Belly Up

A daughter works to understand the ways her mother sees herself

The air in Milwaukee was buzzing with heat. What I love most about summer in the humid Midwest is how full the air is, and how I feel like I can’t get enough, can’t get a full breath, can’t reach every alveoli with wet air. Mamma had an agenda, like she always does, but she was resting. So I woke up early while she lay in bed, not bothering to change out of my shorts and tank, with sleep still in my yawn and in my muscles. The day before, Mamma had transferred the koi and the aerator from the pond to two large plastic storage containers, pumped out the water, and was now in the process of scooping years of built up bio matter from the pit. But there was still a lot left. 

I slipped my feet into some too-big rain boots and started scooping shit with an inadequate shovel. I’d get in, fill a tall yellow bucket with slop, get out, heave the bucket out of the pond, and slowly and clumsily carry it to a remote part of the yard to dump it like she’d inexplicably asked, shit splashing on me all the way. Tired, but focused on getting this done for her, I ignored the smears on my thighs and the way the smell of fish mixed with the smell of my sweat. The heat made it all the more nauseating. At the end of it all, there were baked teardrop shaped piles of shit scattered across the grass.

And so it went as the day got hotter and hotter and the cicadas got louder and louder. It felt like pressure in the air was building. When the shovel was insufficient for the small puddles at the back recesses of the pit, I used a metal mixing bowl.

Mamma frets about time. There’s never enough of it in a day to do all the things she needs and wants to get done. She resents the days she can’t get out of bed until late because of her pain. 

“Can you make me some coffee?” she’ll ask me some mornings. “I have cement hands.” 

Her mind is organized, and she gets frustrated by the chaos imposed by the outside world. Every day is a day of catch-up. Cursing when she gets interrupted by the phone calls, unannounced visits, and requests of others, she just as quickly sighs, straightens herself, and says, “That’s okay. People are more important than stuff.” She gives her time to others with abandon despite the fact that she knows it’s borrowed. Which is why, if you’re around, you might as well make yourself useful. She’ll use all the extra hands she can get. 

Mamma bought the house with the koi pond in the backyard because she imagined it would be peaceful, a return to something she had lost. She loves talking to trees and she loves those fish. When it’s warm she’ll go out, light herself a cigarette, and watch them from a nearby bench or from her squatted perch right next to the pond. I watch her take a break from her life to feed the fish, providing her a small measure of control and calm in the day. Perceptive, she’s spent enough time by that small pond to recognize the two toads that live there and name them; she’ll yell at the dogs if they bother them.

Mamma is pressed to get her affairs in order. Not just legally—she needs to straighten the house, she needs to clean the koi pond, she needs to teach us accounting, she needs to go through her storage locker, she needs to plan the vegetable garden and stock up on tampons and paper towels so that there’s food to eat and supplies in the basement when the world goes to shit like the news makes her feel it will; she needs to arrange it all, to make it easy for us when she dies. She’s scared and selfless and fierce and stubborn.

“I hope you get to feel this someday,” she says, unprovoked.

“What?”

“What it’s like to have kids and want to give them the whole world. It makes you crazy. I can’t explain it, really—but I would do anything. I would do absolutely anything for you and I don’t even feel like I can help it. I want it more than life itself.”

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Watching her zoom through life, one might think she’s just energetic. But in many ways, she’s spending her life preparing for her death. She can’t sit still. For a while she would say that she wanted me to sit down in front of her with a video camera and record her instructions for us (“so that you know what to do with all this shit!”) and a video to be played at her funeral. The video wouldn’t just be a goodbye to whoever attended, but also a confession, loaded with individualized praise or admonition. Whether from her grave or ashes, she wouldn’t hesitate to deliver a few “fuck-you’s” to the people who didn’t show up for her until she was gone.

I was always surprised by this request because she doesn’t like being in front of the camera. She would pose for pictures if I asked, but she would make it clear that she was doing it for me, not because she actually wanted to. “Whatever you need, honey,” she would say. But then, like the ballet dancer she once was, like the performer she still is, she would strike a pose and indulge in her image.

Earlier in the summer, I asked her if we could create a project in tandem. I had begun to delve deeper into my obsession with photography and documentation—an attempt to mitigate impermanence. Now I was starting to record interviews and tidbits of sound, like birds singing in the morning, and conversations, as a form of oral history. It wasn’t that I had never asked her about her life before. I did all the time, and some stories I knew by heart. But this time I wanted to record her voice cracks and hesitations, to be able to later hear the exact way she used words. 

Mamma has a running list of books she’s writing in her head, and sometimes it’s too painful for her to write by hand or computer. Recording her musings and stories, I thought, could be helpful for her too. Legacy is important to her. So many of her belongings are things she kept of her parents or grandparents, “because those things matter, that’s someone’s life.” Most of her things aren’t even hers, she’ll say. She holds on so tightly to them. She thinks minimalism is stupid. But as much as other people’s legacies mattered, she was convinced no one, not even us, cared about hers. I wanted to show her that I did, that her story mattered to me, that I’d hang on to every word if I could, even if no one else did. 

One morning I was lying with her in bed. She always has the TV on in her room, often the news, because it calms her to have consistent background noise. Sometimes when we’re talking she looks at the TV, though I know she is really paying attention to me. When she tells stories, they interweave and overlap and run off each other, to the point that an hour can go by and you don’t remember how you got so far away from the original question or if she’ll ever answer it. I was listening for what felt like hours when she suddenly got really quiet for the first time, for a long time, lost in thought looking at the TV. 

Still not looking at me, she said, “I don’t want to do this anymore. Let’s stop these interviews,” her face very serious, her eyes far away.

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t matter.” 

She recounted a time when she was younger, after trying to integrate herself back into her family, when her sister told her: “What you don’t understand is that people don’t care and it doesn’t matter.” 

Mamma looked at me and said, “I had spent the rest of my life, up until recently, trying to prove that wrong. And what I have realized is that she’s right. If what I did mattered, if it actually had an impact, I wouldn’t be where I’m at now.” 

