Context: On July 13th, several Heads of School around the country and I set out on The Salmon River Program for School Heads, led by World Leadership School, the Alzar School + Gap, Confluences River Expeditions, and ADVIS.
“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Salmon River wends west through the high-desert portions of the Frank Church Wilderness, Idaho, a transition zone where dry canyon ecosystems of sagebrush and ponderosa pines eventually evolve into the firs and spruces of the high mountains. We didn’t feel this transition until the breeze through the half-dropped windows of a classic yellow school bus belonging to the Alzar School turned distinctly cool in the late evening on our circuitous way back to Boise. We were returning from the “River of No Return,” a name that has become as mythical as it is honest—the original boats that committed to the journey downriver could not cut through the powerful hydraulics and large rapids to return home. Instead, they were dismantled, and their lumber was sold and repurposed when they reached their destination. Symbolically, breaking down is what the river eventually does to you—what all time spent in nature seems to do to us decadent moderns—and that is why we came to the Salmon, to dismantle, re-member, and re-purpose. We each brought our own joys and griefs, our own fatigues and potentials, but we launched onto the river from the same genesis.
“A Zen master was once asked, ‘What do you do here in this Zen institution?’ The master said, ‘We eat when hungry, and we sleep when tired.’ ‘But,’ the questioner replied, ‘that is being just like everybody else. They all do that.’ The master answered, ‘They do not. When they eat, they do not eat. They think of all sorts of extraneous matters. When they tire, they do not sleep. They dream of all kinds of dreams.’1 So it is with the life of a Head of School, and probably many other independent-school educators; the “extraneous matters” and “dreams” are a constant hum in the background of our activities, whether we are sitting for a rare meal with our entire family or trying to relax on the beach during summer vacation. Because of the responsibility entrusted to us, being present to our own embodied experience—to taste when we eat, to soften our muscles and rest—feels indulgent; what begins as professional vigilance, if unreleased, becomes a life of distraction and eventual burnout. This neurosis comes with the job, right? Heavy is the head, they say.
But at what cost?
“The opposite of life is not death,” the philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist argues, “but mechanism.” And a mechanistic life is what awaits us who lose spontaneity, awareness, and presence, who dis-embody for the sake of efficiency and that professional vigilance that is experienced as a sense of control. I wasn’t quite there yet, but I could see the path in front of me, which is why I craved the river and its wildness. Without internet and cell-phone service, without the privacy of walls, without the safety of road signs and shingled rooves, there is every possibility of re-awakening to sentience, to the only thing any of us knows for sure—that we are having a conscious experience in this life, that there is something it’s like to be us, that life is blessedly physical.
My path towards mechanism started four years ago, when my alma mater announced me as its next Head of School, to follow a beloved predecessor of 38 years, my former Head of School. I could not have been more proud or excited. But the early weeks brought a wave of scrutiny I hadn’t fully prepared for—questions about who I was and wasn’t for this community, some of it fair, some of it less so. I began to wonder if Thomas Wolfe was right: you really can’t go home again; the hydraulics are too powerful—the river of life really is a river of no return. My wife and I spent several nights wondering whether the place we were about to build a life in was as welcoming as the one I remembered from my own youth, and what that stress might mean for our four daughters. Within days, my body answered before my mind could; hives, swollen red whelps I’d never seen before, covered my arms and chest. I had spent 72 hours living entirely in my head, dis-embodied, writing and speaking to constituent groups I felt needed convincing that I had been the right choice. It took four months of therapy, topical ointments, and meditation before the hives finally cleared. The physical warning sign was not then wisdom to be considered, but a problem that needed solving, an unfortunate side effect of a high-pressure job. A sure sign of the initial stages of disembodiment.
The body, I’ve learned since, actually does keep the score, as Bessel van der Kolk claims. Years later, on a Friday night, I was throwing up in the toilet as the anesthesia wore off from a kidney-stone operation, one eye locked on the livestreamed rivalry football game I was missing—a game we won, as underdogs, in the last quarter. As I sat on the cold bathroom floor, I remember thinking how insane this was. Just put the phone down and be sick, but what Head of School can look away as their students are doing the impossible? I could have been on my death bed, and I still would have been watching that game. Such is the tension in life that is unresolvable—and beautiful for being so.
Now it’s inconclusive whether my job helped form that kidney stone, but it’s well-evidenced that stress produces the habits that do: dehydration, poor diet, too much caffeine. Have our bodies become a vehicle of the school’s mission, I wonder; are they ours anymore? How do we reclaim them?
On the Salmon River, I found I wasn’t alone in sensing this phenomenon of the job. Biometric trackers—Whoop bracelets, Oura rings—were worn by several Heads and became a frequent topic of conversation, their merits and limitations debated over breakfast. We may eat healthier foods and chase eight-hour sleep cycles, but were we still “think[ing] of all sorts of extraneous matters” when we ate, or “dream[ing] all kinds of dreams” when we slept? Tracking our body’s diagnostics is not the same as inhabiting them, as the Zen master might have reflected.
The river experience was radical for me in just this way—not only as a fully embodied adventure, but as one that demanded presence. I enjoyed the taste of my meals, especially the upside-down pineapple cake that’s become something of a trip tradition. I slept soundly, which, to be honest, was not everyone’s experience. I pooped in the “groover”2 without the company of a phone (but occasionally the company of other rafters who came around the bend in the nick of time to see me in all of my natural glory). I drank cold, clean water when it got hot, and sat in the shade when I was tired. I was awake to conversation—lively, intentional, open. I was aware of my own breathing again. I didn’t rush. I enjoyed.
