To Take Us Lands Away

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. Then I spot my friend, Dora.

“Hey, Dora! What’s going on? Weren’t you just sitting by me in Ms. Linville’s geography class?”

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is true. I-I think we are really here!”

“It’s like she said, if you really learn about stuff, it can be like you’re actually there!”

Nine-o-five and the torrent poured through the door: the gangly, good, the garrulous, the stout, the strong, the shy, the overdressed and underdressed. Backpack bearers all, jostling, pushing, and prodding to the cacophony of slamming lockers. Everything was just plain loud about Fairbanks Middle School. The halls resembled cattle drives or airport security areas before the holidays. However, within moments of entering Ms. Linville’s sixth grade classroom, students gained an equilibrium, and like pinballs shaken and rolled into their slots, they settled into their combination chair desks.

Freddy sat in the second row, center. He loved to read and learn, his brain a voracious vacuum cleaner for information. One row over, sat Dora. She was not school smart because she had trouble with concentrating and memorizing. But she loved stories and kind Ms. Linville. This was her favorite class.

Ms. Linville always let her students choose their own seats. A few never took off their coats and slouched in their seats. But their show of falling asleep in the back row failed to garner negative attention. Ms. Linville understood those kinds, and she knew her own limits. Nothing but miracles ever rescued addicts to negativity. “They probably need their sleep. And education is free; take it if you want it.”

Just last week she had organized a geography bee. Tom, a backrow student, had not won the prize his mother had wanted him to get (not earn). Texts and calls of blame bombarded Ms. Linville’s phone that night. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter,” she thought as she stirred her hot chocolate, immersed in an Agatha Christie mystery.

Ms. Linville taught choice and personal responsibility. “It’s your life,” she’d say. “You’ll have to live with yourself long after I’m out of your life. Try making yourself fit company for yourself.” The “Do I have to?” was always answered with the proverbial, “If you want to, you don’t have to.”

Freddy took a second to wrap his brain around that one. “I think some kids don’t get it, Ms. Linville,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said with a smile. “The main thing is that they understand themselves, and that can take time.”

Today Ms. Linville planned to continue the study of Europe—the peninsula of peninsulas. Just the way she described those long coast lines, made everyone start drooling for a beach vacation on the Mediterranean.

She had started with the Balkan peninsula last week, with tales of tunic-draped gods dazzling on Mount Olympus. She had encouraged a section of kids to create models of topics to do with the Olympic games. One had made a hippodrome out of cardboard, another an olive wreath with paper while a third had drawn a map of the first marathon.

From time to time, Ms. Linville also gave notes and tests in addition to the projects. That week, Dora had found Freddy by the side of the basketball court. She looked down, scuffing the dirt with her sneaker.  “Hey there, I didn’t do good on the countries and capitals of Europe test today.”

“I’m sorry,” said Freddy. “I could help you next time.”

“I talked to Ms. Linville and she said memorizing a whole lot of facts and names isn’t what’s the most important. She said I shouldn’t worry. What do you think?”

“Your spunk and curiosity are what make you fun to be with.”

“You know, that’s just what Ms. Linville said! She said any old person can look up the facts. It’s what you do with them that matters, and that takes some imagination.”

“I love Ms. Linville’s class, and you are a good friend.”

The next week, Ms. Linville plunged into the geography and history of the Italian peninsula. Her voice rose and fell with a magical ring as she looked each of her students in the eye. Without notes or text, knowledge poured out of her like rapids in spring. “On the Tiber River, a shepherd was hunting down a wolf which had stolen a sheep. He trapped the wolf in a cave, a great big she-wolf. Entering the cave, he found the wolf suckling newborn twin boys!”

“What?” said Freddy.

“Yes,” said Ms. Linville over her glasses. “But they grew up to be strong men and planned to build a great city. But in a quarrel, Romulus killed his brother Remus.”

Dora leaned forward, her chin in both hands. “Was he sorry?”

“Oh yes. He grieved for the brother he had slain in a moment of anger. The city he built was Rome and Romulus became its king. After the walls of Rome were completed, he told his people, ‘Although we have high, strong walls, it must be the courage and energy of the people, not the strength of its outward defenses on which the safety and prosperity of a state depend.’ What’s to be learned here, class?”

Ms. Linville launched into the story of Hannibal and the army of elephants that crossed the Alps during a blizzard in a futile effort to defeat Rome. She spoke about the Colosseum where gladiators and lions fought to their deaths. Next, the books were passed out as she continued the story of the catacombs beneath the great city. Her students bent to study the picture of the passageways and gloomy rooms with rows upon rows of carved tombs, stacked one upon the other.

“That’s so spooky, Ms. Linville,” one student said.

Freddy closed his eyes. He could feel the dripping water, hear the chiseling of rock tombs, smell the tuff, which although soft to carve, quickly hardened with time. His fingers tingled and his scalp started to crawl. As he raised his hands to run them through his hair, his arms started to feel mysteriously liquid-like, while his legs twisted sideways like an ancient Egyptian painting.

