The Best of Spring Break

I spent the recent Spring Break enjoying the company of my family, renewing acquaintances with old friends, firing up the BBQ, and sipping wine at dusk while watching the deer gambol in the field. Of course I also had a long list of spring cleaning chores to do: replace the storms with screens, re- mulch the flower beds, take down the apple tree split by the first winter storm, and load up the trailer for a couple of runs to the dump.

So how did you spend your Spring Break? Did you go with the family down to the desert to play golf and lounge around the pool, drinking neon drinks with paper umbrellas? Did you head to the islands to soak up the sun, surf, and mirth? Perhaps you stayed home, did some shoveling, some skiing, and some soaking in the hot tub?

Spring Break has a long history of hedonism, of self-indulgence, even of excess. But the following is one Spring Break story that boasts no Jell-O shooters, no Speedos, and no girlz gone wild.

Mark Brockway is the Facilities Manager at Lake Tahoe School. While I'm still not sure exactly what "Facilities Manager" means, it seems as though he does a little bit of everything: he heads up our security, he knows which pumps pump the glycol, he is responsible for ensuring that all our zoning permits are up to date. Mark's usually at school by 6am and usually on his way home by 6pm. Sometimes he works longer.

While I may be the titular head of the school, Mark is the nuts-and-bolts man, the man all institutions cannot do without, the man who makes the place work from the ground up.

I would have thought that Mark would have welcomed Spring Break as a time to relax, to catch his breath, perhaps to poke around school when he had the luxury of no one being around to ask him to fix a toilet, to hang a map, or to replace a light bulb.

But no. At 3 in the morning on Easter Sunday, Mark, along with 53 or so other Incline Villager students and adults, woke up and lugged his suitcases and his tired self to Reno in order to go to Louisiana and help rebuild a Gulf Coast that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Mark and the group went to Ocean Springs (northeast of New Orleans, just by the Alabama border) where he was housed in Tent City, a series of musty canvas tents that slept eight. Until they were shut down, there were just two showers for 80 people.

But they ate well - scrambled eggs, pancakes, and grits for breakfast - and they worked hard to rebuild the homes of residents who were beginning to put their lives and dreams back together. They worked alongside homeowners and did mostly light construction chores - insulating, drywall, roofing, wiring, and painting. According to Mark however, the most important work they did was listening:

"Our work was not just physical but emotional. A lot of people just needed to tell their stories, and once they did the transformation was amazing. They stood straighter, swung their hammers harder, and smiled more.

The people down there were great. They kept thanking us for helping out, and I kept thinking, ‘this is the easy part. I'm sleeping in a tent, but I'm going home to my house, and I have windows and doors and no mud or mold in my bedroom.'"

Mark has much to be thankful for, as do we all. And it's nice to know that while some of us were sleeping off our Spring Break excesses, others were helping people to reconstruct their dreams.

Thank you to Mark and thank you to the others from Incline and elsewhere who spent their vacations giving of themselves. Hopefully, their example will continue a trend of trading thongs for tool belts, sun tan lotion for mole skin, and self-indulgence for altruism.

Wouldn't that be a nice Spring Break for us all to enjoy?

--Steve McKibben
4/30/06