While discussions about leadership often focus on its eudaimonic aspects—living a life of purpose, goal-driven, often at the expense or in inverse proportion to the pleasurable aspects of life—I discovered that what I really needed from the Salmon River was to re-member my body—my arms and legs and hands and feet—to feel the deep pleasure of being awake to life again, to kneel at the “eucharist of the ordinary,” as John O’Donohue described, the hedonism of a body doing what bodies do.
The first poem read around the campfire, a nightly ritual, was “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. In it, she urged me onward toward embodiment, “to [only] let the soft animal of [my] body love what it loves,” which makes it sound easier than it really is.3 A reunion with my body—and we know how difficult reunions can be to organize. But I listened and received what the trip offered.
Now at this point, some of you may be thinking I swallowed too much river water. Yes, that’s great, Brent, but schools have to be run, managed, paid for, and led. Of course there are practical things to attend; there are eudaimonic things to attend—why does this school exist? What is its purpose and mission? There are certainly times to attend to the “extraneous matters” and to “dream” while we sleep, but if we are going to lead schools through the current rapids of disruption, we will need to listen to our bodies more and to heed their wisdom.
About midway through our journey, it was explained to us by one of our knowledgeable guides the challenges the salmon face on the Salmon River, among other rivers in the West. Damming rivers to produce hydroelectric power has created significant barriers to the salmon’s journey home. Energy companies have built fish ladders to try to solve this issue, but the amount of energy it takes for salmon to climb the ladder and, if successful, to land in a warmer, less oxygenated pool of water on the other side of the dam decreases their survival numbers significantly. The solution is well-intentioned, but obviously not nearly as effective as removing the dam. As a book I read about salmon before the trip, King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon by David R. Montgomery4, explains, “Salmon are trapped between human population growth, economic development, degradation of environmental quality, and the politics of public policy.”5 In short, there are no easy solutions to this problem, so suggesting a simple removal of the offending dam betrays a significant ignorance of how systems work. That’s not, of course, an invitation to stop trying to solve the problem, but just to say complexity is not so easily unraveled.
In this example, we can see something of the plight of current Heads of School. With the exception of schools whose endowments protect them from unsettling realities, I believe most of us see that extinction is possible, and believe it or not, I think this is a solid foundation to launch from. Most independent schools function as a fragile, unsustainable model in a volatile and uncertain world: decreasing student populations, rapidly exponentializing tuition increases, a widening wealth gap in the United States, abundance and growth sold as success, declining trust in institutions, technology that reorients our values and ways of being, et al. They have optimized for stable conditions, and as the biologist Olivier Hamant argues, we are leaving the era of the mean (stability and predictability), and we are entering the era of the standard deviation (a VUCA world), a transition I’ll discuss further in my series. This is why, from my perspective, the Head of School carousel is beginning to look like a game of “hot-potato”—you don’t want to be the leader in charge when the ship begins to sink. And the truth is, given our current dynamics, many independent schools will fail—and soon. This prediction does not come from my deep-seated fantasy to be like Nostradamus, but from considering the fundamental logic of independent schools. I feel the lament in my body, as I know many of my colleagues do, too.
Like the William Blake quote that began this article, we have “persist[ed] in [our] folly” to the point that we have become wise. We know the dynamics that keep our doors open right now are not the same dynamics that will keep them open for much longer. This hard-earned wisdom is the call—the embodied call—of the salmon to return to our genesis, to move upstream and to find the fountainhead where the river began. What exactly were independent schools started for? Why do we exist? Should we exist? For what purpose? Many salmon die on the return trip home, perhaps in the fish ladders that are temporary “solutions” or perhaps by hungry bears. And I’m afraid that, unfortunately, the “Head of School” title has become synonymous with the disembodied manager who—led by five-point blogs, hour-long podcasts, and schools of education that teach us how to navigate where the current is already taking us—will continue to take schools down the same river. I, too, am a complicit paddler in that raft. But we all know, we know it in our bones, that leadership always takes the risk of moving upstream.
Is there hope, Brent?—well of course there’s hope!
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote, like the bald eagles that followed us each day or watched us from their elevated perch. Hope was in the young guides who catered us down the river, who were interesting, curious, smart, and courageous. They gifted me hope, as so many young people do. And I’ve experienced that uplift of hope, that unexpected grace, in the “chilliest land” and “on the strangest sea” and know it will not abandon me even if the days ahead are dark. All we need is a sliver of light to navigate toward, and I was blessed this summer to sunbathe in the beauty, intelligence, and energy of twenty other independent-school leaders, fellow salmon, who just love kids, love their endless possibilities, who love what the soft animals of their bodies compel them to love, and who will, I believe—as they live and breathe—break through concrete if it’s the right thing to do for kids, or die trying: the Pyrrhic Victory of the salmon.
I have pulled this story verbatim from Alan Watt’s “The Democratization of Buddhism” (p. 111-12) housed in a collection of his lectures called Zen and the Beat Way, published by Tuttle (2024). This was my “river” book.
Using a “groover” toilet with a group of other Heads of School is a truly humbling experience. Any teacher working for one of us will be glad to know that our shit really does stink, even if occasionally we act like it doesn’t. And I know this because when you return from using the “groover” and pass the toilet-paper box to the next in line, your excrement is what they will now poop on top of. Again, humbling.
Every night on the Salmon River Trip, a participant reads something they brought with them to close the day. If I remember correctly, for our group, every night ended in a poem: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, “Instructions for Having a Soul” by Joseph Fasano, “Everything Is Waiting for You” by David Whyte, and a personal poem.
For some reason, I thought the history of salmon was going to be a significant part of the programming.
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