The dogs in the barn barked that bright morning as I was sitting at the dining room table, open notebook before me, scholastic workbooks stacked to my right. My mom threw dishtowel over shoulder and walked to the front room windows, frowning. Someone was walking up the driveway.
I was just eight years old and in my first few weeks of home school. That was back in 1987, when home schooling was pioneering, alien and decidedly frowned upon. Store clerks looked askance to see a child in the wilds of the day. "Are you playing hooky?" Family members became combative. My mom's choice to school me was derided. "You're not intelligent enough," they told her. "Josh won't be educated. He won't be socialized. He won't be able to interact." Her choice was unpopular and I, a wide-eyed child, was there to witness the conflict first-hand.
The man walking up the gravel driveway — a driveway framed by black locust trees just beginning to lose golden autumn leaflets — was nearly to the house. Front screen door slammed and my mom walked out, shoulders set. We had closed the gate way down past the pine trees and past the hill covered in crown vetch, closed the gate because our horses and big young donkey grazed free in the yard. Only some idiot from town would know you don't open a gate without permission.
The man was medium height, but looked tall to me. I was at the window, watching. He wore a brown tweed jacket and had nice shoes, glasses, a pleasant expression. Light brown hair combed carefully. He stopped walking when he saw my mom and adjusted his glasses. The conversation drifted on the autumn breeze. "There was a report...." "Is your son named Joshua?" "Is he in school?" The bland man in the tweed jacket was the county truant officer. I had been reported by a certain disgruntled private school owner, the school from which we had left three months prior. Officially, I was now truant, absent, in trouble, part of the county's paperwork, a column in need of tallying, all for my own good of course.
The conversation apparently drifted farther than my young ears that autumn morning. From the tall pond bank beyond the house came the sound of hooves. The horses and their kin had been grazing that morning in the thick grass near the pond water. Past the big willow tree and the tall black fir and the line of lilacs and the silver maple with gray trunks like smooth elephant skin, our donkey Molly Kathleen galloped. Molly was young but big and in her prime. We had named her for the Mollie Kathleen Mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and she, while full of vinegar, adored my mom, following her around like a big burro lap dog.
Molly Kathleen was at a full run as she rounded the house, sized up the situation in a split second, hit her breaks, skidded to a rodeo halt and spun like a tornado, counterclockwise between my mom and the offending officer. That spin brought Molly into position, rear-toward the unknown man. Her ears laid back, head tilting just slightly, allowing that phenomenal equine range of vision to trail back to her target. Hind quarters shivered gingerly. Only some idiot from town wouldn't realize he was in real danger. The near-speed-of-sound kick of a donkey's back hooves can shatter bone. Molly's hind kicks were usually head-height.
"Nice horsey, nice horsey," the truant officer chided nervously. "You might want to back up," said my mom, arms crossed. My mom was the queen of understatement. The truant officer left that morning and I stayed home, home all the way through high school — much to the deepening dismay of other family members. We learned to navigate the state's bureaucracy, filling out paperwork every year, getting letters of recommendation, notarizing the whole bundle, just to prevent more visits from the state. Against angrily implied odds, I somehow managed to learn to communicate with the outside world, building a media company leveraged heavily upon my own capacity to read a room. The classical education I received is something for which I remain forever grateful, shielded from the vagaries of an increasingly politicized industry masquerading as human benevolence.
But there was another lesson I learned that day: that we are easily free only so long as we don't color outside the lines, don't question the authority of a bureaucracy designed to satiate itself on its own lies of goodness. All the other eight-year-olds in my county that autumn day never learned that artificially constructed authority could be challenged, could be overcome. It's a dangerous thought, of course. Freedom of idea, freedom to challenge propaganda. Freedom to walk away from an authoritarian state, charting a new course entirely. The system is monolithic, appears unshakeable. Little do we realize such a thing can be broken, often with just determination, a new idea, and maybe a donkey named Molly Kathleen.
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