Once, When the School Year Vanished

Students who are watching the end of their school year disappear -- along with its celebrations and class trips and gatherings -- must be disappointed if not disillusioned by the unexpected shock waves of the Covid-19 pandemic. The excitement of not having to "go" to school surely wore off quickly. Now we find many wondering, rightly so, whether "normal" will ever be normal again.

We are, without doubt, living through unusual times under unusual circumstances. But it might be helpful to remember that the experience of watching a school year unexpectedly vanish is not unique.

Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1970, students of my generation had a similar experience. Across the country, student protests against the war in Vietnam had been flaring up for many months, campus buildings had been "occupied" by student groups demanding an end to American military action in Asia and demanding changes to the status quo. Violence and vandalism gave the protests a nasty edge. Our University was relatively quiet in those days although events in Vietnam and on other campuses across the country kept us focused on our country's unrest and on the pressing questions themselves.

Fifty years ago we were finishing our junior year at the University of New Hampshire. Donna and I were engaged to be married in June. Ahead of that we were lining up summer jobs, finding a place to live, and chasing down the hundred separate details that had to be pursued individually in those  dark times before the internet. Trying to make life-shaping decisions can be nerve-wracking in the best of times, but few would have thought those were the best of times.

As tensions on campus began to ratchet up week by week, some students started boycotting classes in favor of discussion groups we called "rap sessions." Sympathetic and like-minded professors cancelled their own classes and volunteered to participate. A kind of alternative curriculum sprang up around issues we felt more urgent for our lives than normal academics. There were sessions on racism and women's rights as well as on the complicated politics of war.

Yes, there was a lot of shared ignorance, but there were also energized and vital discussions as we tried to figure out how to think about the challenges facing our generation.  Most of us were less consumed with the political ideologies confronting each other. Rather most of us were anxious and confused about what would happen next and whether we, as young people, could possibly have any say in it.

In an effort to be close to what was happening, to learn first hand, I joined the university newspaper and began writing about rap sessions I was assigned to.

Then in early May, news spread rapidly around campus that the Ohio National Guard had fired on students at Kent State, killing several. Classes that had continued to meet abruptly stopped meeting. Our sense of fear became tangible. For all practical purposes, the University ceased to function. We had joined the student strike without trying to. Rumors spread that New Hampshire's Governor, Mel Thompson, had called up the National Guard. Armed troops were rumored to be ready at the Armory five miles away.

A makeshift memorial to the slain Kent State students sprang up spontaneously -- mostly stones and candles and signs and flowers. A little more than a week after white students were shot at Kent State, black students were shot and killed at Jackson State in what was being called a police riot, a recently coined term. What would we ever do if the National Guard arrived on our campus with weapons?

We continued to hold rap sessions and rallies to hear student leaders speak. It was hard to know what would happen tomorrow, let alone imagine  how the country might ever return to normal. What had become clear in all that uncertainty is that life and death issues were being "played" by those in positions of power to advance their political ends. At some point, word came down from the University administration that there would be no final exams and that graduation ceremonies would be cancelled.

Then, almost as if we had been given permission to leave, the campus emptied out. The makeshift stone memorial, which had become the center for evening bonfires and rallies, remained. But banners were taken down. Graffiti was painted over. Junk from the weeks of rallies and meetings was raked up and hauled off. Lawns were fixed. Unsure of what else was called for, I started my summer job early. In mid-June we were married on schedule.

That fall we returned to classes for our senior year. Fifty years on we lean on what we learned from that experience.

Even in these days of quarantine, chaos and fear again cloud the future, but it is the quiet fundamental lessons that matter.  There are many things to be said -- in another essay, perhaps -- about the abuses of power on many levels.  But in this moment, when the stability of our school year has become distant and uncertain, I am more interested in one simple lesson, a reminder from fifty years ago: Life does go on. And we know there will be opportunities, yet to come, to make something good from these lost months.

Snows out of Season

     Every morning but one in the week after Easter, we have looked out to find our little town covered in snow -- not a lot of snow by western New York standards, but measurable all the same. Saturday morning on my deck, where late and early snows stick easily, my official yardstick reading was 4.5 inches.

     The appearance of these snows can cause irritation, consternation, and wide-spread grumpiness in the local population, especially in these days of the stay-at-home mandate.

I don't know what a snowfall out of season does for you.


But for me the late snow draws me to my window.

 

When the snow stops and the sun reappears,
I always want to grab my camera in hopes I can somehow save this moment of wonder.



Or I find my notebook and try to describe what I see.




Somehow in these days of confinement, these moments never grows old.












In This End is Our Beginning


In these last days before the earth hardens
into its last malleable posture
we wake to find our small world
dappled with snow, its textures
far richer for the white dustings
than the forgetting snows of December.