She went on to tell me, so matter-of-factly, that she was disappointed. That all the trauma she’d undergone, and all the effort she’d made to seize her life was for nothing. That the lives of those around her would’ve been better if she hadn’t been born. She didn’t want to die, she clarified. Rather, she felt that all her efforts, her whole life, and even now, as she prayed not to die before she got everything in order, were pointless.

“I keep trying. Don’t get me wrong. I will try every day. But I know that I’m so insignificant that I’m replaceable. That if it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else.” She didn’t even look sad. Instead, she seemed almost bored. She was stating what, to her, was obvious. 

“What about me? If I hadn’t moved in with you, I have no idea where I’d be,” I said, unable to appropriately summarize the complete turn my life took when she became my guardian, after I moved out of my biological mother’s life. I felt stupid, as if I was saying all she had done for me was provide me a roof, when she’d really given me a new life and another mother.

“You would’ve figured it out. It was your destiny. It would’ve been someone else.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I fought, stubborn and slightly insulted. But mostly I couldn’t understand because the divide between how I see her and how she sees herself is a heartbreaking, irrevocable chasm. Standing on the edge of it, I said, “I don’t think you’re replaceable. You can’t imagine an alternate life and be certain it would’ve happened. You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Here’s the thing about the eventuality of her death: it wasn’t like a truth revealed, something that sent you reeling and struggling to find balance in the aftermath. It had always been there and always would be, like a thick fog lacing the air with premonition and hysteria. You live with it, and, in some ways, become less sensitive to it. Of all of us, she sometimes seems the most calm. She’s composed and rational, often either incredibly vague about what’s going on with her health or talking about it like she’s delivering a joke. 

“Now that I know it’s not gonna kill me,” she once said about the latest curiosity in the string of half concerning and half benign developments of her body, “it’s super cool. This machine that we walk around in does some nifty fuckin’ things.” 

But if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that she’s scared. And then you get scared too.

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By midday the heat was almost suffocating. In the morning, the fish were calm in their tiny world—they’d been in those big blue containers for a few days. By afternoon, when I went to check on them, most of them were belly up. 

“Fuck! MOM!”

The water had gotten too hot. Warm water causes fish to become more active and require more oxygen, and unfortunately, warm water holds less oxygen than cold water. As the increasingly hot day penetrated the depths of the containers, the fish were competing for less and less oxygen, their nervous systems becoming more and more stressed, and they started to suffocate. It was slow, barely noticeable, and then it happened all at once. I reacted quickly, running to fill another bucket with cold water. 

I moved my hand through the bloated and slimy fish, trying not wretch, trying to find the ones that were still alive. I looked for any sign of life—some would swim against my fingers, others would just twitch. 

“Just leave them,” Mamma snapped, trying to get my help for another problem from another part of the yard, resignation in her voice. Why she wasn’t concerned about this, about her fish, her peace, I couldn’t understand.

“Hold on,” I insisted, the heat rising to my head, still weaving my hand through the water, bringing the aerator closer to the mouths of the fish, seeing if I could revive any more of them. The pressure of the day was rising in my chest and in my focused movement.

She was growing impatient with me and my insistence. 

“Most of them are going to be dead, okay? Just let it go.”

Her apparent annoyance and indifference infuriated and distracted me.

“Just hold ON! Give me a fucking second,” I snapped back, motivated by the smaller ones I kept finding with some lingering life in them, electrified by my touch. She and I never argue. When I was sure there were no more live ones in the big bucket, I stopped and took a breath.

All the beautiful, big, old ones were dead. 

It got quiet. I transferred the lifeline of the aerator to the smaller bucket with colder water, giving up on the chance of any of the others jolting awake. The six or seven fish left alive were starting to move more and more, slowly at first, grace and swiftness eventually returning to their bodies. I stared at the fish. I sat there for a while, alone, crying, in reverence of these few remaining creatures. 

The sun was setting, the hues around us now bluer and cooler. Flies began to gather on the dead fish in the blue containers. We both rejoiced at the thought of showering for the first time in a couple days. Before she got in, she came out in her towel, looking like a robed princess. I asked if I could take some photos and this time she obliged with more enthusiasm, laughing with ease. She has the youngest smile and laugh. These images will always make me think of the sweat and pain and fish scales of this day, but also how shaken it left me, what it foreshadowed. It’s a form of archive to me. When I later showed them to her, the chasm of representation became even more evident. I see her and I see my beautiful mother, her eyes, and all the unimaginable. She sees her pain and her abuse and her exhaustion.

"Well, of course you think I look beautiful. You're my kid."

Excessive Issue | January 2020

Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

At its core, the excessive is what happens once you’re pretty sure you won’t die, at least for a little while. Fundamentally, it’s that which surpasses the basic human needs of food, water, and sleep. Yet, in spite of its benign logic, the word “excessive” has been burdened with notions of vanity, selfishness, greed, shame. Somewhere in its history, the word “excessive” became critical, when it might not really be so bad.

Our lives don’t solely consist of the perfunctory, emotionally sterile process of pumping blood, keeping death at bay. And thank God they don’t. There are 24 hours in a day, and the routine tasks of staying alive don’t usually take up all of them. 

The rest? It’s excessive. And that’s not always a bad thing. A totally unexcessive, purely biological existence might be likened to the watery nothingness of a plain, uncooked block of tofu: non-poisonous, somewhat nourishing, not particularly appetizing, and not very interesting. It seems like we might actually need excess, if only to buffer us from boredom and distressing existential questions about the meaning of life or the point of it all, whatever “it all” may be. If checking the box on basic needs constitutes survival, excess constitutes living.

For all its virtues, “excessive” gets a bad rap. We usually don’t hide having that which we don’t need. Except at CC, of course, where hiding wealth is the norm for the disproportionate number of students from the one percent. But at some level, the descriptor is usually applied to some kind of material surplus, like a needlessly full closet of clothes, or the use of one’s time and energy on something completely frivolous, like the Hailey Bieber-Selena Gomez rivalry or the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston interaction at the SAG Awards.

