Classroom at Castle Rock

            I volunteered to start a garden at the school where Laura, my wife, taught. Several volunteers helped with the garden when they could.

            Elizabeth, Madison’s mother and a consistent volunteer in the garden, removed pasture grass, broke up new ground, and worked in fertilizer in sunshine on a warm winter afternoon while I sat against a large ponderosa pine tree and ate my lunch. I enjoyed watching significant progress on our next seedbed while I rested and ate. I also enjoyed witnessing the work project to my right. Just north of the garden, a jumble of volcanic rock, named by the children, “Castle Rock,” rises from the volcanic soil of this part of Central Oregon. Pine and juniper trees grow in soil between rocks.

            Four first grade boys worked in the shade of pine trees. A smaller piece of rock, held in position by large rocks it has fragmented from, might come out from its tight position, and the four boys decided to work together and do the job. They set about the work with determination and resourcefulness. With sticks and fingers, they tried to free the rock. “It moved.”

            “It will come out.”

            “We can do it. Come on. We can do it.”

            They scouted the area. We’ve used straw in the garden for mulch. The boy with the broad-brimmed white hat found plastic twine from a straw bales and carried it back to the work site. The darkest child circled trees until he found the sticks he needed, and he brought them back. The other two boys pried at the rock and discussed possible ways to free it from its position.

            Freeing the rock was not a rapid process. The four boys experimented, conferred, and revised their work. They raised their voices in the excitement of discovery and the intense need to communicate new insights and settled again into relative quiet as they concentrated on the actual work.

            By prying with sticks and fingers and by hammering with other rocks, they achieved enough space between rocks to slip the baling twine down around part of the rock they intended to free. Two of the boys pulled on the twine. “My hands slip.”

            “It hurts my hands. I can’t pull very hard.”

            The boys wrapped the plastic twine that was tied to the rock around a short piece of wood and pulled on the wood. That moved the rock but did not pull it free, so they did the same thing in tandem. They had the rock circled with twine, then six feet of twine, then a wrapped stick for one of them to pull on. Three more feet of twine. Another wrapped stick for another to pull on. Two boys pulled on the sticks while one pried on the rock with a branch and another pounded on the rock.

            “Look. This pulls harder.” The dark-haired worker at the end of the twine figured out that, if he tied the twine part way down a long, stout stick, braced the stick against solid rock, and pulled on the stick above the twine, he applied more force than if he pulled without the lever. The two boys working at the rock dropped small rocks into the widening crack, to preserve their gain. They used levers directly against the rock to pry it upward.

            The tree branches they used as levers directly against the rock broke. “If we had...” It wasn’t necessary to finish the sentence. In their effort, they had become largely one, and they all knew what they needed. The smallest lever-user climbed out of the jumble of rocks, ran into the garden, and pointed to the hazel hoe, “Can we use that?”

            Elizabeth said, “No. I’m going to use that in a minute.”

            “What about a shovel? Can we use a shovel?”

            I pointed. “Take that one.”

            They worked the point of the shovel down into the space between the rocks. Two of the boys pulled on the shovel handle while two pulled mightily on sticks wrapped into the baling twine. The rock moved, moved more, and then came free from the rock surrounding it.

            The boys were pleased, but they weren’t particularly noisy with jubilation, because they knew from the beginning they would achieve their goal. They celebrated together and then set off at a run to find another project.

            Important learning that day, about leverage, persistence, tools, and working well together, came during recess, when no adult guided their efforts. I was confident that adults could also learn that readily and work together that well on projects fully as important as freeing rocks from surrounding rocks.

            I finished my lunch, and I rejoined Elizabeth in sunshine. We worked together and built a long, raised bed of soil that, in the spring, would receive a variety of seeds and grow vegetables toward autumn harvest.