Suffolk, Boston
Making my way up Tremont Street today I bumped into Barry, an old Shackletonian who once worked in the Boston Office and was one of the last to walk away from the school. It felt odd speaking to her there outside the Suffolk buildings, dressed in my grubby suit jacket with a computer bag slung over one shoulder, a high school student no longer. We gossiped for a few moments before parting and, as I walked across the infernal wind tunnel to class I was struck with a sudden sadness. It’s the same feeling I always get when thinking of Shackleton, a sense of regret now the doors of Base Camp have closed and the busses finally put out of commission and left to rust in a junkyard somewhere. Though I am often overly sentimental when writing about my old home on spring hill it still seems tragic that no one else will have the opportunities the few of us experienced. I’m still only twenty-one and yet thanks to that school I’ve seen hundreds of miles of America, Central America and Asia, talked to a myriad of people and been given some of the most important life lessons one could wish to have.
Thinking back I remember Liz and Nikki standing laughing by a trail in Maine with backpacks on, Simon leaning against the temple of Angkor Thom with his camera out, Steve talking Spanish in Nicaragua with an complacent border guard. I don’t think I’ll ever again have the honor of working with such a committed group of educators and mentors, only a handful of whom I’ve mentioned above. Though I didn’t always respect or listen to them and was at times quite rude they were literally my parents away from home, my guides through the wilderness and at times both my biggest critics and largest supporters.
As I interact with students here and listen to what they have to say, I feel deeply that what this country (and perhaps this world) really needs are schools where the students are given an opportunity, whether they take it or not, to step away from everything they’ve known before and develop an expressed thirst for learning. Shackleton was by no means perfect but to this day I’ve never seen nor heard of any institution that comes as close constructively breaking the hard mold of humdrum normality and unoriginality as much as Shackleton did. I hope that somewhere there are other people like Luke O’Neil, making huge sacrifices so as to pursue their crazy dreams and that one day I’ll have a school like Shackleton to send my children to.