In reality, the excessive can propel life at its best, can elevate the hours in a day and make it all worth it. Excess is a line we all walk between indulgence and glorious fulfillment, and the perils of too much and too far. Embellishment on the human condition is something we all do, but at the same time it gives us our individuality. In this issue, we pay tribute to the excess that captivates us. D. Verda’s story “The Six”, now in its third installment, grapples with excess and obsession as one character confronts her harmful dependence on video games. In “The Way of St. James,” Miriam Brown recounts her summer trip to El Camino de Santiago and contends with the paradoxical relationship between excessive commitment to the past and indulgence in modern amenities. And Ella Hartshorn’s “On Potatoes and Higher Education” exposes the author’s own covert agricultural campus protest and her tenuous relationship with a complicated institution and its excessive practices.

There’s no way around it: we’re all excessive. In fact, when it comes down to it, many of us spend the majority of our time pursuing things we don’t truly need. The excessive runs in all directions, but I bet we’d even take the bad over nothing at all. 

Take the amoeba: amoebas are never excessive (except by existing, because they are pointless), and no one is jealous of them. They lead sad, boring lives, and the worst part is that they don’t even know that they are sad and boring. They are the only completely unexcessive creature that comes to mind, and they are the worst. 

For the humans reading: sleep, eat, live excessively, repeat.

 

Thank you for using your excessive time and literacy to read this issue,

Georgia and the rest of the Cipher staff

Excessive Issue | January 2020

The Six

 The welcoming music, the flashing lights: it all came back with joyous fanfare. “Regressi! Regressi!” it chanted like a holiday parade. Letters danced across the screen until the title took its rightful place near the top of the screen. “Start New Game” appeared below it with an inviting graphic of ripples.

The same. It was the same.

Null realized she hadn’t inhaled in at least a minute. Her lungs were begging for mercy, but she was scared that even the mere act of swallowing oxygen would dispel the dream and chase away what seemed to be a miracle. What miracle? Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. Regressi still taunted her with its promise of adventure. It was all the same. What was Tai trying to do, make a point? Get her hopes up? She was ashamed of her own naivete.

Without making a fuss, she gathered her bearings and took a gulp of air, which she nearly choked on because, at that very moment, a small box appeared on the screen.

“What is that?” she shouted. Her hand tore away from Tai’s and she began crawling desperately towards the TV. Her bare knees trenched through the carpet as she dug her joints into the ground, burning red welts into her skin. 

She clutched the corners of the television, her face so close that she almost headbutted the glass as she tried to make sense of what she saw. 

“No way,” she exclaimed. “There’s no way!”

“Way,” replied Shin, Though the shock was apparent on his face, too. His toothy grin gleamed in the TV’s reflection.

“That’s not possible. That’s not how the game works. I’ve done this thousands and thousands of times, and never once has it—”

“And yet it is,” Tai stated with ease.

“Yeah, but—” Null couldn’t bring her thoughts into words. Her heart pulsed rapidly. “This can’t be happening. This can’t be real!”

“And yet it is,” Tai repeated.

Null fell backwards, stupefied. She then propped herself up on her elbows and stared at the screen. Her glasses had slipped down the bridge of her nose, her mouth was agape like a door torn off the hinges, and in her eyes were disbelief and exhilaration.

A tiny box had appeared on the screen. Nothing too unusual or too exuberant. It was prompting her with a question, one she had never been asked before.

“Load saved game?”

What is going on? Null didn’t have the strength to move from her elbows. She so desperately wanted to grab the controller and mash the button. Yes, I want to load saved game! You’re damn right I do! But she was stuck. She had wished so long for something like this to happen. She had only dreamed of it, and here it was, right in front of her. 

“So what?”

Was that Shin? Null was hardly able to comprehend what was happening before her, but he was able to say, “So what?” Maybe he was referring to the pointlessness of everything, but she was having trouble focusing on that. She felt like a fool. A dialogue box in a video game had blown her mind to distort every familiar thought. She mustered the strength to lift one arm and scoot the frame of her glasses into their rightful place. 

Apathy. She had to remember that things like this didn’t matter.

“Yeah, now you’re getting it,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “So what?”

“No, I mean, so what if you’re sand? If we’re all sand? Is it really that bad to be like each other? We may strive to be unique, but I’d say that’s only making things harder than they need to be.”

Shin was on the move. His pants ruffled against pillows as he edged over to the TV where Null had settled. He wanted to embrace her, to tell her that it was okay to have feelings, but he was worried that it would be too much; he didn’t want her to pull away again.

For a moment, he stretched out a hand to put on her shoulder as a friendly gesture, but even that seemed wrong. He withdrew it. Why did he hesitate so much? He just wanted to show her that he cared. His knees tensed in frustration and, without realizing it, Shin began to lean forward like a falling tree. His forehead made contact with Null’s back softly and he was positioned squarely between her shoulder blades. This is nice, he thought. I like this

“Null, you and me, we don’t have to be apart. We can work together. In fact, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s hard to make progress alone, but as a team we can move. You put your foot forward and my foot will follow after. 

“And yeah, it’s scary. It’s scary knowing that maybe tomorrow the progress will be gone again. I know how it feels—like there’s no point in trying when the end result is the same. You know more than me about how it hurts to be trapped, alone.”

Null didn’t move a single muscle. She couldn’t. Her heart was a glacier, but Shin was warm. His little forehead felt like a heat generator that pumped fire through her back. Before she knew it, her glacier heart was sweating rivers. He talked to her as if she was the most important person in the world. 

“I’m just as terrified as you are,” he continued. “Who knows what the future will bring. It could be awful or it could be amazing, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have to live through it. Nobody can live it for us—but that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other, you know? Let me be there for you, Null. You can be there for me, too. We shouldn’t try to handle everything alone.

