It’s a real place. We looked it up after a student calls it out as a possible destination for their year-end project. My 6th graders are just launched on a “fun mini project.” Ooh, the eye rolls I received, to be assigning “real work” the last two weeks of school. What’s the big deal? You get to work in small groups! Plan a hypothetical dream vacation, on a budget, and present it to the class using Google slides. Many choose tropical destinations. Their travel itinerary is determined by a prop they picked out of a basket: a sun hat. a beach ball. a fishing net. ice skates. tent. Three girls are trying to convince me that ski boots, a parka and “a favorite book” all belong at the beach. “Oh yes, Mrs. B…no, no—for real, I get really cold when I read at the beach.” So far in A1, we’re going to Aruba, Puerta Rico, Switzerland, Camping, and Bora Bora. And this one: Disappointment Island. Whaaat? I Google it and pull it up on the overhead projector so we can all see. Sure enough—there it is. “Disappointment Island is one of seven uninhabited islands in the Auckland Islands archipelago, in New Zealand. It is 475 kilometers south of the country’s main South Island and 8 kilometers from the northwest end of Auckland Island…” Explanations for the name vary. One website says it’s called that because of its lack of natural resources. Ya think? There’s not a tree or stick of vegetation. Looks like a pile of rocks in the middle of the ocean. Another, more imaginative website blames the name on the occurrence of frequent shipwrecks. I’m going to go with door number 3: the hostile natives.

By this point in the semester the natives are indeed hostile. We’re scrambling for end-of-year plans after the SOL testing. What to do with them? Nobody wants to do work. One kid, day after the 7th grade reading SOL, was aghast. There’s really not a better word for the level of shock and indignation he expressed as I was handing out papers. Acted like he came to school just for the Kona ice truck and live band. He was incredulous he would have something assigned to him in the 90 minutes of time I still call class. Welcome kid, to Disappointment Island. In fact, you shall captain my ship. Where all the crewmates are lazy and the sails are half-assed and mutiny is a distinct possibility at any moment. And there are two more FULL weeks of school, thank you Virginia department of EDUCATION. One student on remote learning, whose days at home could be spent perfectly engaging with the 7th grade’s equivalent “mini project,” a clever analysis and critique of media put together by the school librarian, writes me to ask what he should do. “Got any work for me?” the question. I direct him (through Schoology messaging) to the carefully laid out online lesson. The librarian has created introductory videos, anchor charts, hyperlinks and a few Google assignments to show what you know. Key word: graded.

The lesson is perfect for this unpredictable week and a spot-on summation of the skills they’ve learned this year, at least on my watch. “Media Literacy.” The videos she has selected about the dangers of vaping, the benefits of wearing a seatbelt, and one on the environment are interesting to boot. Relevant teen stuff in a colorful video format, and all you have to do is apply the battery of rhetorical analysis skills we studied for 10 weeks and come away sounding like you care. I can almost hear him weighing it, opening Schoology and scrolling through the folders before he messages back: “what grade r you taking the media letarcy for?” What grade am I “taking”?? You mean, what grade are you making? Zero, you flunkie, and everyone else who asks me that question! Translation: “Is it worth my time?” Because, let’s face it —letarcy is overrated. Boy with a C in the class who clearly makes time for other pursuits. (Another) Boy who hasn’t read a chapter book since the third grade (oh yes, his proud proclamation I’m printing on champion T’s if you want to order one. It will make great spirit wear on disappointment island). Where we all eat crow and the drinks are served in low-ball glasses. I tell you what. It was always hard being a mom these last two weeks of school, 24 years now and counting. It’s even harder being a stand-in teacher.

This is how the “plan a vacation” mini-project has come about. It’s actually a pretty clever project. Plus it’s fun! Plan a hypothetical vacation to anywhere in the world. Research your destination. When will you you travel? What sort of weather can you expect? How will you get there? What will you see and do? Where will you stay and, of course, what will you eat (no they don’t have Chik-fil-a in Boa Bora. Or I guess maybe they do). Each person has a budget of $3000 per person. I laugh at this one. Our 10-day girls’ glory tour of France was $3250, even less than our most expensive Disney trip, and the 5-person spare-no-expense trip to the eternal city just last month came in under budget at $5600. For all FIVE of us. Yes, flights included. Travel w/ me, kiddos. You won’t be disappointed.

Other classes are are going to American Samoa, camping in the Great Smoky Mountains, and skiing at Massanutten (Man, are they going to eat well! Or perhaps the budget surplus is accounting for gas. Nowadays it really would be cheaper to fly.) A pair of chittery girls who are indistinguishable from each other in voice, hairstyle or clothing and who really are just wasting time using “partner work” to mask their unproductivity, are going to Cat Island—another yes-it’s-a-real-place and stuff-of-Snapchat-memes location. Sounds horrid. When my three lads in the back jokingly put out there their supposed rock of despondency, I think—why not? We all stop a moment to look at it on the projector screen and consider — sure, why not? “Disappointment Island is a 566 hectare scrap of land with a a rugged coastline, thick tussock and zero trees.” Not exactly your tourist mecca, but hey, it has a certain appeal. It seems to capture some of the ennui of the season. And underneath it is the premise: we all need a vacation.

