LITMIR.BIZ

      When the school year ended, I returned to California to attend high school in the fall with over two thousand students. Compared to the prep school with only a few hundred kids, it seemed like an impersonal factory. The school looked and felt like prison to me with its unimaginative cinder block construction, loud class bells, and sterile learning environment. Compounding this was the curriculum for my senior year—essentially what I had just eagerly embraced in Vermont in my junior year. It felt like a massive rehash, and I was getting capital B for bored with trouble on its way from an antsy teenager.

      This all added up to a miserable imploding scene for me, and I was ready to do something desperate. I dreamed of the country-wide crisscrossing journeys of Jack Kerouac in On the Road, taking my camera and a backpack and heeding Bruce Springsteen’s compelling command: “We gotta get out while we’re young, ’cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”

      Sizing up my options, I decided the best thing for me was to drop out of high school and hit the road. You can only imagine how my well-educated parents responded to this “bright” idea of mine. After a few “sick days” and a lengthy battle, the verdict came from my dad: “Marc, go back to school!”

      I did, but not without a prolonged pout where I spoke as few words to my parents as possible. I could have won an award for my superbrat performance. Finally, after a week of this slow torture, my father said he couldn’t go on like this and would I please knock it off and get back to the family too. He was a very hardworking and dedicated MD with a strong family practice. What really reached me about his appeal was when he said it was affecting his ability to care for his patients. That little recognition of a higher purpose than mine pulled me out of my funk.

      But going back to the factory-school wasn’t any easier nor the outcome any better, so my wheels kept spinning. I was like a junkyard dog with a bone on the other side of the fence asking myself, “How can I get out?”

      Somehow, I got the idea to check up on my credits for graduation, and lo and behold, I found that after the first semester of my senior year, which was about to close, I would only need one more social studies class to graduate! And at about the same time one of the teachers there was getting ready to take a few high school students to Mexico to work on a project building a medical dispensary in the very remote Sierra Madre Mountains above Mazatlán.

      I spoke with him, and he said I could go along with the other two or three if my parents and the high school were okay with it. Now, here I was going back into the line of fire, but at least this time I actually had a sensible plan to graduate instead of just dropping out. Now my strategy was to convince my parents and the high school principal to allow me use this Mexico trip in lieu of attending the final senior semester

      .

      My Great Escape

      In one of the best sales jobs of my life, I made an appointment to speak to the principal of my dreaded school and gave him my pitch, which came out all in a nervous rush. After I had delivered it, breathless, with no more to say, I sat back and waited to hear his response. He took a long time, removing his glasses and cleaning them slowly, as though they were somehow essential to what he was about to say. My stomach was turning and I felt slightly nauseous; so much was riding on what was about to be said. In the vacuum of his silence my thoughts rushed in to fill it: I wondered, what is he thinking over anyway? How to get this wild-eyed kid back in line? Did this call for some sort of discipline for trying to break out? Or something even worse, like extending my sentence another year?

      After a pause of what seemed like eternity, he put his glasses back on and looked right at me, and very softly said, “Son, I think that could work.”

      Inside I was beyond ecstatic saying to myself, Holy crap! Did he really say yes? Does he know what he’s agreeing to? Outside, I did what any good salesman does when he closes the deal of his life: played it cool and acted like it was no big deal but was cautiously appreciative.

      I only had a week or two to go until the semester was over, and then I was free to jump on this project. Instantly I was filled with a sense of purpose: Not just the freedom from the sentence I had received but, even more importantly, I was operating on a real purpose to help others by building the medical dispensary. The following days were a thrill of this new beginning—getting ready for this adventure, which proved to be hugely successful in terms of a rich experience in a third-world environment, and helping people who had no other source of medical care.

      But there was major bonus: My Uncle Sambo had recently gifted me his Rolleiflex twin-lens camera. I brought it along and, coupled with my newfound purpose, I returned home at the end of this trip deeply tanned with dozens of rolls of exposed film that turned out to be some of the best photos of my life. I was able to enter the lives of these people, rather than just get snapshots as an outsider.

      These were some of my life-lessons from this experience:

      1.My protests and urge to flee the misery of high school prison didn’t get me out, in fact I was more trapped and cut off than ever.

      2.Light began to dawn only when I stopped trying to escape and began to research and really look at my options.

      3.Tapping into the purpose to help others was what finally opened all the doors; even the principal couldn’t say no.

      4.I

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