In September of 1969, wearing a new $40 gold corduroy suit with a wide brown-and-white paisley tie, I boarded a turboprop in Boise and flew to Salt Lake. There I got on a Boeing 727 to Boston’s Logan Airport. A few minutes after landing in Boston, I was standing in the aisle of a bus headed for the airport MTA station, holding onto my suitcases because I was afraid somebody would steal them.
The bus driver noticed me in his rear-view mirror. “Hey Harvard,” he yelled. “Sit down before you fall down.” His South Boston accent was thick and not the sort of thing decent people render phonetically.
Everybody on the bus looked at me. I faced a wall of smirks. “How do they know?” I wondered to myself.
I had been out of Idaho once before, on a train trip to Texas with my mother when I was five. I had flown before, but mostly in helicopters, fighting fire. I had never been on a Boeing 727 before, and if I had known then what I know now about the landing approach problems of 727s, I would have preferred crossing the country in a helicopter.
I figured out how to get my suitcases to Harvard Square on the MTA, but it was a traumatic experience. I had experienced trying to load five horses in a four-horse trailer, so I understood the concept of mass transportation. I just didn’t think that humans would willingly put up with it.
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I had transferred to Harvard from the College of Idaho, where I had spent my first undergraduate year discovering that big things were happening in the world, but not in my part of the world. I yearned to go someplace important.
Had I noticed, I would have realized that small things were important too, like learning to write, and reading history and psychology and philosophy. The College of Idaho had given me a strong start on all these things, and if I had been more patient and stayed there, I probably would have gotten a better undergraduate education than I ended up with.
But a Boise native named Fred Glimp had become a dean of admissions at Harvard after attending there on the GI Bill. Glimp made it his mission to recruit Idaho kids. With the help of a brilliant Twin Falls attorney named Lloyd Walker, he found a bunch of poor-but-reasonably-intelligent kids from Idaho Falls and Pocatello and Montpelier and Hailey and Fairfield.
I had an interview with Lloyd Walker. He told me I’d be accepted if I applied. I did, and I was. Harvard gave me a generous scholarship, which was likely Fred Glimp’s fault as well.
I had been recruited into a good news/bad news joke. Leaving Sawtooth Valley for Caldwell had been culture shock enough. After a week in a barely-furnished dorm room in Dunster House, I experienced culture paralysis, culture carpet bombing, culture obliteration. Everyone I met seemed richer than me, smarter than me, better-looking than me, and had a Mercedes 230 SL they had been given for high-school graduation. The course catalog looked like a copy of War and Peace. The Dunster House senior tutor, with whom you were supposed to confer if you got in academic trouble, was the budding historian Doris Kearns. Kearns, if you believed the earnest dining-hall conversations between political-science majors, was the mistress of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the President of the United States. I decided that if I got into academic trouble, it would be safer to deal with it on my own.
The good news is that, thanks to the College of Idaho, I was a better writer than most of my new classmates. I had already learned how to study, and because I didn’t have a social life, I studied—at least during that first semester.
I had been given a work-study job mopping floors in the dining hall, but when a position came open in Widener Library’s circulation department, I applied for it and was hired.
Widener had three-and-a-half million books and closed stacks, and one of my jobs was to find and deliver books to the researchers who handed me a call number. I spent a lot of time finding mis-shelved books. I got good at it with time, and in the process learned how many books there could be on a single subject, and how many subjects there were. I reached the uneasy realization that it might be impossible to read all the books in Widener.
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It was a miserable, lonely, anxious year. By mid-second semester I was behaving as though my grades and scholarship and pride in jobs done well didn’t depend on studying, which is to say I had quit studying altogether. In early February I received a Valentine’s card from my mother, who enclosed a five-dollar bill and told me to use it to find a nice girl and take her on a date.
Instead, on February 14 I went to the convenience store behind Dunster House and used my mother’s gift to buy a four-pack of a carbonated catawba wine, a beverage (I’m being kind here) known as Ripple Pagan Pink. I put it under my coat and took it down to the River Charles, walked out to the Weeks footbridge (apocryphally famous as the spot where Al Gore proposed to Tipper), sat on its concrete railing mid-river, stared moodily into the dirty water, and drank it all. I dropped empty bottles, one by one, between my dangling feet.
Occasionally I could see flashes of the goldfish schools the river was famous for. Each had been planted in the Charles when its owner, tired of tending to a pet-store impulse buy, flushed it down the toilet. It was the worst Valentine’s Day ever.
In April the riots began. Antiwar protests were happening every week on campus and in the streets of Cambridge. People I knew had been injured by police and by fellow protestors. Tear gas seeped into the evening air.
Students living nearer to Harvard Square had it worse. Adams House, where bottles and bricks and floor lamps had been tossed from high windows onto police vehicles, was invaded by dozens of cops. People inside stacked couches and desks against their doors before a prudent police captain stopped the doors from being broken down and everybody inside being pulled out by their hair, beaten, and arrested. That had happened the year before, during the student occupation of a Harvard administration building.
