Marooned. - 'Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working with Troubled Boys - A Teacher's Memoir' - book review

Commonweal, April 5, 2002 by Mary Lee Freeman

Crossing the Water
Eighteen Months on an Island Working with
Trouble Boys--A Teacher's Memoir
Daniel Robb
Simon & Schuster, $24, 287 pp.

Over the roar of a boat's diesel engine, during a traverse of Massachusetts's Buzzards Bay, potential staffer Dan Robb poses a question to George Cadwalader, cofounder of the Penikese Island School for "troubled boys" (read: fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds with police records). "So, uh, what kind of treatment, or therapy, do you practice on Penikese with these guys?"

Cadwalader's answer: "The best therapy we provide, I think, is a lack of therapy."

Robb sums up that elaborated answer and his own prior knowledge of the Penikese philosophy: "The plan, it seemed, was to give [the boys] a steady diet of wind, suns setting and rising, hard work, wholesome food, open space, some free time, routine, and the presence of reasonably well-adjusted adults. I could use a little of that, I thought." Uh-oh.

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the world of so-called "service work" with marginalized people knows from this last sentence that poor Dan is in for a rough time of it. We know this won't be To Sir with Love or Mr. Holland's Opus. We just wonder how painful it will be to watch Dan's ideals crash on the rocky shores of Penikese, as his needs--whatever they might be--go unmet.

Fortunately for the reader, Robb is an articulate and thoughtful soul. His first eighteen months on Penikese Island are rendered with an honesty and a liveliness that make the characters' struggles engage your attention, unsettle you, and leave you wanting to know more than Robb himself can provide.

Insofar as Crossing the Water is a memoir, it is not surprising that the most compelling character is the author himself. One cringes at his bitterness, peevishness, and narcissism, but one also respects him for the fact that he cringes, too. During an early shore leave, Robb reflects, "What the hell am I here for, taking this beating? I have high ideals, want to teach them to write, to inspire, and am deflected at every turn, it seems, or almost, ricochet[ing] off their hardened shells of 'F---- that' and 'F---- you'.... I don't want to be here if I'm not changing the world visibly here and now. I want results. What a whiner."

After fifty pages of this, one wishes Robb would ease up on himself, but the descent continues. As he matures in his understanding of himself and the boys, his ambivalent feelings and anger ultimately require that he leave the island. Still, by the time he does, Robb is manifestly wiser, humbler, and at times downright brilliant in his one-to-one interactions with the boys. Once back in the "normal world" he has earned a place in that silent community of veterans of such work, every last one of whom endures the same awkward cocktail party/barbecue scene. Robb renders it deftly here: "Over a beer in a backyard a man or a woman will tell me how well I have done, how good it was of me to go there to the island...And they listen to...my description of a day there. They nod, take a swipe at the grass with one foot, tell me again how good it was of me to go. And I see that it is so. But I see too one of the deep truths of such service--that it is I who have been taught by the boys."

At another level, the memoir is also, of course, about the boys themselves. Their number is small; only eight are on the island at any given time (with four round-the-clock staffers). The expected length of stay is six months. The broken-home backgrounds, police records, and predatory attitudes are sadly predictable, but Robb is an adept sketch-artist, master of the short take, and so the individuals described are nearly always instantly compelling. Most strikingly rendered are the "chameleons," the boys who instantly adapt to beat whatever situation, whatever system, they are in. Neatly dressed "David the good" from Somerville ("he listens, which sets him apart") plays chess with the staff, works diligently, toes the line--and gets arrested in a crack house during a weekend home.

Many of the boys' stories stand as stubborn witnesses challenging the truth of the "Penikese Idea" touted on the school's Web site: "Treat boys with respect, tolerance, and disciplined friendship and they will likely respond in kind." Robb, having taken upon himself the burden of that "likely," wrestles with a more nuanced, even tragic, reality. "The boys come to us, savable, salvageable, and they do their dance and we do ours, and some of them seem to clutch the rope, and others to let go of it, to fall perceptibly into the abyss. And I watch them, helpless sometimes, often not knowing what to do. It is much like watching cars crash from a safe remove. It is harrowing, and I can't help but take it personally at times. I am to blame. I am not to blame. I am."

The old Jesuit educational motto, "Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will give you the man," kept coming to mind as the "failure" stories accumulated. The motto is a boast, perhaps, but a haunting one. What of the boys who by seven have received an education in the ways of sociopathy, and who are given at age seventeen to Jesuits, or boot camp, or prison, or reform schools, or the Penikese Island School? How much change is possible? How much can reasonably be expected? Which approach is most effective? How can effectiveness be measured in the first place? Who is to blame for failure?