Student At Large

There was no closure for us going back. Splintered tree branches, the ends lily white from where they’d split from their trunks, lay festooned around the campus we loved so much. The paths to the doors were covered in thick snow, brambles crawling over a splintered Adirondack chair that I remembered from my days there, a thick chain fence now stuck crudely like a thick scar across from the old farm house. Even the trees around the Buddha garden were in pieces, the statue itself hidden by ice. We parked behind the old educator housing, cracked a beer and walked into the school like explorers stumbling upon an ancient city.
Around us were the signs of decay, rot on the wooden siding of the buildings, a tattered blue plastic rain jacket hanging from a tree. It was this last that brought back memories, images of teenagers walking up a path through icy mountains, of standing in that very spot and packing and unpacking our heavy backpacks in unison upon huge tarps that probably still gather dust in one of the school’s locked sheds. Looking at the rain jacket Zach pointed, we recognized the type from when we had been here years ago.

I had not seen Zach Orme for almost two years when we met yesterday. Old school friends from Shackleton we had been reunited just once after the closure and a fierce argument had sent us on our own paths from there. Yesterday though, was a time to put our differences aside, embrace old friendships and go back to the start. Ashby Academy, the autistic school that had followed Shackleton when our doors had so abruptly closed, had gone bankrupt under a cloud of fraud allegations alleging to the founders penchant for buying sports cars with tuition fees and was now under investigation by the F.B.I . With this in mind we had decided that the buildings would be empty and that we should visit for old times sake.

To this end we had lunch and drove back up icy roads, past forests snapped in half by the ice storm, the landscape looking to us as if a Bosnian warzone had intruded into our quiet New England existence. A giant tree had smashed through the shed of a house on Spring Hill, and as we finally mounted the hill an abandoned and tragic looking campus faced us. My eyes widened and I was lost for words, instinctively I turned off the radio and forced us to deal with the silence.

Zach led the way after we’d parked the car. We sipped our dark beer, trudging through the snow and posing for pictures outside the abandoned buildings. All around us, the place was like a horrible nightmare that had taken root in my darkest subconscious for nowhere were there signs of improvement or progression. Seemingly nothing much had changed since the last day of school save for a single fence standing pointlessly by the entrance, shining a light into Elephant Island we saw furniture we recognized and the same beds gathering dust. In the dining hall the kitchen had been ripped out but everything still looked like the same old Shackleton. Even the emergency lights were still on and I was reminded of a scene from the film "Shackleton" where the Endurance lies sinking in the ice and yet a single light blinks on and off like a "heart beat" to tell the crew she is still alive.

The hardest part of visiting was not being welcomed back into a loving community. Even now I remember being a first year in Sua Sponte and giving out blankets to Boaz, Danny and Rob Bessler as they visited, our alumni but still part of our family. For me and Zach it was different. We were alone in what felt like a pure white thought consumed with bitterness and darkness, the buildings that had played such a big part in who we are covered with brambles, snow and rot.

In the end though, as I drove away with eyes sore with barely suppressed tears I remembered that Shackleton still exists, however cheesy that sounds to you who were not part of it. Though our campus has succumb to nature, like the Endurance did when it buckled and sunk beneath Earnest Shackleton, like him we are not beaten. We keep in touch, many of us, share news of our journeys and when we meet, however rarely, we share much of the hope and optimism that bound us together in the first place.