June 9, 2001

 mfinley.com   
"A Tale of Two Hilltops"

by Michael Finley

I had two possible reunion options this summer, and each has occupied my thoughts for months. Sometimes I have been eager and sometimes afraid.

The choices: attend the 30th anniversary of the commune I was a drop-in visitor to, next week, in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado, or my 30th college reunion at the College of Wooster, on a leafy hilltop in Ohio's Amish country, which was last week.

The culture of the commune, which called itself Jacob's Hill, was thoughtful, and achingly idealistic. The people who founded it and lived there, most of them coming from Wooster, were strong personalities, ranging from the iconoclastic to the doctrinaire, but very bright and deeply felt. Living up among the aspens was like being in Fleetwood Mac: creative, attractive people continually recombining in different, sometimes disturbing ways. There were stars; some went on to be co-creators of The Whole Earth Catalog and Coevolution Quarterly. It was a cult, but an open-ended one -- always looking for a better way. We were based half on books like Walden Two and Summerhill and half on emerging best hippie practices of the day.

On its worst days, the Hill was a hard place to live. People made nearly everything from scratch. A pancake required more energy to make (you first had to make the flour) than it provided in nourishment. I never quite fit in, being uncommitted and -- I think this would be their appraisal -- kind of cynical. But at night, with the long work day behind us, it became a remarkable place. People played and sang, shared stories, drank wine and passed the family bowl. And the stars atop that stubby mountain were so beautiful -- I want to pause here so that you believe how beautiful it was -- that you wanted to bust out blubbering at the honor of being a dot in such a universe.

And come on, how many people get a chance in the 2000s to go to a commune reunion? I hated to pass it up, but I had to, because I had important work I was obliged to do on those dates -- although the work excuse did not carry great moral weight with my friends there. "'Important work' -- do you hear yourself, Mike? Can you still hear yourself, Mike?"

Saying no to Jacob's Hill, however, freed me to attend my class reunion at Wooster. Wooster is two places for me. First, it is a Scots Presbyterian liberal arts college of middling pedigree that turns out reliably high performers with great hair. On the other hand, it was a place, in the late 60s, where all hell broke loose. My classmates were part of a staged riot for the benefit of the same National Guard unit that would later open fire on the kids at Kent State.

What Kent State scholars might like to know is that our mock-riot, a kind of anti-protest war game, turned into an embarrassing disaster for that unit. Knowing it was just a game, and we would not be shot, we students took advantage of our uniformed brothers, first taunting, then disarming them, and latching some of them inside a dairy barn on the Wayne County fairgrounds. Eventually the recruits lost their cool and lofted real tear gas at us, and a few kids, like my friend Julia, whose foot was bayoneted, got hurt and required medical care.

It was a painful experience for the Guard, and I think it explains why the unit commander (of mostly different Guardsmen) used live ammo a year and a half later -- "No more Woosters!" It was also a bonding baptism for about 150 of us at the college. Whether we were black, white, short, fat, skinny or tall, we were all exceptional friends throughout our stay there, fashioning a culture of kindness toward one another and deep-dyed skepticism about the establishment. Drugs and what I would call "pretty free love" -- loose but not without pattern -- were a part of this collectivity. By paying only token attention to studies and exams, we all broke our parents' hearts, not to mention the Wooster tradition of middle-to-high performance. Our real education in 1968-69 was about one another.

And I was the worst -- I dropped out in midyear 1969, and left, not telling anyone what my plans were. I thought the real world was Out There, not in the dorms and classrooms and coffeehouse. Probably the dumbest thing I ever did, though there is competition.

I can see why some readers will find my "greatest generation" repulsive and wrong. A part of me is likewise aghast at the ignorance and naivete and narcissism that fueled our passion. But at the time it felt necessary and right, a developmental passage, the '60s version of a walkabout. CBS came out and did a documentary about the crazy goings-on at the old Scot school. At the New Mobe antiwar rally in Washington in the fall of 1968, our school had more representatives, oddly, than any other college in the U.S. We were either spoiled brats or prophetic messengers -- pick your politics. But we could be fearless, and we were all in thrall to one another.

So when I finally pull up at the student union, around 7 AM the morning of the reunion, I check the bulletin board listing who has come to the reunion from each class and who has not yet arrived. My heart sinks a bit -- no one I remember has shown up. I meet some of my fellow alums, and we talk pleasantly. I have mastered enough basic social skills in my post-Wooster years that I can now be inquisitive and courteous even when someone is an actuary ("So, in a sense, there could be no insurance industry without your mathematical know-how"). I can see now that these are good and wonderful people in their own right. They have humor, and intelligence, and experience -- they are human beings. But deep down, I am pining to see faces I really knew -- faces I had melded with, and melted with, years and years ago.

