Life’s meaning finally dawns on graduate
I yawned and squinted through four hazes: the morning
mist outside, my fogged kitchen window, the steam floating
up from my mug erf Morning Thunder and the veil of
sleep-mist tucked like insulation between my skull and still
drowsey brain. Their combined dimming power should
have been enou^r to gray-out the world, but as the sun
crawled up the west side of Spencer’s and vaulted over the
peak, it retained — incredibly — enough strength to blast a
hole through whole lot, and it kept pumping buttery light
through the opening until only the steam from my tea re
mained.
The brightening dawnscape dazzled me, and I was sliding
gently from a fog-stupor to a sun-stupor when Steve came
crunching up the gravel driveway in his battered Hillman. I
grabbed my work gloves and trotted outside.
“Some morning, eh?” 1 said, swinging into the front seat
next to Steve. He eased out the dutch and skidded into the
shiny street.
“Batterup,” he replied. “The mom, all unconcerned with
our unrest, begins the rosy progress smiling.”
“Uh... Keats?”
“Strike one, it’s Milton. Next pitch — ‘Day! Faster and
more fast O’er nights brim day boils at last. Boils, pure gold,
o’er the cloud cups brim.’ ”
“Browning,” I replied confidently.
“That’s a bunt, which one?”
I admitted I didn’t know, and Steve perversely, dedined
to tell me, urging me to look it up on my own. He went on to
quote excerpts of morning prose by sky writers from Aris
tophanes to Twain, tossing in thumbnail sketches of sun
deities induding Ra and Apollo.
I listened attentively, gaining new appredation for the
sun’s glory as I watched it through the cracked windshield,
seeming to sink as we neared the glistening Cascades.
As the Hillman chattered through M*cola and up the
muddy logging road to the dear-cut, 1 r^^ed for the 89th
time — today was the 89th day that Steve and I had been
planting trees — on the irony of a man with Steve’s educa
tion swinging a hoedad for a living, a job that requires little
more in the way of intelligence than an ability to distinguish
shapes and a rudimentary understanding of the difference
between up and down.
But the real irony was that Steve, with an M. A. in English
and a collection of published literary papers that resembled
a phone book, was far from the rfrost educated member of
our planting crew. Pulling into the dearing, I suddenly
realized that fully a third of our fellow planters had Ph.D.’s
and, in fact, my B.A. in invertebrate sociology made me the
least-schooled member of the group.
This depressing revelation was uppermost in my mind as
Steve and I got out and stood in a knot with the other
scholarly members of the crew, counting seedlings into the
heavy canvas bags that we had strapped around our waists.
The contractor was droning through his monologue about
the gloomy fate that awaited anyone who “counted short”
or hid trees; 1 turned him off and selected a hoedad with a
relatively unsplintered handle.
Today’s planting ground — an unusually ugly clear-cut,
deeply scarred and mounded with slash — only worsened
my morose reflections. It boggled me to imagine the terrible
waste erf time and effort represented by the fine of swinging,
flashing blades spreading down the hillside. Potential doc
tors, lawyers, professors, pushed out of crowded markets
and into the raped forests, chunking holes in the permafrost
while their diplomas — and mine — languished uselessly in
drawers at home.
These thoughts were beginning to weigh me down. As I
ambled forward, Riding into the automatt^iunk-plant-step
routine, I turned to Lance, my neighbor ^TOie planting line,
intent on stifling my cheerless reverie. “Some morning,
eh?”
Lance turned toward me, the dawn glow before us giving
him a rosy aura.
“Night’s candles are burned out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops.”
“Shakespeare?” I guessed.
Lance nodded, and continued quoting from the plays
with his crisp enunciation, honed by the years of practice
that had earned him his master’s degree in theater.
“But look, the moon in russett mantle dad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.”
He followed this with a graceful flourish of his hoedad
toward one on the snowy Sisters. Heads turned our way
r
Parties...
(Continued from Page 1)
“That’s just it,” replied my friend’s room
mate, looking even more disheartened than
her companion. “Before we came to this
school we saw the most divine, beatific vis
ions, but now... all we see when we...
partake ...” she sobbed “is Ronnie Lee
swishing 20-footers!”
She sobbed and buried her face in her silk
shirt, but my friend and I suddenly realized
the significance of thie vision. Slowly and sol
emnly, with the Oregon fight song played in
minor violin chords filling the room, we
turned our heads toward Mecca... and Mac
Court.
V.
from up and down the planting line. Sensing his audience,
his tones grew Stentorian:
“The heavenly harnessed team
Begins his golden progress in the east
He flies the proud tops of the eastern pines
And darts his light through every guilty hole!”
The crisp air was suddenly alive with appreciative ap
plause, answered by a deep and graceful bow from Lance.
But eventually the ruckus subsided and the woods grew
quiet, except for the ^^K-chunk of blades parting the red
earth and muffled grt^re as the workers bent to plant the
seedlings.
One of the crew, however, did not return to his work, but
remained gazing intently at the light filtering through the
great Douglas Firs.
“Uh, Lance,” the man said finally, and I recognized him
as Frank, holder of a psychology Ph D. “What was that last
line you quoted — something about ‘holes’?”
Lance repeated the passage and Franks face lit in amaze
ment.
Post-college blues fade as
hoedad realizes hes not alone
“Incredible.” He whipped out a pocket notebook and
began scribbling furiously and mumbling “.. . darts his light
through every ... guilty, did you say?... fixated .. .
phallic... uh, say, Lance, you don’t happen to know if
Shakespeare was sexually attracted to his mother, do you?’ ’
“Not much is known about his early life,” piped up
another member of the crew, Garth, who had been a history
major. By now the planting had ceased again as all ears
turned to follow the discussion. “He did, however, marry a
woman who was nine years his senior. .. and I believe she
was a blonde!”