This is a world we know
even as we learn its contours anew.
Hour by hour as the weakening sun
draws its warming brush wherever
it is not obstructed, the landscape
reemerges, glistening, renewed
even as it dries, its small wonders
beneath our feet quiet as tears.

D-Day

     WWII was my father's war. Like most veterans of that war he said very little about it. At least to us, his five sons, he said very little.  And since he was sent to the Pacific to support that part of the war effort, what I know of D-Day came, insufficiently, from text books in school and more recently from movies.

     My black-and-white knowledge engagement with D-Day ended last October when we had opportunity to  visit Normandy during our first ever trip to France. All of those things we have seen in photographs and in televised news reports looked just like the scenes we have seen, but being there colors all those images with life and drama and significance.

     The white crosses on the vivid green lawn at the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach are stunning and sobering in equal measure.

     The view of the beach itself from the western edge of the cemetery is equally stunning and peaceful.

 

     We attended a short service of remembrance at the circular memorial featuring the "Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves" sculpture was singularly moving. We joined in singing the national anthem with a solemnity and dignity I have never experienced during the anthem performances that routinely precede ball games.

     After we left the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, we stopped a short drive away at the memorials that have been erected on and near the beach. The memorials are terrific reminders of what it cost so many thousands of soldiers in those suicidal landings. The weight of significance is enormous if impossible to describe.

     As much as we found the cemetery at Omaha Beach moving, what really stirred my deep sensibilities was our visit to Gold Beach, site of the British landing on D-Day, where our tour had stopped to visit the British museum commemorating their sacrifices and to have lunch in the little village of Arromanches-les-Bains.







      Every element of that short visit contributed to a sense transcending drama. The wind coming off the English Channel was cold and hard, the Channel was grey and choppy, the sky was full of sunlight and dark, scudding clouds. The now quiet and quaint village rises from the beach up a steep grade of hills.

     Here and there reminders of the war are positioned to allow non-participants like me to imagine how the now familiar narrative played out -- a tank on a low promontory beside a road near the beach, the remains of a landing craft just visible at high tide, a motorized bicycle of war vintage.

     A handful of the bunkers just south of the town have been preserved for pilgrims and tourists to walk through. We did. I took photographs of the English Channel from one of the better preserved bunkers to get an idea what German soldiers might have been looking and shooting at. I must confess that this brief moment inside the bunker left me feeling trapped and vulnerable.

     Fourteen months after D-Day on the other side of the world, our atomic bombs did their terrible work on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombs were necessary, so the best rationale goes, to avoid a D-Day kind of assault on the coast of Japan. Both choices were horrifying. My father's ship was in the Pacific steaming toward Japan when the bombs were dropped, so his role was part of the occupation near Nagasaki rather than part of an unimaginable assault.

     The sacrifice of those who joined these war efforts must not be forgotten nor minimized.  I know that. I know that victory is better than loss. And I know that evil must be confronted.Yet I am inclined to agree with William Stafford's assessment that "every war has two losers." The price is heavy -- even for the winners.

    What puts the whole matter into perspective for me during our late fall trip to Normandy was a wall mural in the little village of Arromanches-les-Bains just a half block from the sands of Gold Beach. The last word, here, belongs to the little girls.

A Few Words on the Prospects of Retirement

A Few Words on the Prospects of Retirement

On Saturday morning just past, I donned my black robe, my colors, and my velvet hexagonal mortarboard and marched into the Chapel with my colleagues for my last commencement as a regular faculty member. These occasions, many over the last thirty-four years, carry a different feel for me than they did when I first lined up at the end of the double column in the year of George Orwell. That year would be 1984.

At the end of the ceremony, after an excellent talk by Richard Mouw, class of ’61, the seven of us who are retiring were asked to stand for a round of applause, and then we marched out into the damp, cool morning as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world.

And it was. Ordinary, that is.

I have been asked since I informed the Dean of my retirement intentions in January and increasingly in these last weeks, whether I was, essentially, happy or sad about being let out to pasture. These questions are generally accompanied by questions as to whether I have “plans” for retirement, whether we will move from the area, and whether I am counting down the days remaining before . . .well, before the last whatever !

The answer to these sincere and well-intentioned questions, remarks, and congratulations falls somewhere between the good and the bad ends of the spectrum. Life as I have experienced it is not a simple series of binaries – yes or no’s, good or bad’s, black and whites. Nor does it involve following an outline with inflexible rigidity. 

My response to the good people who extend themselves, then, is more complicated than brief conversations usually permit.That is why, I suppose, we resort to clichéd responses. “How are you?” “Great, how are you?” “Wonderful.” we exchange in passing. So, at the present moment I answer, “yes, I have projects, we will stay here, and I attach no special meaning to lists of last things.” These responses suffice, I suppose, because most people want direction not detail; but a better answer is more particularized and time consuming.