Bill, as it turns out, got one. After more than two years keeping the ‘rona at bay as they say, Bill is sick. We ushered him away to the upstairs bedroom immediately, before the stick test was even dry, but still. Matter of time. Nothing has changed from 2020 except maybe its virility. But let’s face it: we’ve ridden in cars, slept in same bed, chatted across the table, shared the sofa to watch a movie and done life together for the days leading up to his diagnosis. It’s only a matter of time, yes? I think we all just boarded the express train to you-know-where. He’s pretty miserable, the full, hit-by-a bus feeling only slightly more unpleasant than driving one these last couple weeks of school. The rest of us are adrift in panic and misery, just the perfect weather for a shipwreck.

We all retreat behind separate bedrooms, closed doors. Family time ends like the last vestige of student interest after SOLs. Masks, which we have never removed in public, get changed more regularly, hands washed, the whole she-bang. There are the Clorox wipes and the sanitizer once again on the countertops. I cook dinner in disposable gloves. I must say it’s handy to have full cannisters of Lysol in every room instead of caught up in a supply chain somewhere. Still, it’s a bit of a scramble, to be honest. What we drilled for in 2020 but it never came, now the alarm bell now sounds in our caught-off-guard world. Though Will had been watching the country stats since all the schools are blowing up right now, we no longer have the CDC bookmarked or the “what to do if” protocols we used to read line by line. In the middle of it all we lose power. I kid you not. Yes, during a tornado warning with Soph still 20 miles from home on 64 a tornado warning and the power goes out. With no dinner made and dirty dishes in the sink. Masked, quarantined, isolating. With my cell phone at less than 18%. With a busted speaker that everyone yells at me about when I call them—WHAT? What’s wrong with your phone? I can hardly hear you. Sounds like you’re on a boat. I am says the voice inside my head. I’m sailing to disappointment island.

Will takes it all in stride. He activates the plan he aired with me over the weekend. Said if he got Covid he could NOT stay locked in his bedroom all day. Just couldn’t. So, proactively he sets up the camper in our back woods as a little quarantine cottage and moves out. Again. And by “sets up” I mean throws that 15′ puppy on the hitch of Bill’s truck, backs it into the woods between two sheds, spreads a 20′ x 40′ moisture barrier tarp underneath, hauls out a bunch of scrap lumber to level it, disengages the hitches and drives out of the woods neat and tidy like he’s simply moving the lawn tractor. Now he will eat and sleep free in the night air under the trees and wake once again to the racket of our backyard birds. Back to nature boy.

There was time in the worst days of 2020 I would look out the kitchen window and see that little tent tucked in between the trees and realize what a haven he had set up. (See Three Chairs and Landing the Helicopter March 2020). Just boy and his little nylon lifeboat, adrift in a sea of all that was unknown and the tides of what was pulled away, one by lovely one. Perhaps that is the crucible that made this man, perhaps it is more recent events, but he approaches disaster with a calm seemingly summoned from the deep. He moves with the one who calms the sea, and he too, is unruffled by the storm brewing. He moves through the house purposefully, gathering clean laundry, a box of cereal, more masks and a couple home tests, a flashlight. Goin’ to be gone a while. He’ll catch the public transport at the bottom of our drive to get to/from school so he won’t need us for a thing. “Got my phone, mom,” he says just before the downstairs door thunks behind him, “Call me if you need anything.”

So much for spending last days with Ellie, turning her bags around from Italy into camp carry-ons. She is days away from staff training and from a 12-week residential summer camp. I don’t need to remind her there’s no such thing as Plan A on Disappointment Island. They’re barely limping along through plan Z or maybe W. Worn out. She retreats almost faster than sickie, back to her bedroom, door shut, mask on. She’s upset. We have exposed friends. Mom, camp is serious. Unlike us buffoons I guess, going about a bit of life. I don’t knock or bother her, but I want to. It’s been three long months without her and now here she is, gone again in her own home. No more shared stories or show-n-tell from Italy. She’ll go on to camp for the summer and come back three front-loader wash cycles before she goes off to college again. Hey, travellin’ girl. In an antigen contest between the five of us, guess who would win? But she is adamant she’s not coming out until she leaves for camp. If they’ll even take her. Shades of 2020 all over again—only this time without emergency surgery (See Going to Ellis Island June 2020). Guess I’ll have to print her a ticket as well.