“Perfect! Symbolic, phallic, incestous lex/e for the golden
Mother Sun!” Frank cried. He thrust his rigid hoedad into a
deep, dark furrow and sat down, scribbling at a lightening
pace.
While the awestruck crew discussed Frank’s discovery,
Garth turned his great, shaggy head toward the sun as it
cleared the last treetops and shone down on us warmly, ever
rising.
“And yet it moves!” Garth roared. “I can neverlook at the
sun without thinking of those words Gaiileo spoke after his
condemnation at Minerva in 1633. The inquisitors of the
Holy Office hounded him for half his life for the simple,
irrefutable belief that the earth spins on its axis and the sun is
Stationary in the sky. What a terrible persecution it was,
wrought on a noble man through ignorance and stup-”
“Now just hang on a second,” interjected Luther, a
former Religious Studies major. “Galileo was the vainest
man in Italy, he taunted the Inquisitors and claimed to be the
discovered of “all celestial novelties.” And the Roman
theologan Bellarmine said Biblical passages could be mod
ified if Galileo could present proof of his Copemican views.
Whose fault was it if he screwed up his demonstration of
proof?”
“And there’s something else,” chimed another man, a
physics scholar knon only as ‘Poindexter.’ He dropped his
hoedad and nodded at the golden globe rolling up into the
southeastern sky. “Who’s to say that the old priests were
wrong in the first place?”
“First,” he said, “all movement is relative, and the points
of reference used to determine movement are totally arbit
rary. Thus it is perfectly reasonable to assert that the earth is
a fixed immovable point in space, and that the sun and the
other planets spin around it once every 24 hours, like a huge
wheel with an off-center hub. Similarly, one might say that it
is the bi-annual tilting of the plane of the earth-centered solar
system that causes the seasons to change, and not Galileo’s
mythological ‘tilt of the Earth’s axis’.”
“And second,” said Poindexter, “the sun is the only
object in the solar system that cannot be regarded as statio
nary, because it moves in relation to itself—that is, it rotates
faster at its equator than it does at its poles. And, using the
surrounding galazies as reference points, it moves in at least
two other ways — it rotates around the center of the Milky
Way, and it rushes away from the other galaxies so fast that
they doppler like big red apples.”
A roar of affirmation arose at the end of this scholarly
assertation and Garth joined in heartily, pounding the smal
ler man on the back. Interpretations of Poindexter’s elo
quent defense of 17th century astronomical beliefs were
traded up and down the planting line as it forged ahead
beneath the c^orious sun that had inspired it.
All at once, the whole experience — education, work,
discussion, ideas, the sun and the line of happy scholars
wiggling across the brilliant hillside like a sidewinding snake
— was beginning to come together for me [suddenly know
that I had been far off the mark when I h^pk'wed these
men, and myself, as shackled scholars who would never
have a chance to sow the benefits of the time and tuition we
had planted in the four to six previous years.
Listening to the observations that rang out in the clear air
around me, and letting my own views float out into the fray, I
came to realize that the real value of an education was not to
be found in a wallet or on the rungs of a vocational social
ladder. I voiced my thoughts to Mark, ,who held a doctorate
in philosophy.
“Of course,” he said. “The world would have you believe
that it is things that matter — paychecks, clothes, houses,
cars, and, most importantly, titles — titles with seven-letter
initials that go in front of one’s name, or behind it or that
flank it on both sides, to protect it from infection from the
other naked, brutish names in the phone book, though
usually the titled folks fear the ravages of infectious normalcy
so much that they leave their decorated names out of the
book altogether.
“Placing such a high priority on these thirigs, the world
has carefully constructed all sorts of equations to make sure
that each person gets the things that he or she deserves, in
right order and the proper amount. While these equa
tions are almost infinite in variety, they share a common
orientation; that sacrifice — and education is regarded as a
classic form of sacrifice — is directly proportional to the
amount of things that one gets.
“For a long time, almost no one questioned the equa
tions, because they almost always worked. They worked in
the social framework like imaginary numbers work in
algebra — as long as people kept accepting what they did
without asking what they were, everything was sweet cream
and gooseberries.
“But pretty soon the equations started screwing up, and
that” he said emphatically, staring into my eyes, “was when
people started to question the mathematics behind them.
And that was when they discovered that though a square
that had sides 5i long had an area of -25, the equation,
perfect and precise, did not make any sense, because where
the hell are you going to find a square with an area of -25?”
1 stared back into his eyes, thinking in fourth gear, but I
was losing ground. “Uh, I’m not sure I follow.
“The point is,” Mark said with gentle patience, “that even
though a value system, or a number system, may fit into the
framework of society, or algebra, that does not mean thai it
is wise to follow it along blindly, because in the end it may
not mean anything at all. You may think that a tight job
market was what pushed this crew out here, but in most
cases the log jam in the professions was merely the spark
that started them wondering what the hell they were doing,
presenting themselves to the world as a marketable com
modity.
“So now, class,” he puffed, straightening his back, “if we
eliminate the sacrifice — things equations then what is the
value of an education?”
I leaned on my hoedad and felt the soft rays, now coming
from high in the sky and due south, warming my face.
“Well,” I said finally, “I’d say an education’s value is
directly proportional to the degree that it enhances one’s
ability to appreciate a sunrise.”
Mark grinned, and I grinned, and between us we planted
more than a thousand trees before the sun went down.