If you have the time, then – or, better, if you will take the time, here is how my particularized response would begin. I would say that teaching, overall, has been great.  I began teaching forty-five years ago with no desire to teach and with no methods to make it happen, but with fairly simple motivation: I needed work. I am walking away with a great love for the possibilities of the classroom and for my students, with habits of mind and process that continue to energize me and attempt to engage the great possibilities of life, and with gratitude to be at this juncture, like graduates everywhere, for the formative experiences of the last half century and for the opportunities that lie ahead.

In my first self-evaluation as a young teacher, I called myself "a writer who teaches," appropriating a phrase I had picked up from Walter van Tilberg Clark, whose novel The Oxbow Incident I had discovered in graduate school. I had used the phrase both as a defense against the tendency of writers in teaching to abandon the writing craft and as a reminder that teaching was a role I expected to fill for the time being. I have been determined to continue writing, to preserve through practice that "vocation" that I hoped and believed and proposed in fact constituted my truer self.  In specific terms, then, the end of my teaching career should allow me to be that writer in a more central way than has been possible to this point. 

There are variables here, of course, that involve the unknown and the Grace of God. We don't know the future in any reasonable way.  In this regard I would appropriate another phrase, this one from Matthew Arnold's 1681 poem "To His Coy Mistress": I have many writing projects and travel ideas should God grant me "world enough and time."

When I returned to my office on Saturday and hung up my robe and colors, which had belonged to my father during his teaching life, I set aside the role of teacher I have filled for forty-five years. There is no sadness.  Lots of things can happen. There is something about this moment that reminds me of being a parent.  Once you are a parent, you are always a parent. The kids may leave home but in a real way they never leave. Teaching, I suspect, has a similar impact.

The classroom is no longer beckoning but the blank page awaits. OK, let’s see what happens now.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Hay Bales and Cloud Studies: Art is Where you Find It

Despite the brevity of our visit to Wyoming at the end of October, Stefan and I fell into a routine that allowed us to work out of a kind of rooted-ness. We were as absorbed in our little cabin on the range as much as we were in our short excursions. And we worked well together.

Back at the ranch at the end of our drive to Saratoga on our third and last evening in Wyoming, we carried chairs from the kitchen of our little cabin onto the gravel drive in front. I sat in the westering sun to stay warm and make notes. Stefan set up an easel twenty feet away and began to work with watercolors. It was cold in the shade that grew from every raised surface. But it was quite nice in the sun.

As I wrote I listened to the raucous bellowing of the cattle pastured a half mile away. Their voices are most noticeable near sunrise and sunset.

Leah, our ranch landlord, had said when we arrived on Thursday that it was time for her to begin weaning the calves so we should not be surprised if the bellowing grew more intense.  But she hadn't gotten to the weaning yet; other things needed attending first. The bellowing we heard was just end-of-the-day chit-chat, cattle being cattle.

We saw her ride out in the late afternoon several different days to check on the herd. One or more of her dogs always seemed to run ahead of her on their way out, as in this picture, and frequently trotted behind on the way back in.

There were many things we found interesting on the premises, many things to photograph or paint or wonder about in addition to the mountains to the west and to the east. Stefan painted a series of watercolors that brought out the layering of the landscape visible from the kitchen door: grassland, foothills, mountains, horizon, sky, clouds, in gradations of color.

I found the fog that hung over the river beyond the trees in early morning to be particularly telling. It was as if an artificial gap or void had been created between the flat grassland and the highlands that rose into the sky.

One of the things that had attracted our particular attention when we arrived was a large stack of hay bales some one hundred feet from our cabin door. Here it provides a kind of natural border and gives a sense of perspective to the mountains rising in the distances.

The hay bales made an interesting study almost any time of day since they offered both an array of color variations that changed with the sunlight and an assortment of textured surfaces. The cattle who would eventually eat these bales would not have been interested in such distinctions, I am sure, but I was much taken by them if for no other reason than that they seemed to offer in an abstracted way the kinds of color and texture variations one sees in the grassland itself.

Well, perhaps hay bales are an acquired taste. I don't imagine just anyone would find them fascinating or would be patient if they had to wait while someone else photographed or painted the bales; but for us it was engrossing.

When we returned to New York, Stefan incorporated his watercolors and photographs of hay bales with other images and impressions of southeastern Wyoming into the MFA thesis project he had been working on.

Another way of understanding this fascination is to connect it to my family origins in this place. The hay bales, common and unremarkable though they are, have narrative value that resembles the story of our coming and going from Wyoming.

One particular naturally occurring feature of this landscape that attracted our attention were the clouds.  On our last morning, I watched and photographed a small formation over the ranch as it reflected the changing light from the rising sun.