“You said it yourself. We’re just sand—the same, single grains of sand. But that’s only if we’re alone. You, me, Tai, the others—add it all up and we’re a handful of sand. A whole clump of the stuff. And how many clumps of sand are out there? Like you said, there’s billions of us. We’re not just grains of sand, Null. Together, we make up entire beaches. We’re a whole desert. More than that, we’re a mountain big enough to part the clouds and touch the heavens!” 

Her heart shivered. Spring water channelled down a riverbank long dry.

“You and me, Null, we’re mountains. You think anything can stop a mountain? No way. I’d like to see them try.”

Null laughed. It was a girlish giggle, something that Shin hadn’t heard from her in quite some time. It was nothing like her sarcastic scoffs or dismissive snorts. It was an honest laugh. She was tickled with joy and happiness, and before Shin had the opportunity to act offended by her laughter, Null launched off her elbows and wrapped the boy in her arms. 

“Mount Shin!” she teased. “Since when did you get so good with words?”

Shin turned scarlet with embarrassment. Null’s hair floated swayed in front of him while she moved from side to side. That hair, those locks of bouncy curls, were they … blonde? His eyes might have been mistaken, but Shin could have sworn he saw the faintest shade of yellow.

“Mount Null.” Shin chuckled after saying it. “I’m so sorry it took me this long to get my head out of the dirt, but I care about you. I’m here now, and I won’t leave you behind.”

Null squeezed tighter. “Do you really think we can do it? Bring everyone back together I mean? Is it worth the try?” 

Shin nodded. “I know it is. And if you’re with me, we will.” 

Null looked at him.

“You have too much faith in me. It’s not over yet. I have one more thing to do.”

 Excessive Issue | January 2019

Torment by Innocents

Lucas is taking an aqua-dump!

Sweet God, Lord in heaven, where is he, stop filling up your Nalgenes for just a second. 

Where is he?

Lucas emerged from the woods upstream. He was absolutely losing it, throwing his head back and cackling, basking in the glory of the unanimous attention he so rarely got from his peers at Birch Island Camp. They were definitely impressed, having not yet processed the implications for their own risk of contracting giardia. Lucas told them it had been a really interesting, unique experience. He’d never done anything like it in his 14 years of living, but he’d read about it on the internet and had been waiting for an opportunity to try it. Before anybody else could sneak off to take another aqua-dump, I announced loudly that Lucas was a moron, he was in huge trouble, and I was going to have to talk to him one-on-one, right now. His face paled and his eyes locked on the ground—the female counselor, the one he had a crush on, was about to yell at him for pooping in the wrong place. What could be more humiliating? But Lucas was one of those kids who, if you observed him for as long as I had, seemed like he might have been partially lobotomized. Even though we habitually made the boys drink the pasta water so it wouldn’t contaminate the soil, he somehow hadn’t foreseen that there would be consequences for taking a shit in the river at all. 

———

The river that Lucas had defecated in was the St. Croix, which delineates a large section of the eastern border of Maine and Canada, connecting the Chiputneticook Lakes before winding southeast to the Bay of Fundy where it meets the sea. Northwestern Maine is remote, idyllic. Much of the waterfront is an untouched wall of gorgeously leaning northern hardwoods and balsam fir. The occasional decrepit seasonal home, lawn strewn with the toys of American summers, peeks out from the trees at passing boaters. Mainers and Canadians alike have taken advantage of the St. Croix for not only recreation, but also extensive hydropower. The 62-mile river is choked with a half a dozen dams, greatly impeding the natural run of the Atlantic salmon. When they encounter a dam, rather than turning around and heading back towards the sea, they’ll keep insistently smashing their heads against the concrete until they die. 

Birch Island Camp for Boys found two such dams, upstream of any vestiges of salmon and ideal for their purposes; between them canoes can float lazily downstream for between three and five days. The camp has sent a group of paddlers here every summer for the better part of a century. The point of entry is just below the dam in Vanceboro, Maine, population 134, at the eastern terminus of Maine State Route 6. About 500 yards upstream of the put-in is the United States Customs and Border: Vanceboro Port of Entry, a concrete two-lane bridge we were about to view intimately from below. 

The first task was to wrangle the carousing youth and load up our five Olde Town canoes with all the essentials. Then we slid them, one by one, into the somewhat harrowing deluge of whitewater spilling out from the dam. After the Port of Entry bridge, the river took a sharp, blind turn to the left. I had a vague feeling that once we launched the first boat, it might disappear into unknown perils and never be seen again. 

The boys weren’t particularly worried—or if they were, it manifested as a sort of contagious, animated energy. Most of them were eager to show off their whitewater canoeing prowess to my co-counselor Scotty and me. Back at camp, they were at various stages of the canoe skills ranking system. A chart with all of their names was displayed in the boathouse, and with each new skill came a new, proud Sharpie X. Some already ranked Sternsman, but some were only Bowsman not having yet demonstrated their mastery of the elusive J-stroke.

Don’t grip the gunwales! (pronounced gunnels) because if you do you’ll shift your weight from the bottom (keel) of the canoe to the tippity-top and become incredibly unstable and capsize into the water which is so shallow that you might smash into the sharp rocks and all of your warm dry stuff will get wet and you’ll regret it when it gets cold later. 

I didn’t know much about whitewater, or really canoeing for that matter. I knew what to tell the kids about the gunwales, about aiming for the V-shape in the oncoming rapids, about when to draw and when to pry. In reality, I was skeptical that our canoes would hold up to any sort of serious rapids we might encounter. Scotty, on the other hand, was head canoeing instructor, which the boys took pretty seriously because he had the authority to bestow the much sought-after Sternsman ranking. Scotty was 19 and freshly inaugurated into Sigma Chi back at Trinity College. A year of demeaning hazing rituals was finally over; his courage and resolve and beer-chugging ability had been tested, and he’d passed. Out on the other side, he was practically frothing at the mouth for his turn to inflict the hazing. These 12- through 14-year-old boys were the perfect victims—they were old enough to tough it out and annoying enough that he wouldn’t feel guilty. 

