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.