In the cinderblock college chapel, I sit through about 20 minutes of the alumni association meeting and lifetime achievement awards ceremony -- which, surprisingly, was not as interesting as it sounds. My skin began to itch. Everyone seemed so clean and capable. All the men who won the awards had soft heads of silvery hair, and each one thanked his mentors and spouse, without whom his excellent career and contribution could not have been. One introducer used the word excellent five times in consecutive sentences.

Isn’t it funny -- I don't think I have judged anyone by the "straight" versus "hip" yardstick in 25 years. But I'm doing it now.

Then I make the conclusive error of the day. Pulling a pen from my satchel to take notes with, it slips from my fingers, and rolls down, down, down the inclined chapel floor, rolling under twelve pews to the very bottom. My class secretary, Jim Lowery, sitting next to me, looks at me and sighs. He has tried to be patient with me, tried to ease me back into the college rhythms. Still fidgeting after all these years.

I feel, with the pen gone, I have lost my last best friend. The pen was my ticket out of that hour, my escape hatch, my LSD. If I could scribble, I wouldn't have to listen, wouldn't have to marvel at all the excellence. In the multitude of clean people, I am a mess and I feel as bereft as a street musician with thirty eight cents in an open guitar case, as a hitchhiker on the freeway just outside of Needles, California, just after midnight. As bereft as a stoner with nothing to fill his guts at a rock festival but a sandwich of unsalted brown rice between two slices of wheat bread. Why had I come here? What was I thinking?

As the audience applauds the Presenting Of The Third Plaque, I experience a sharp esophageal spasm, as if I have a plastic ruler caught horizontally in my gullet, and I rise and stagger out of the chapel, into the light, clutching my throat.

It's the darnedest thing. In the 30 years since I left Wooster suddenly, never looking back, I have had to kneel humbly before many people, many clients, many government agencies, many powerful truisms that might have been or might not have been true. I have got very good at suppressing my natural arrogance; like everyone else, I stifle my alienation in an eiderdown pillow of fluffy trade-offs.

But back at my bagpipe-playing college on the hill, I feel my old identity flooding back into me -- I am that impatient, show-offy, judgmental wise-ass again, deciding in an eye-blink who's straight and who's OK. Kill 'em now, or later?

My theory is that when you are young you have several important "imprinting" moments, formative experiences that mark you for life. Wooster is one of these for me. With a little help from my friends, I cultivated a sense of inner largeness there, a spirit able to freely express anger and righteousness, attributes that my usual status in life, as a citizen, as supplicant, as survivor, oblige me to suppress. They are, in the grown-up world, loathsome qualities.

This repulsive inner fire is your real home. Ordered to lay all the valuables on your person on a table, it would be the last thing you would let slip from your fingers, because it is your attitude, and your attitude is like a great big gun, unless you already have a gun. Cocked and ready to fire, my inner self is defiant nonconforming jerkiness, and I cherish it after all these years of giving ground, as the thing most true about me. Wooster is where I discovered it.

I wander by myself among the old spaces, the dorms, the library, the playing fields, the wonderful tall sycamores and maples that stood guard over that fusty kingdom. Finally the sun forces me to throw my herringbone jacket, the one with the patches on the elbows, over a shoulder. I brought it because it seemed liberal arts, somehow. It's a coat, it's a joke; hey, it's a coat joke.

When I suddenly see my friends Julia, and Donna, and Jo, as funny and beautiful as I remembered, and as prejudiced (in the way I have been describing, of the type that is joyous to reconfirm) as ever, the real reunion begins. The day we spend together, finally drifting away from the official reunion altogether, is so much fun. We are like a family of the soul -- the one place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

But back to the commune. This would not have been our first reunion. We held a ten year anniversary in 1979, and I abandoned my job as newspaper editor to fly to Denver and drive south to the mountains overlooking the Rio Grande. It was a healing experience for me, as I learned that many of the "stars" of the commune had had their share of comeuppances, and many of the formerly lowly now seemed to have been lifted up to leadership. The constellations had reformed.

I wrote an essay about that weekend, which is still up more than 20 years later at http://mfinley.com/articles/jacobs-hill.htm . When I first wrote it, the managing editor at my newspaper, Paul Gruchow, liked it enough to suggest I send it to The New Yorker. I did, but they said no, as they are wont to do. (I once had an apartment bathroom wallpapered entirely with New Yorker rejections, each one as identical as the next.) But it is as well, because I embedded a lie at the tail-end of that piece, which seems to sum up my feelings about both the college and the commune, a lie that was bad journalism though it bespoke a larger truth.

The commune anniversary had a guestbook for people to sign, with their observations. People on the Hill wrote well, and each page was heartfelt and gleaming, even after all those years, with spent psychedelic stardust. But I only quoted one entry in my article, an especially dramatic, seemingly female statement penned anonymously on the end-leaf:

"Dear friends, I have loved you with all my heart. We should be grateful for each other for ever."

But the writer was cynical, jerky me.

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by MICHAEL FINLEY}

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