Ms. Linville’s voice faded into a faint faraway tinkling. His body felt jelly, and a sensation of spreading swept over him until he was quite level, gazing up at the white ceiling. The fluorescent lights swam like floaters on his watery eyeballs. As if in slow motion, he felt himself slithering down a gigantic slide toward a thin crack, the crack of an opened book—his geography text book! This is weird, he thought. Mixed colors and shapes flowed like paint pouring down a canvas. Then just before he disappeared down the crack of the book, he caught sight of what he thought was a flattened Dora, sliding smoothly from the opposite page into the same book crack. He started to laugh, but the only noise it made was the sound of a book closing.

“We’re here!” Freddy’s voice echoed down a dark corridor.

“Shh,” Dora’s pupils dilated, and her hand stroked the rough stone.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Look at this!” On the walls of the narrow corridor, they could just make out ancient symbols and figures. They moved slowly, trying not to make a sound with their soft, wary footsteps.

“What were all these carved shelves for?”

“Ms. Linville said they were graves. Some of them were for martyrs. They had to be super secretive.”

“And brave.” They stopped and looked at each other. 

“Silent as a tomb, all right.”

“We could get lost in here if we’re not careful.”

“We’d be stuck down here with 2,000-year-old ghosts!” The labyrinth, although faintly lit for tourists, was plenty dark enough to imagine danger and dungeons.

“I see light at the end of this tunnel, and stairs! Let’s get out.”

Freddy and Dora picked up their pace, then blinked as they topped the staircase. Freddy took off his sweater and tied it around his waist.

“Wish I had my shades,” said Dora.

“I just can’t believe this. This is the Appian Way, one of Rome’s oldest roads!”

“Honestly, Fred, I’m ready to turn the page. I’m just not a big fan of those Caesars.”

“Where do you want to go?” Just then a group of tourists following a tour guide brushed by them.

 “Woah, it’s like they didn’t even see us! Do you think…”

“Is this real or what? What happened to the other kids in class?”

“They just weren’t that into it, I guess.”

“So-- I don’t know about you, but I loved Ms. Linville’s class about those St. Bernard dogs and how they did those rescues in the Swiss Pennines.”

“Hey, you remembered the names! Good job, Dora. That would be cool.”

“Nice pun, buddy. Ms. Linville said thirty-foot snow drifts and avalanches.”

 “There was that hospice started by monks along the Swiss border with Italy.”

“OK, I think I know how to do this page turn thing. Hold my hands, and-- ” They felt a current pass between them and the same jelly sensation, then the slide, the book crack, and…”

“Geez it’s cold!” Fred was standing on snow. Majestic, snow-capped mountains with peaks stretched as far as the eye could see. The sun, brilliant at this high elevation, had melted the snow in patches, and alpine flowers dotted the spring green grass.

“Look, there’s the monastery!”

“And maybe that’s the dog kennel!” A robed figure emerged through a heavy wooden door carrying a large tin pail. “Let’s go see the dogs while he’s gone!” said Dora already running.

They both tugged at the door, and it creaked as it gave way. The walls were stone, and although the kids hardly made a sound, the light footsteps seemed to echo through the cavernous room. A dozen dogs lay on mounds of straw, brown and white with kind, saggy faces. The dogs didn’t flinch as the kids knelt and stretched their arms through thick fur barely reaching around their necks. Their lips sagged and drooled with pleasure as Dora scratched behind their floppy ears. When one rose, its back stood as high as Freddy’s chest, its paws bigger than his hands.  

“You are my favorite kind of dog, I think,” said Dora into one furry ear.

“Ms. Linville said they can sense the faintest heartbeat twenty feet under the snow!”

“They’re so smart. I’m still sad when I think of what happened to Barry,” said Dora, her face nuzzling one of the gentle canine faces, her arms still buried in the fur around its neck.

Ms. Linville had impressed the kids, telling how Barry rescued over forty lives from beneath avalanches. That was until a frightened young man, lost on the pass, had mistaken Barry for a bear and stabbed him. The animal who tried to save him was killed by the person whom it was trying to save!

“It was all because he was gripped with fear.”

“He couldn’t get his own fear out of the way,” said Fred.

“What’s the lesson there?”

“You’re starting to sound like Ms. Linville.”

“You cool enough? Wanna move on?”

“I want to go to Spain, the Strait of Gibraltar!”

“But Ms. Linville hasn’t gotten that far yet. She said we’re starting Spain tomorrow.”

“Let’s go back to class then. I’ll tell her I want to learn about the bull fighting.”

“Do you think she’ll believe us if we tell her we found a way to actually go to these places she’s been telling us about?”

“I don’t know, she always talked about that golden thread that runs through everything.”

“It feels like we’re onto something,” said Dora as she looked across the mountain majesty one more time.

“Kids--” It’s Ms. Linville and her magical voice again. “This morning’s lesson is on the next peninsula called the Iberian Peninsula. But before we start, I’m going to read a poem by an American poet who was a recluse in her home in Amherst, Massachusetts.”

Yawn. “What’s that?” comes a bored voice from inside a hoodie in the back row.

“She rarely left her home, but that didn’t hold her back.

‘There is no Frigate like a Book

To Take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry—‘”

I look over at Dora and we lock eyes, a look that didn’t go unnoticed.

“Freddy, Dora, is there something going on?”