There is a special type of urgency that attends to a teacher driving home after the last day of school, and it doesn’t matter if the teacher has just completed the first or thirtieth year of a distinguished or incompetent career in a public or private institution. Nor does it matter on the last day if the sun shines or the rain pounds or if the teaching assignment took place in an elementary, middle, or high school. (College hardly counts.) All that really matters is that the year is over.
Jack, a high school English teacher, felt the urgency, but he wasn’t yet driving home, so he leashed the feeling with a choke chain as he stood in front of his fourth period class, as one might leash a hostile dog before taking a pleasant city stroll.
A few hours later, the clock struck 3:19, the final bell rang, students rushed into the halls tossing paper and textbooks into the air, took goofy photographs with their cell phones, and hugged one another or grabbed ass. Jack walked over to his desk and picked up six periods of unread and ungraded final essays, each one approximately six hundred words in length. Thirty students a period. One hundred and eight thousand words. The paper recycle box rested ten feet away. Jack concentrated, and then in a graceful underhanded motion, set the essays free from his clutch in coordinated flight. They flew, and landed all together, neatly in the box, a feat utterly elegant to behold if someone had actually been around to behold it. Ten minutes later, as Jack left school, he heard a cheery female voice on the PA announce a faculty social in the library at 3:45 where cookies and coffee were to be served. At 3:31 Jack fished his keys from his pocket and a moment later, was cruising out of the parking lot and waving goodbyes to a few of his students who signed yearbooks while sitting on the hoods of their second-hand sedans. They were the same students who never turned in any work and never appeared in any yearbook.
The urgency commanded Jack as he sped home, north on Highway 101, the Pacific Ocean on his left, the Siuslaw National Forest on his right. As he drove with his left hand, he counted silently with his right-hand fingers how many years he had taught secondary English and social studies in public schools since he commenced his career at the age of twenty-five in 1988. Nineteen years, in nine different schools all across Oregon, in rural, suburban, and urban districts. He thought of himself as a seeker although he sought nothing. He liked to transition, live in different places, meet new colleagues, and experience different educational customs, although he had come to discover that there weren’t many different educational customs in Oregon or probably anywhere else in the country. About the only thing that made any difference was whether the families of his students had any money. In this rural gig in Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast, they did not. Indeed, many of Jack’s students didn’t even have families, let alone semi-functioning ones, as was apparent at graduation last week when one of Jack’s seniors, a girl, still wearing her mortarboard, circled the lobby desperately with her diploma in hand, apparently looking for someone. Jack watched her, off and on for fifteen minutes, between congratulations and handshakes with other graduates and their families. He finally went up to her and saw a face he’d never seen before. It looked the color of new snow and appeared as if it might actually collapse. Jack put his hands on her shoulders and she started crying
“What’s wrong?” asked Jack.
“My parents never showed up. They were drinking earlier this morning and never made it. Can you fucking believe that?”
Jack squeezed down on her shoulders. “Listen to me. Make a pact with yourself right here. You will break this cycle and never do this to your own child. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
Jack hugged her hard, she squeezed hard in return, and he whispered then do it into her ears.
Then she left, left high school forever, the last place employing anyone who would ever sincerely care about her or her future.
As the new graduate left the building clutching her diploma, she edged by an old obese man in shorts. Jack had talked briefly to him in the restroom before the ceremony and learned by easy admission that the man had been drinking an Everclear and chocolate milk concoction in a Thermos all morning and was so drunk he couldn’t remember the name of the relative he was supposed to watch graduate. In the restroom Jack made a joke about this and decided against informing the man that he had pissed down his right leg
Jack had now logged four years at this latest stop, or tour as he called it. His itinerant behavior marked him somewhat as an eccentric nomad in the profession, particularly to the school’s veteran teachers, seven of whom had actually graduated from the school and wore its black and orange colors every Friday. But Jack didn’t really care about the label. He stayed as long as it interested him, and then he moved on. He always carried a symbolic letter of resignation in his back pocket. No job would ever trap him. There were always teaching gigs in rural Oregon if you were willing to relocate and smart enough to drink at home.
No, Jack didn’t care that his resume struck some administrators as evidence of instability. He was more concerned that despite all his years in the classroom and teaching twenty-five different subjects, he really didn’t fathom what constituted his ultimate purpose in front of students, much less carrying out that purpose well as would befit a professional educator paid $53,400 a year and $1700 a month in health insurance by taxpayers, most of whom believed he was scandalously overpaid and ineffective to boot.
It was exactly twenty-two miles from school to Jack’s home and he passed a dozen vehicles to get there, including executing a tricky two-car maneuver at the summit of Cascade Head near the intersection of the logging road that led to a trail to Hart’s Cove.
Since teaching in the area, Jack had learned the legend of Hart’s Cove, a rocky and roiling site at the base of the western edge of Cascade Head. So the story went, Hart’s Cove had been named for a hearty hermit of a man who lived long ago in a cabin above the cove and walked twenty miles roundtrip to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. Jack loved the story, even if wasn’t true. He imagined a crusty Hart, whipping his unruly students with a stick of willow while simultaneously declaiming sonnets to the rhythm of the beating, and then, with the show over, telling the students that the previous generation of students was much better behaved and much better at doing anything academic, or for that matter physical, than this current crop of miscreants. For time immemorial old and tired teachers made this exact same bogus historical comparison and Jack swore if he ever followed suit, he would quit, on the spot, or maybe pull a Richard Corey.
