Takoche [Toke] was born on [my] ranch, son of a big wall hard man named Cov and a Sherpa porteress. They had met on a winter trek we made from Namche Bazaar into Island Peak next to Lhotse. We were going in to climb, she was the porteress called The Tall Slender One whom we hired in Namche, and Cov would hang around the porter campfires each night and that amounted to a successful courtship. It was not going to be easy: two children, two miscarriages, and an intercontinental, interracial marriage that finally settled into our tiny cabin on the ranch. What began fragile, fractured in due course. Cov told me he sat and looked at her with hate, and that she did likewise to him. He said that at the end they went four months without talking.

Toke went to the Community School and that worked well until about seventh and eighth grades when the deal was coming apart in the cabin. Guys in that age group do a lot of physical messing around they describe as “just joking:” a poke, a shove, grabbing a pencil, pulling off a cap, etc. When the abused announces, “That’s not funny!” he is often just labeled a bad sport that can’t take a joke. Interventions at the Community School tend to sound like this. To the abused: “Tell Toke what you felt when he (did such and such).” To Toke: “Can you understand why he felt that way? Would you feel the same way if someone (did such and such) to you?”

There were two things about Toke’s boyishness. One, he was strong and usually angry. When he pushed a guy’s face into the water fountain, it didn’t come back up just wet, it came back up bloody. Kids were getting hurt, and parents called and demanded that Toke be kicked out.

We followed our principle of never giving up on a kid. We changed our intervention into trying to get Toke to know when he was feeling angry, to tell his pals when he was angry, and for his pals to not mess around when Toke was angry. This too failed, and at long last we realized that Toke simply had no way of knowing when he was angry. Perhaps he was always angry, and being especially angry felt no different than his normal level of anger.

Toke’s issue put a lot of stress on the school community. His classmates learned more and more how to stay safe, teachers put huge efforts into helping Toke to like himself. Parents remained against the effort, arguing that it wasn’t safe and that we didn’t have the qualifications for the effort. Finally, it got to the point that we knew we had to come to grips that sometimes we do indeed give up on a kid and how do we, as a democratic community, come to that point? I’m fairly proud to say that we broadened the arena of discussion ever wider, and that Toke even began to think that he was important, maybe even worthwhile, because he was receiving so much attention. And finally we had a consensus (his Mom excepting) that the world as a whole would be better off with Toke disenrolled.

He went and stayed with his dad, ran into trouble with the law, did time in “boot camp” retraining, did some harder time, finally got out, finished an art degree, and now seems fine.

I never think back about those times without wondering “Did we do our best? Give it our all? Did we give up just when we were about to get the prize?” And we will never know. I do know that the school community learned a lot about itself, and probably became institutionally and individually wiser from the effort. And what the hell—the end, much later than we could have wished for, is fairly happy. Even his mom now agrees to that.

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