Only some of them, though, were eagerly looking forward to bright fratty futures themselves. Others were shier, more attuned to manners and more often socially ostracized—especially Silas, who mostly just wanted to be left alone to read his book. With all the boys, Scotty was altogether sparing with his graciousness: he opted more often for barked orders and empty threats to withhold meals, after which he’d shoot me a grin, isn’t this fun?

Scotty, of course, was silently elected alpha. Nothing constructive would be done without his command, and the more he bullied the boys, the more they vied for his approval. Throughout the trip, I would come to watch the younger boys taking turns yelling to get his attention, dipping their paddles into the water, brows furrowed, and scooping deliberately in a semi-circle motion. Their attempted J-stroke was usually unworthy, their arms thin as sticks and the canoe heavy with all our supplies. They so wanted it, that Sharpie X, and for Scotty to stand up and boredly read their names aloud to the assembled dining hall when we returned. Scotty, with that lofty air of disinterest that the boys so admired, gave no pity rankings. 

The first two campers pushed off from the rocky beach on the American side of the river. We watched as their boat wobbled downstream and around the bend with increasing speed. Pair after pair went one after another down the river, out of sight and quickly out of shouting distance. Scotty and I had decided, however misguidedly, that there would be a Counselor Boat pulling up the rear. If we agreed on anything, apart from our mutual disinterest in each other, it was our unwillingness to be stuck in a small, crowded boat with one of these adolescent boys for any length of time. 

Our turn at last. We passed underneath the bridge as the current quickened, then immediately  encountered an absolute minefield of protruding rocks. Not that we’d bothered to check, but the water level was low this time of year. I was the eyes in the bow, and we were down on our knees for stability. The river was suddenly very loud. Cross draw, I cross drew, then a rock punch to the side that would have hit us dead on.

It became clear to me then that whitewater canoeing is a ridiculous sport, like riding down a river in a bathtub, and there’s only so much you can hope to do to control your speed or direction. It’s about as graceful as amateur broomball and far more hazardous.

There was a brief period of calm where the river widened. And then we were plunged back into mild panic and frantic paddle pushing and pulling, jerked this way and that by the rocks, swooping down glorious fast-flowing deep sections. This time, I was ready for it: I could enjoy the thrill of it. Suddenly around the next corner we encountered a pair of campers marooned horizontally across two large rocks, trying desperately to push off the riverbed with their paddles and free themselves without tipping the entire contents of their canoe into the water. There was nothing we could concretely do to help them, much less put on the brakes, and so we careened past, shouting vague pieces of encouragement and advice. And there, not far downstream, the rest of the boys waited, drifting and shouting and bumping up against one another in a blessed, swirling eddy. 

A glance at the map suggested that this afternoon would hold the majority of the rapids of the entire trip. Narrow sections menacingly labelled: Elbow Rips, Mile Rips, Tunnel Rips, Joe Georges Rips, Little Falls. None of these were as thrilling as the first, and we cruised through without too many more maroonings, the spacing of our lazy procession lengthening considerably. 

Our first tent site was on the tip of a small outcropping on the left bank, on Canadian soil. The boys always got a kick out of that, some of them had never been to Canada—illegally sneaking into a foreign country without their parents might have been the most badass thing they’d ever done. As we drew our canoes up parallel to the high, eroded riverbank, I was reminded with some uneasiness of an earlier trip that summer, kayaking the Chiputneticook Lakes just upstream of Vanceboro. Then, too, we had camped on the Canadian side. 

We had set up tents about 50 yards away from some older Canadian fishermen, who were as kind to us as anyone whose tranquil weekend trip landed them serendipitously next to a dozen hyperactive children. They asked us where we were from— some said the United States, a few said France, and little ten-year-old Jose announced that he was from Mexico, bouncing skyward with uncontainable energy. 

And it hit me then that I was bringing children from international backgrounds across a border without their parents, certainly without their passports, and that’s the kind of thing that must come with some sort of fine if not jail time, and our Canadian neighbors were suddenly a little concerned and standoffish, you know the border control comes around here sometimes, are you sure you want to camp here? But Birch Island Camp is old-school wealthy, run by a certain kind of self-assured masculine energy—there are usually no women around to worry about such liabilities. If the Canadian Border Services Agency came zooming down the St. Croix in a motor boat I’d tell them I was kidnapped. 

———

On the second day, the plan was to spend a few hours lapping Little Falls, a section of class II rapids that we rounded up to class III for the campers’ egos. The apprehensive energy of the group grew as we drew closer, manifesting as a kind of aggressive play-fight back and forth. The boats wobbled perilously with the reckless movements of nervous bodies, and I wondered how far into the forest the shouting could be heard. 

Scotty handed me the map in a Ziploc bag. He had a drug problem back at college and the absolute lack of drugs available at camp has been a rough transition. Sometimes back on the island, he would have to excuse himself and take a canoe far enough out on the lake that he could smoke a cigarette in secret. His endorphin needs had only grown more urgent with the stresses of alpha responsibility, and I could tell he was getting a little grumpy, stony-silent behind me in the stern. 

A wooden sign nailed to a tree: Little Falls. And we could hear it, too, the low calamitous murmur of the colliding whitecaps. We shouted for the kids to pull over, and managed to rein everyone in twenty or so yards above where the river seemed to drop away into nothingness. We emptied out the supplies from their canoes so all that was at stake were the children and the boats; soon we’d send them down and run alongside to meet them in the eddy below. Scotty chose this moment to tell me he needed a smoke break, needed a minute alone, sorry—and just as he shuffled hastily out of sight into the trees, the boys began piling into the boats, metal scraping on sand and rocks, punching each other and tugging their life vests tight. 

