The next morning, Tal and his sons get to school a little before eight o’clock. Henry and Calder, now in the ninth and seventh grades at North Branch, help unload the family truck as Tal drinks a mug of coffee and rubs his eyes. His face is taut and stubbled, and he is rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. This year in particular has been a special one for Tal Birdsey and his boys. The dedication of his book reads, “For Henry and Calder, who were there—”and this year, perhaps more than ever, they both were. A ninth grader, next year Henry will travel down the mountain and out of Ripton to a new high school. Like all North Branch parents, Tal admits that this transition will be difficult. “But if we’ve done it right,” he offers, “it’s a moveable feast. You have to learn how to take what you know and what you’ve figured out and bring it out into the world. The world’s not going to be just like this. But you learn how to be strong in yourself and how to either find what you want, or make it.”

Embracing that struggle of change, of becoming, is what North Branch is built on. In the book, Tal writes of his first students: “They came wanting to make sense of where they had been and wanting to claim something about where they needed to go. Dynamism, movement, and transformation were the essence of their beings.” The place, like it’s students, is in a constant process of self-making. It thrives on the clatter and hubbub of growth. And in this way, Tal Birdsey is every day building a school in the woods of Vermont. North Branch swallows whole the hellish middle ground of middle school and spits it back as a time of possibility and promise. You get the sense during those long discussions of a potential energy gathering in the room—a feeling that things, great things, are happening or just about to happen. Tal says, “The key is to make sure that whatever was the best in those early years, when we were in formation, stays. Because that part of things, the creation, has got to be what they feel. We have to sustain that feeling of, we are making something that’s never been made before.”

A half-hour later, one of the ninth-grade boys rings a dinner bell, and the flurry of morning activity finds its focused center. Tal sighs and sets down his coffee as they all settle into the table. “Who’s got something?” he says.

A pause, and then a girl with glasses raises her hand.

“I was going over my lit homework this morning, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the old man and the end of the book. And I’m not sure why, but I felt a loss—like I had lost him, even though I didn’t know him.” She pauses again, and then continues. “He’s just a character, a character in a story, but I felt for him. I felt something like love for him.” By now, Tal’s eyes are wide awake. He twists his fingers in his hair.

“Well,” he says. “That’s what we’ll talk about today.”

Xander Manshel ’09 wrote “The Caretaker” for the summer 2008 issue of Middlebury Magazine. This fall, he will begin teaching English at Phillips Academy Andover.

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