Other Articles

An early Saturday morning; A group of rising tenthgraders from under-funded schools in Boston, Philadelphia and nearby Enfield, NH; A rock climbing trip to Pickledish, just east of Lyme, NH. An image that gives one hope:Three to four kids on safety ropes at a time, spaced out at intervals on the rock, receiving constant encouragement and support — both literal and figurative — from the trip leaders on the other ends, ready to catch them should any of them start to fall.

The kids are here as part of the William Jewett Tucker Foundation’s and the Dartmouth College Education Department’s Summer Enrichment at Dartmouth (SEAD) program, which hopes to give these kids access to things their schools can’t provide, through an all-expenses-paid two weeks of educational and recreational enrichment activities on the Dartmouth College campus.

“This is just great, to be out here and see these kids climb for the first time,” says trip leader Cortland Barnes ’03 between turns at belaying.

Just down the rock a bit, fellow trip leader Cat McManus ’04 belays a student who’s not so sure just how great this all is. He’s a good climber, really — just a bit timid. They don’t have rocks this big where he’s from — only buildings with elevators and stairways with handrails.

After listening to repeated refrains of “I can’t,” McManus finally tells him,“I don’t want to hear ‘can’t.’ If you don’t want to, that’s one thing, but you can.” He does not say “I can’t” anymore. He does, however, reach the top. McManus was right: he could, and did.

Back on the rope, Barnes belays another unsure student, Kaitlin Rogers, here from Philadelphia. About halfway up the rock, he tells her that she cannot continue up until she demonstrates that she can sit back against the rope. This is standard procedure; the technique is needed to get back down the rock, and it wouldn’t do to have kids getting up there and stuck at the top.

Kaitlin isn’t convinced. She tries to lean a little, but her legs shake and she never gets her weight out off of the rock. “I was so scared,” she says later. “Just the thought of being back, and with nothing to hold onto…” She trails off, with a shy grin and a head shake.

It’s about this point in the climb that the coaching, the rousing encouragement, begins from below her, comes from all sides — from Cortland, from the other trip leaders, from her fellow students. Finally she asks,“I just sit back, and I won’t fall down at all?” That’s right, they all tell her. You won’t fall down at all. And it takes a few tries, but she does finally sit back, and she does not fall. And she even makes it to the top, sits back, and does a shaky moonwalk to the ground. And then she smiles.

She isn’t on the ground more than five minutes before she’s back on the rock face again, back climbing her way to the top.

That isn’t the end of the story, of course. This isn’t a fairy tale. Leaning back against that rope was still scary the second time — “Even after I’d done it a few times,” Kaitlin says now,“I was like,‘You’ve got the rope, right? Can you tighten it up?’” — and these kids’ schools will still be under-funded when these two weeks are up and they all go back home. But Kaitlin was climbing again. And I think that’s what SEAD is aiming for. These two short weeks aren’t going to solve everything for these kids; they aren’t going to take away all the struggles that they will face, all the rocks that they’ll still have to climb. But the hope, I think, is that this small taste of success, of potential, will make them that much more likely to try the hard climbs in their future.

A little while later, I had a chance to do some climbing myself. It’s a fun sport; I highly recommend it. I, too, reached the top, sat back against my rope, and began to backpedal down. It was then that the climber on the rope to my left caught my eye.

It was Kaitlin, back at it again.