Okay, meet us at the bottom—And off they went, pair by pair, first Desaulniers and Maulin—God bless his soul, Maulin, he was on my side most of the time. He would laugh at the other boys’ crude jokes but never make them. He listened to me when I talked in a way that made me think he must have an older sister whom he respected. At the end of the summer he would earn the much sought-after Watermanship Award. His name would be immortalized on a plaque in the camp library, in part because of his expert sternsmanship over Little Falls with little Desaulniers barely weighing down the bow. 

Desaulniers (widely pronounced dezolners) was from France. He spoke excellent English and most of the time he used it to be an insufferable suck-up, behavior that wasn’t overlooked by the rest of the campers. His hair was immaculately euro-cut and his mannerisms were an imitation of someone older who he wanted very badly to grow into already. Most of the time, Desaulniers was on my side, too. The two of them slid into the eddy at the bottom with little more than a few bumps to the keel.

Jay and Kowalski in another boat, down the rips. They were two of the oldest and most popular boys at camp. Kowalski was a real menace—bulky with his hair buzzed short, his grin malicious and his intentions nefarious. Most of my suffering those five days could be traced back to him. Of all the boys who delighted in being Scotty’s fraternity pledges, Kowalski loved it the most, yearned for that hard-won masculine approval. Jay was his best friend and accomplice, but he couldn’t disguise his big heart and I sometimes caught glimpses of it. The two of them would take something too far, enough! I’d shout, and Jay’s big brown eyes would go guilty while Kowalski’s narrowed, unrelenting. The two of them quickly hit a rock with the bow, jerked around 90 degrees and tumbled into the churning water. A fast-moving yard sale of paddles and limbs thrashed to catch up with their liberated canoe. 

Scotty returned at some point and the rest went, pair by pair, and all in all that day we only lost one paddle to the river. Once we’d all had enough portaging we congratulated them and called it quits. The boys were exhausted but overwhelmingly pleased with themselves—they hadn’t admitted their fear of the rapids, of course, but their nerves had been looming. Little Falls would get swifter and rockier with every retelling. 

———

Lucas had put his Crocs too close to the campfire and the tread on the bottom had melted entirely flat, leaving an acrid burning smell. He had left them and disappeared. After tiring of swimming in the river upon arrival to camp, the boys had no clear direction and the campsite was reaching a crescendo of manic, lewd energy. I had to get out of there, if only for a second. A luxurious, bone-chilling dip in the river (wearing all my clothes, of course) far enough away from the boys that I couldn’t hear the vulgarities they were saying. The unabridged versions of their worst thoughts, blurted out in boyish carelessness. Once I felt like I wasn’t going to have a meltdown anymore I toweled off, stepped into my sandals, and yelled at them to shut up and set up the tents.

The boys would do it, eventually. they had to sleep somewhere. But, and I couldn’t blame them, they simply didn’t know how to talk to me—they didn’t come to a 6-week boys’ camp to learn how to interact with girls. Birch Island would give them practical skills, independence, character, but they would be bred into Good Old Boys through and through. I wasn’t a role model, because they couldn’t see themselves in me; I was either a stand-in mother, a crush, or an ill-tempered enforcer. 

Kowalski’s voice was emanating from within one of the tents; they were playing President. He was bragging loudly about his Juul to Jay and Sam Schultz, both of whom seemed to be quickly asserting that they definitely also Juuled but just hadn’t brought theirs to camp. I remember what is was like to throw my good-kid judgement out the window, too. 

Sam Schultz had two moms. The other boys liked him but still couldn’t resist the temptation of dancing dangerously close to half-joke homophobia, confused by women already and completely at a loss when it came to women who liked women. Undoubtedly made wiser by a childhood of fielding lesbian jokes, humbled by acne and extreme skinniness, Sam Schultz was one of my favorites. 

———

For my campers, cultural literacy was of paramount importance for popularity—best demonstrated by quoting a staggeringly large body of recent viral videos and pop songs and memes. 2016 saw the discontinuation of the extremely popular Vine app, which had been systematically destroying the attention spans of Generation Z one six-and-a-half second video at a time since 2012. By this summer, a veritable sea of Vine compilations on YouTube had arisen to replace the actual app, keeping the past-time in the mainstream. The craze was still very much alive for these boys who hadn’t seen their phones for several weeks now, cloistered away on an island in upstate Maine, where the only incoming news was an enthusiastic sports update from the director at Sunday lunch. They would constantly quote their favorite stars, real famous and Vine famous. The more you say it the funnier it gets, the same joke on a loop just like a Vine. 

Most of their punchlines weren’t timeless or even funny, and certainly didn’t cement themselves into my memory; I do vividly remember however what they created together—a nation gripped by fast-track stimulation binges. People in their passenger seats and living rooms, dogs and babies, celebrities and skateboard tricks. 

———

When things never change, what you get is a marvelous timelessness, a feeling that you are a part of something old and grand and important. Birch Island Camp for Boys gives them this, reminds them of the glory of the past they never knew, makes them yearn for it when they return to the pursuits of millennial distraction. On the island: the wood, the canvas, the squeaky iron water pump. The songbooks and war games, unsmiling group portraits, their hair combed on Sundays. Best of all, the freedom to stray from watchful eyes and make mistakes for themselves in the mud and the trees. A safe haven from the burdensome cautiousness of the modern world. In many ways Birch Island Camp for Boys remained resolutely what it had always been, and that was a good thing. 

These boys belonged there in the Olde Town canoes on the river. But the handful of other women and I—we were a modern disturbance. The camp gave me all the cursory privileges of any man but couldn’t, or didn’t know how, to see me as the same. I wasn’t. I was an imposition on the unchangingness of boy’s camp, there to nudge them towards what the 21st century will expect of them as men. I was there to censor their words, or make Scotty do it. I was there to forcibly make them aware of kinds of human experience unlike their own. This was a somewhat lonely responsibility. 