The clouds turned pink before the sun breached the horizon. As it began to appear in the east, the Medicine Bow Range to the west turned pink as well. The clouds shifted from blue-grey to vivid pink to white in a matter of minutes. Once the sun was sending rays across the grassland, a treat in itself, the cloud show was over.

It was a lot to take in in just a handful of days. In short order the sun went down, we took our chairs back into the kitchen, and headed into Laramie to eat.   In those few days we felt very much at home in that cabin. Our hosts had afforded us a memorable experience.

The next morning we flew out of the little airport in Laramie in the dark and watched the sun come up at the airport in Denver. We were both sorry to leave so soon, but happy to have gotten out before the snows came.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Looking West

On Saturday, the morning after we made our loop east to find Albin and Golden Prairie, we planned to head west into the Medicine Bow.

I got up early as I had the day before to see the sunrise. This time the sky was essentially clear. To step out into the yard in the cold, dark air at first is just an astonishing experience; the sounds of cattle lowing a half mile away and the stark contrasts between the dark and light colors as the sun approaches are nothing short of thrilling.
Overhead the sky was deep blue, gradually moderating to yellow-gold along the nearly black horizon.

Stefan was up too, both of us taking pictures in every direction. I walked up the road several hundred yards to a rise to catch the first splintering of sun and watch the colors of the grassland come alive.

The lively richness of color is astonishing. Behind me the mountains and clouds shifted colors minute by minute from blues turning to deep red hues, then to softer pastels.  Notions that this countryside is essentially monochromatic and featureless is just flat-out wrong.

We had chosen this day to drive into the mountains to see the Snowy Range up close and the Medicine Bow Peak in the Medicine Bow National Forest.


So after Stefan cooked up our eggs we drove out.

We arrived at Centennial at about 10. Not much was happening. Like our experience in Albin, no one seemed to be around. Most businesses were closed because of the lateness of the season.

Centennial is famous most recently, I suppose, because of the James Michener novel bearing its name. But it is hardly a town at all, more to my eye like a frontier settlement with trailers, ramshackle houses, and a handful of businesses -- garages, restaurants, western souvenir stores, gas station/convenience stores -- scattered along a bend in the highway just about where it begins a fairly steep ascent into the mountains.  There seemed to be a lot of "junk" lying about.

I don't want to be unfair in my description -- every tourist town has its less than pristine sections.  And perhaps there was more to the town than we could see, or perhaps things get cleaned up in the spring when the new tourist season starts. We stopped at the Centennial Museum but found it, too, closed for the season.  We went into one store and had a good look around at the assortment of western souvenirs. We decided not to buy anything, but I did find a rather interesting sign in the Men's room.

The clerk told us that a foot of new snow had fallen in the mountains the night before but the roads should be open. We thanked him and left















We drove up through the Snowy Range on Wyoming 130.  There had, indeed, been new snow, and the road was, in fact, clear and dry.



Just minutes after we left Centennial in the dun foothills, we were winding through high mountain, snow-covered woodlands. The road above Centennial actually has a gate that can be closed during bad winter weather.  They can literally "close" the road.

For a while we were stopping frequently to take pictures, to admire the long view, to feel the wildness that still characterizes much of this land.

Then we realized we would never make it to the top if we stopped every time we thought we could get a good picture. There was just too much gorgeous scenery for one short trip. Besides, the wind was blowing pretty hard and the cold quickly invaded our jackets and gloves and got under our hats. So we became more selective, stopping less frequently, viewing more from the car.

We did stop at the summit for a quick taste of arctic air and at a viewing spot facing the Medicine Bow rock face where a plane had crashed sixty years ago.  I have a vague memory of my parents discussing the plane crash, but it's one of a handful of memories from that time when my parents talked in hushed, serious voices. I remember generalized sadness detached from specific circumstance rather than a clear memory of tragedy.

My father used to hunt up in these mountains and fish in these rivers.



The landscape is different on the west side, more rolling plains with sharper features, rock outcroppings, rivers with their groves of trees.







As with our trip to Albin and Golden Prairie the day before, these childhood trips had always seemed too long and tiresome; I was too young to appreciate them. It was almost shocking to discover just how close these places actually were, how quickly one could drive there from Laramie.

We had lunch at the Wolf Hotel in Saratoga, a nicely kept, late 19th Century building.  Saratoga itself is pretty close to what I imagine a stereotypical "western town" would look like, with wide streets that formed a grid, wide sidewalks, old small-town store with facades.

After lunch we visited a few of these stores that sold western items, and bought ourselves some touristy things to take home, including  arrowheads for $1 each.





Then we headed back the way we had come, stopping again to take pictures at different spots.  We drove right through Centennial this time without stopping.








 We got back to the ranch by 4 or so to recover and work. Stefan got out his watercolors and I got out my journal. And then we had one more sunset to catch before heading into Laramie for dinner.