Sophie, the only real traveler of the bunch with possibly the most to lose, is aloof as she floats from room to room, trying to make life seem normal—a stint in her favorite chair, a magnanimous kitchen clean. While we’re at school she redecorates or paints furniture, trying to pass the days without questioning every little sniffle or passing headache. Is she anywhere worried about the air quality in here? She had it, remember? Or did she? Covid outlier last fall, tested positive for leprosy—oops, I mean Coronavirus, and all her “friends” ushered her home, where her beloved “family” out of an abundance of caution (for HCPS bus driving and subbing!!) put her up in a friend’s garage apartment! Talk about warm welcome. It was a terrible time of navigating what to do. So I suppose she’s had a world class stay on the Island herself and is a little hardened to the subject. Even still, we couldn’t beat her alma mater for lack of amenities: after all the effort and energy and TUITION DOLLARS spent retrofitting the campus for state-of-the-art remote learning in 2020, they dismantled in in 2021 and told kids to go to class. What? You tested positive? Ten days isolation for you. Some students failed. As in, semester. Sophie emailed professors frantically; some helped, some didn’t. She was for a time a girl without a home or a college life. I think it was after this period of “Sophie who??” that her perspective shifted and she decided very clearly, that she too would go to Italy in the spring, kicking an entire week of UVA classes to the curb. So she did. And now she’s hauling her bags out again for DC and then after that a trip the likes of which is to Disappointment Island what the Rapture is to a birthday party. She does not want to retreat to her room. She does not want to stop her planning, or retrofitting her car with a pull-out camping bed and storage drawers. She has an itinerary, and a schedule to keep. She really is planning a dream vacation. And there’s nothing hypothetical about it.

So Will and I, we test, we don our masks—which, keep in mind, I have never taken off except for a brief stint in June 2021 right before Delta. After that I slapped it back on and figured soburymeinone and have worn it in public ever since. There are countries who have perfectly normalized the practice. Have nose, breathe air, wear mask. As the students start droppin’ one or two a week I sure wish we hadn’t done away with the mandate. I can feel it circling the classroom, closing in. All spring Will and I have looked at each other (over our masks) and wondered whether we should ditch or not. First we were protecting Ellie, weeks and then days away from her study abroad. Then our own trip. When we got back from that we were pretty much done being the 1 in 10 but Will had all his fun bike races and team practices going on. I couldn’t wrap my brain around being part of the spread. In the end, I’m glad we didn’t. I’ll betcha anything they mask on Disappointment Island.

On Saturday, boy tests negative and saddles up at 7 am for the trip to “staff training” at the bike camp he’ll volunteer at this summer. And I, his sidekick (for real, now that I sit in the passenger seat of my own vehicle) I aim to spend time on the river. It’s my favorite attainable place (I have a whole list of the other kind). I am hiking, walking, resting, reading. It’s been a week. Nothing as planned or foreseen has worn me out. The river is high, but not nearly so crazy high as it was memorial day when we went down with family and saw, to our amazement, people out on the raging waters. I think about the bodies they have not yet recovered from the churning river, nine feet over its norm, about all the about the school children buried in the last two weeks. I think about my students, about what I’ve seen in the classroom these last 12 weeks. The anger, the loss, the whole chunks of their brains, not to mention their ways of being…just, gone. I think about the world gone truly mad. I think about the students in my classroom who can work and won’t and who could learn but don’t, and the valiant few still trying so hard to pass these hateful tests, and about all the ways somebody is failing somebody. Hard to put your finger on. I think about the layer of—what is it? disappointment—laid over all of it and I know, seated out here on Belle Isle on a beautiful June Saturday that it is not the sun making me warm. I’ve been dosing Zinc and vitamin C and every antioxidant known to man since Bill fell ill and I know…I know it’s not the sun. I have a fever.

Sure enough, my kids will plan their vacays without me this week. I have gone on ahead to the land of isolation and quarantine. Packed light, since I don’t plan to be gone long, and a laptop can connect me to all 85 of ’em if I want. I can keep right on grading (I do) and assigning (I do not) until I return at the end of this week. I’m in the hilarious place of writing sub plans for a sub, something I’ve had to do a couple times before. So, I tell them a little about this project the kids are working on. “A1: Watch out for the stray cats who will ask to work in the hallway so they can slink away. And the three boys in the back may finish early, as there is not much to see and do at their chosen destination.” (Ya think? One of the nicknames given by stranded shipwreck victims was “starvation island”) “So, if you could, please tell them to look up the wreck of the the HMS Dundonald. That ought to inspire them to keep going. In February 1907, the Dundonald left Sydney en route to England with a cargo of wheat and gold, and 28 men on board. Things went wrong right from the start (my kind of language!), with gale winds pushing the ship off course…and into the Auckland Islands’ path. On March 7, the Dundonald sank after running ashore on Disappointment Island’s west coast. Twelve men drowned; another died of exposure shortly afterwards. For the next seven months, the remaining 15 men kept themselves alive on the inhospitable island.  (No boys, no, you may not put down “cannibalism” as a cost saver to your budget). And here’s the part I want delivered straight to the imaginations of my 11-year-old vacation planners: However, the more than 70 kgs of gold (valued at roughly NZ$316 million in today’s money) that it was carrying has never been recovered.

Source credits: “Disappointment Island: The New Zealand place that became a global meme,” by Louise Fisher. The Spinoff. March 14, 2021.

“Disappointment Island.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, Inc. Last edited February 28, 2022.

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