———

The third day of the trip, July Fourth, was the laziest of all, the river wide and the current steady, so everyone dropped their paddles and kicked their feet up on the gunwales. With nothing else to do, the Vine referencing game grew more and more insistent, shouting across the water, everyone talking over each other in what became an absolutely unrelenting chorus. What happened next could only have come from the particular kind of contented boredom you’ll find sunbathing in a fleet of lazy canoes. The boys began to coordinate the pop culture one-liners, each one repeating their bit over and over with rhythm, taking turns in the round. It must have started with one boy—maybe Sam Schultz—and the rest began chanting along, until the whole thing was a masterpiece that had to be rehearsed over and over to perfection. There was nobody around to be bothered by the floating parade of adolescents shouting up and down the river, marveling at their own creative genius. 

Our camp that night was set back in the trees from the reedy shallows of Loon Bay. We had a firepit and deep spot to swim in and a beach full of little rocks to throw into the water. Scotty had been in charge of packing the food, and for Fourth of July dinner he had packed nothing but pancake mix and M&Ms. Hearing this put the nail in the coffin of our relationship, so to speak, and I subsequently retreated from any responsibility of cooking duties. Everyone was feeling an oncoming hungry frustration, and started taking their empty-stomached boredom out on each other with towel whipping and fire stick-poking. Meanwhile, the pan wasn’t getting hot enough over the Whisperlite stove and Scotty began to push the wet batter around like scrambled eggs. 

It had been very important to stop at Pyro City Fireworks on our way north. The boys were missing a glorious celebration back at camp so we had to make up for it by letting them set fire to a few things. The store was a lonely outpost, a beige box with obscenely large signage catering to the stimulation-starved residents of northern Maine. The inside was assaulting to the senses, appropriately explosive with clutter and color, all magnitudes of firework danger at our fingertips. Scotty, useless in most realms, didn’t know which fireworks to choose, so I filled our basket with a variety of roughly fist-sized explosives. Sparklers, Bang Party Snaps, Bottle Rockets and ground-spinning Jumping Jacks. We came out with a well-stuffed plastic bag and the boys immediately began clamoring for a peek of its contents. Seatbelts unclipped, they began throwing themselves forward over the rows, the volume of the bus interior rising beyond an agreeable level. The bus driver shouted them down as best he could and then veered rather roughly out of the parking lot, effectively subduing them back into their seats. 

Scotty had dumped the rainbow M&Ms in with the pancake scramble and the colors had all bled together, the whole thing looking more and more like vomited-up birthday cake. Where the flames hit the bottom of the frying pan, the batter was burning into blackened flakes, and towards the edges it was resolutely liquid and cold. The boys hovered around, dubious but growing ever hungrier; I withheld comment, smugly free of any culpability. 

I had kept the pyrotechnics in my posession the whole trip in the deep recesses of my bag, with my underwear and emergency menstrual products, in the hopes that any pilfering hands might be discouraged. By then the light was getting low over the water and the far bank was reduced to spikey silhouettes of douglas fir. Having choked down spoonfuls of doughy chocolate scramble, the boys began other pursuits; some started a sand-throwing fight while others stared morosely into the fire. 

Time for fireworks? I had their immediate attention. Ten pairs of hands clutching at the sparklers in my fist, everyone wanting to light theirs first, thrusting them into the flames and yelling gloriously when they started to crackle. They waved them around in frantic circles, writing their names in the air. When the first round fizzled out of life, the boys threw them to the ground and came back for more. I couldn’t hand them out fast enough. After the first cautious taste of fire they were emboldened, they wanted bigger and more spectacular and more dangerous. 

Overwhelmed by the sheer mass of jittery waiting children, I gave out a few lighters to the kids with the most developed self-preservation instincts. Some of them, I could tell, were well versed in explosions, sticking the bottle rockets in the sand and expertly jumping away at the last second. Others were slowly recovering from a history of stifling parental supervision, struggling to spark the lighter, flinching at the loud bangs. Faces leaned out over the lake, ogling the ground spinners, which we had discovered still worked underwater. In the shallows, they bubbled up in a kind of ethereal glowing volcano before sizzling into blackened and twisted remains.

Scotty was outwardly anxious; the situation had moved positively beyond his comfort zone. He had grown quiet, maintaining a shield of children between him and the blasts. The alpha with his tail between his legs. I handed him a sparkler, and Sam Schultz stuck out his arm to light it. 

Excessive Issue | January 2020

The Yellow Deli

I always knew something would happen to me. My childhood and adolescence were plagued with immediate anxiety, but there was always something greater just at the edge of my mind and possibility, a feeling so tangible that I could almost see it out of the corner of my eye if I turned fast enough––but perhaps feeling is the wrong word. It was more of a shadow, sometimes flitting wraith-like at the edge of my consciousness, sometimes so present that it threatened to smother me in its blank cocoon, a pale fog creeping across the face of the sun. 

In November, I’d received a letter from my Aunt Kathy, who I hadn’t seen in seven years, asking if I would like to spend my Christmas break with her. When I informed my mother, she begged me not to go. She hadn’t spoken to Kathy since I was twelve for a reason she never explained to me. At first, I agreed not to go. Christmas with Aunt Kathy sounded lonely and vaguely surreal. I pictured knitting by firelight in her shadowed cottage or walking through the dank, maze-like forest that blanketed the island where she lived. But as those first cold December days dawned, the prospect of my usual Christmas in the city lost its luster. Why should I sit at the family harkness table and be interrogated by well-dressed urbanites over my ill-advised choice to major in Creative Writing? The image of my mother whenever someone asked what I was going to do with my life—her eyes frantic above a thin smile—haunted me. Anything was preferable. And besides, it would be nice to reconnect with the warm lady I remembered, her gluten-free oatmeal cookies and quaint little deli beckoning me. 

I took a ferry to the island, and then a bus to the little town in its center. The deli stood between a pizza parlor and the local Subway, the only chain restaurant on the island. I stood clutching my bags in a faint drizzle on a gray sidewalk beneath a gray sky, staring at the squat building across the street. A sign in the shape of a flower hung beneath its awning and read, in large block letters, “The Yellow Deli.” The deli was indeed yellow, not misleading in that way. But, as any artist will tell you, shade is a matter of gradation. 

