best outcomes, except the only problem is that doing so can be agonizing in practice. There is just no linear, certain or clean and tidy way through this, nor any way to feel OK about letting go when stakes are so high.

Sometimes, however, the very thing that tips a boy towards choosing the right thing and changing his behavior is the fear of losing you, a strange happenstance given how he treated you all along up until that point. The question is, do you want to be there with and for him, connection somehow intact when that moment arrives?

We have seen kids and parents completely write each other off over far less than what I have seen so far with your family, so if you can’t find much else to feel good about as a parent right now, know that you are in the distinct minority of parents able to hang in there beyond a point others can endure. Furthermore, those that somehow stay connected through this process not only tend to have the best outcomes, but also forge a special kind of bond that only those who have survived an ordeal together can develop.

That is your ultimate goal: keep in the struggle without giving up no matter what, and strive to stay connected no matter what. The last thing to keep in mind is the strategies we cooked up the other day may not work the first time, they probably won't work every time, but if you stick to them, they will work over time.

The Sting of Trauma

A bit late on the draw here (I spent several days on Penikese Island last week), but an article in the Sunday March 30, 2008 issue of the Boston Globe bears mentioning. It is “The Sting of Poverty” by Drake Bennett which details the economic theory of Charles Karelis challenging conventional notions about the causes of poverty.

According to Bennett, Karelis in essence says that conventional explanations for the existence of poverty in our land of plenty are flawed because they derive from our own experience of how the world works rather than the experiences of those actually living in poverty. Such attempts to understand the seeming foolishness of what other people do through our own sensibilities inevitably leads to remarks such as “Now why would a person do that? It makes no sense at all!”

Poor people squandering what little money they have or criminals with two strikes on them committing a third doesn’t make ordinary sense, but it does make sense when viewed through the reality of a person living a life so different from our own. This doesn't mean we in any way should excuse poor choices, but any better grasp  of the underlying motivations of problematic social behavior can go a long way toward actually doing something effective about it, rather than just kicking such issues endlessly up and down the political football field.

For those of us working with problematic behavior, Karelis’ observations strike home another way: while discussing poverty he manages to capture the signature attributes of those living with the effects of psychological trauma. These include an externalized locus of control manifested by a what-difference-does-it-make attitude and a shortened sense of future that, when combined with other emotional and cognitive quirks, have these unfortunates forever running on a treadmill of just making it from one situation and day to the next without end.

Karelis, as paraphrased by Bennett, points out that “poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems,” and when compared to how the rest of us view the world amounts to "fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way.” 

In these and other ways, Karelis' work forcefully captures a fundamental, overlooked aspect of poverty and its close relative, crime. Even if flawed on economic merits (I am, after all, a man who can barely balance his checkbook), Karelis’ observations merit consideration for their compassion alone, noteworthy considering the manner in which our society tends to judge and treat the least among us. 

Perhaps presumptuous of me to say, but it seems likely Karelis would agree with this: any strategy to battle social ills based based on flawed assumptions and lacking basic human consideration for those suffering the very woes at issue is policy bound for failure. Or, if it does succeed, it will only do so in further alienating and disempowering an already vastly disenfranchised segment of our population.

A Foster Parent’s Dilemma: All Is Not Lost

A foster parent to a Penikese-typical boy is, after six months of doing a wonderful job, at the end of her rope. She knows she needs to let go but struggles with how this might affect her foster son, likening the decision to “throwing him off a bridge” and adding yet another loss to an already loss-filled life. I listened to her and replied with the following:

True, this boy has been dealt a shit hand, but it is still up to him to play that hand. In the real world people have their limits, there are consequences for how we treat people, and we get only so many chances. Yes he has been victimized, but he is not a victim here, and no one should be keeping him from learning these things just because they feel sorry. This is on him.

But ending the foster placement does not mean he has to lose his relationship and connection with you, and that’s the most important thing. Get some help framing what you want to say, and then tell him that he is still worth it and still matters to you (and why), that you will still be there for him in certain ways, and then follow through the best you can over time.

He might say something like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what everybody says,” but boys like your foster son have enormous difficulty imagining different outcomes, and failure only confirms what they already know: I screw up and people write me off. You can prove this wrong over time, but only if you follow through on your words!

Try to keep in mind, too, that you never know when a kid is going to get it, and sometimes the only chance they have is when they lose something they could've kept if they had taken the opportunity a bit more seriously. It's a harsh way to learn a lesson, but these often teach us the most. Over the years Penikese has kept in touch with dozens of former students that never graduated, and many tell us that getting tossed helped them wake up and start taking responsibility for their lives.

Bottom line, letting go does not have to mean all is lost and, if handled with care and compassion, may in the long run do more for the boy than all your previous six months’ efforts on his behalf combined.

Thank You, Shirley McIntire

With heaviest of hearts we post the news that dear friend and Penikese stalwart Shirley McIntire passed away Easter Sunday. Her obituary appeared in today’s papers. For those of us at the Penikese Island School and the countless others her life graced in many ways, words cannot describe our admiration and love for Shirley, nor our grief in losing her.

Those who had the good fortune to meet Shirley know that she was diminutive in physical stature, but extraordinary in every other way: her forceful but unassuming character, compassion for those who suffer and strength and comfort in presence of that suffering, a spirituality that matched deeds to words, and a practical, no-nonsense way of getting jobs done.

I hold up Shirley and her husband Bob as instrumentally supportive during a difficult time when the mantle of a faltering Penikese unexpectedly fell upon my shoulders in 1996. They rallied an entire community to the school’s cause with prayer, volunteerism, donations of all kinds, and most importantly, their belief that Penikese’s mission was worth supporting and I worthy of its leadership. In many ways, Shirley helped save Penikese then and since worked with us towards the place, stronger than ever on the eve of our 35th anniversary, we hold today.

With more stories and tributes to come, our hearts go out to Bob McIntire and his family as we contemplate the empty feeling of going on without her.

Castaways, Revisited

Today I reread the preface to Castaways, Penikese founding director George Cadwalader’s account of school beginnings in 1973. Cadwalader can flat out write: pointed and colorful in reserved old-school fashion. Remarkably, George’s prose squares with the man himself, evoking his salty visage and piercing gaze that can spot and shoot down bullshit from a mile away.

Ever fascinating, Castaways is also somewhat pessimistic. Even George regrets penning certain words contributing to its occasional bleakness. In fairness, 1973 is a long time ago and today we understand more about the problematic behavior that puzzled him so then. Never a clinician (God forbid!), George nevertheless draws an uncannily prescient diagnostic picture of learning disability, emotional disorder and psychological trauma.

Then there are passages like these: “Whatever the verdict on that question [of success], I know of no inner-city kid who has taken the long boat ride to Penikese and there listened to the mysterious night calls of the petrels and watched the moon rising over Buzzards Bay is likely to ever forget those experiences.”

Here George captures Penikese’s immutable and unmistakable magic that works under the skin of staff and student alike, instilling a hope and longing for something better that keeps us coming back for more no matter what. That about Penikese will never change.