Then the Kent State murders happened on May 4, 1970. National Guard troops shot into a crowd, and four students died. Fearing uncontrollable violence, Harvard cancelled the rest of the semester and gave everyone a pass in all their classes. We were told to come back in September. My academic ass had been saved by the deaths of four young people.
On May 15, two black students were killed by white Mississippi state troopers at Jackson State. By then, I was back at the College of Idaho, helping celebrate Spring Fling at Lake Lowell (whose carp were bigger and meaner than their flashy cousins in the Charles. They were rumored to eat ducks.) Then I went back to Sawtooth Valley to work for the Forest Service, clearing trail until fire season started. It felt better to have a Pulaski in my hands instead of the gun I would have carried in Vietnam if I’d flunked out.
Partly because of that threat, my last two years at Harvard went better. I resumed studying. I picked classes where I could read good books and write about what I saw in them. My grammar skills added a grade-point or two, gifts from grad students who valued literacy over content. I found a nice girlfriend, one I regretted not marrying for twenty-five years, until I met Julie.
I graduated with honors, but didn’t attend Harvard’s commencement ceremonies. I had invited my parents to my graduation, but they had seen too many scenes of violence between cops and protestors on their TV, and they were afraid to come to Boston and navigate the city—and spend all that money—just to see me walk across a stage. “We really didn’t want you to go there in the first place,” my mother told me. “We worried you were going to get killed.”
My parents’ decision not to come was the excuse I needed not to stick around. I was sick of feeling poor, sick of the guilt of leaving my girlfriend, sick of wanting a 230 SL, and sick of missing Idaho. I had a cabin in Stanley that I could live in and a job that paid enough to live on. I could be an adult, not a student. That was the rite of passage I was looking forward to. I told Harvard to mail my diploma to Idaho.
________
Fifty years on, the civil disturbances that marked my college years are recurring, not because of a foreign war but because of stomach-turning police murders of black people. Giant but mostly peaceful demonstrations have driven a president to his bunker in the basement of the White House. The American border fence has been shrunk to a two-mile long perimeter in Washington, D.C.
Campuses have been closed down again, but not because of the demonstrations. Students have been sent home due to the pandemic. This time even the College of Idaho has been closed. Graduations across the country have been cancelled. Most graduates have received their diplomas in the mail. They and their families have been deeply disappointed, but graduations are not considered essential rites of passage.
I’d go further and say that in some cases, they can be harmful rites of passage, if they give you the illusion that your diploma represents an education. For me, going to Harvard mostly taught me what I didn’t know. That year of cancelled classes, the long educational searches in the dark stacks of Widener Library, watching cops knock down and beat protestors with nightsticks, not marrying, avoiding the hard classes, developing a taste for Ripple—all these conspired to make me feel a lot more ignorant and stupid at the end of college than at the beginning. I spent my twenties filling holes in my education, my thirties filling in the holes in the holes, and so on. I did get a graduate degree, an MFA that allowed me to return to the College of Idaho for a couple of decades as a professor of literature and journalism.
I didn’t go to my MFA graduation, either. The last time I walked across the stage for a diploma was high school. I’ve been on the stage while other people walked, but I was there because I was the graduation speaker.
________
Commencement ceremonies may have been beside the point for me, but other ceremonies were the point. Getting married to a person I love transformed me into a different person, and a better one. I’d hate to have missed it.
Some other things that I can now identify as rites of passage:
Finding a teaching job and discovering I was good at teaching. Getting fired from it. Getting hired back. Getting fired a second time. Building a house. Leaving the house I had built. Getting hired to teach college.
Becoming a full professor didn’t feel like a rite of passage, but quitting that tenured position did.
Also, a long-ago night in the Christiania in Ketchum. I had been drinking Grand Marnier on the rocks, a beverage of considerably higher quality than Ripple Pagan Pink. I was sitting at the bar next to the wait station, having a pretty good time with an astonishingly beautiful cocktail waitress. I had hopes the pretty good time might get even better. She had just told me her boyfriend had moved in with another woman.
That was when Lloyd Walker, drunk and alone, still a lawyer but in an advanced state of senior partnership, walked up to the bar and recognized me from the decade-old interview with him that had gotten me on the plane to Harvard. He didn’t like what he saw.
“You think you’re going to be young and beautiful forever,” he growled. “You won’t be.”
He greeted the waitress by her first name, ordered another drink, and walked back to his table. Gloom descended on the Christiania bar. The pretty good time was over.
If I ever write another graduation speech, it will be hard to resist quoting Lloyd Walker.
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These days I’m approaching my seventieth birthday. It’s generally considered a rite of passage, but I’m not sure it will be. You can really only recognize them after the fact.
Which sustains my hope that I’ll wake up on the first day on my seventy-first year realizing how little I know, and how many holes in my education still need to be filled, and that nothing I’ve done thus far in life is complete. I’ll know that seventy is just another number, and the real work is still ahead.