I crossed the street and stood before the deli’s glass door. My silhouette loomed against the street’s hazy reflection. I grabbed the handle with my free hand and pulled, the chime of a bell ringing sharply above me. I stood for a moment in the open door frame, the crisp autumn air stark against the deli’s warmth. Then I stepped into the deli and the door swung shut with another tinny chime. 

“Hello?” Nothing but the static hum of a refrigerator somewhere in the back. Shadowed pine paneled the floor and flared in round barrel vaults across the ceiling. Dark booths lined the walls. Atop the desk next to me, a ceramic cat waved its gold enameled paw, beckoning toward a calendar that read December 21st. 

“Hello?” 

And then she was there, emerging from the kitchen door, sleeves rolled to her elbows and a bread knife in her hand. 

“Sebastian, is that you? My, you’ve changed,” Aunt Kathy said. 

She seemed shorter than I remembered, but her long, silver hair streamed out behind her and she had an unmistakable air of strength as she strode toward me. When she reached me, she set down the knife on the desk and flicked on the lights, infusing the pine floors with a warm glow. We embraced. 

“Seb, how’ve you been?” Holding me at arm’s length, she looked me up and down. Her dark blue eyes bore into mine. 

“I’ve been good––er, well,” I said, startled by the intensity of her presence. “Thanks for the letter.” 

“Oh, of course, hun. I tried to email you, but my computer just didn’t want to work that day. I suppose you must think we use carrier pigeons out here,” she laughed. 

“Um, yeah.” 

“Well, we don’t dear, rest assured.” 

“No, sorry, didn’t mean that—” 

“So, you’re trying to be a writer?” 

“Um, yeah.” 

She tapped her finger against her lip. “What would you write about, then?”

“I don’t know yet, I guess.” 

She smiled, the corners of her eyes creasing. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, if you stay on this island long enough, you’ll have something to write about.”

“Um, yeah, okay.” 

“Oh, hun, don’t make that face. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Want some coffee? I have a little time before we open to make you some.”

“Sure,” I said.

“And I’ll take those,” she said, gesturing at my suitcase and duffle bag. After hoisting the duffle bag onto her back, she grabbed my suitcase and stomped to the back of the deli and into a hallway to the left of the kitchen. I listened to the thud of her feet on stairs. 

I sat at a booth near the window and waited for my coffee. Droplets streaked the steamed pane, a silver before the deep gray sky. Umbrella-wielding pedestrians marched through the fog, Monet’s painting “Paris in the Rain”. The speakers crackled and a lilting, Celtic melody hung in the air. I sat there for what felt like a long time, watching this pearl world slip by. Then I heard footsteps and turned to see Aunt Kathy emerging from the kitchen, clutching a steaming mug. 

“Here you go, dear.” Aunt Kathy set the cup of coffee in front of me.

“Thanks.” 

“I made you a latte, hope you don’t mind. And don’t thank me. I’m your aunt, remember?” She sat down opposite me, still holding the bread knife. 

“Yeah, of course.” 

She frowned. “Now, I know your mother and I have had our differences. I was always a little too, hmmm, how did she put it?” She stared at the misshapen foam heart in my coffee. “Idealistic, that’s it.” 

“What happened?” The question sprang unbidden from my lips. 

Kathy blinked. “What, dear?” 

I’d said it. There was no turning back now. “Between you and my mom?” 

She placed the bread knife on the table. Her gaze was cool and still. “I’d be careful if I were you. I don’t know if you can handle the truth.” She flicked the bread knife so that it spun in a silver arc. Then she laughed. “Oh hun, don’t make that face, it was a joke. We aren’t all crazy hippies out here.” 

I smiled numbly. 

She frowned. “You’re just like your mother. So literal.” She smiled, but there was no warmth in her eyes. “She didn’t like it when I moved to the island. Fought me tooth and nail. She’s always been very concerned with the so-called practical—earning money, living in a nice area, having the latest cellular phone or whatever, but you know this. I’m not like that. After all, what could be better than living in a loving community? When you give yourself over to something larger than yourself, the rewards are so much greater. What could be more practical?” 

I didn’t know what to say. My mother had always told me there was something a bit strange about Kathy, but in truth I’d attributed that to some deep-seated sibling rivalry. Now I began to wonder. Kathy stared at me, waiting. On the table, the knife reflected the overcast light. 

“Nothing, I guess,” I said. 

Just then, the door chimed. A man stood on the doormat, shaking the rain from his jacket. He wore a blue plaid shirt and cuffed blue jeans. A long brown braid wound down his back, and, as his eyes met mine, I felt something twinge. He smiled. 

“Ah, you must be Sebastian. Kathy’s been telling me all about you. I’m Rowan.” I watched as a raindrop slid down his cheek, leaving a glistening trail. 

“Rowan helps me with the deli,” said Kathy. He grinned, flashing a row of small white teeth. The door rang again. In stepped a woman in a slick black rain jacket, folding her umbrella. 

“Our first customer,” chirped Kathy. “Time to get to work, Rowan.” 

I watched as people trickled in, dripping and flushed. Cold drafts stung my cheeks each time someone opened the door, its bite turning tepid in the deli’s warmth. In the booth next to me, a family dressed in matching knit caps and sweaters played a rousing game of cribbage, the wooden divider shaking each time one of the young boys lost a hand. Rowan and Kathy switched between hosting and waiting on tables, accompanied by other braided staff members that seemed to materialize from the kitchen. After I finished my coffee, Rowan brought me a stack of waffles drenched in syrup and caked in butter. I sliced along the gridlines, dividing them into neat little pieces that I forked into my mouth. As I sliced open the final waffle, the family left, the boy dawdling before grabbing a pamphlet from a shelf near the door. 

Curious, I finished my waffle and walked over to the shelf. The first page of the pamphlet seemed to be a description of an organization of sorts. 

The Sunrise Order welcomes you to The Yellow Deli. We bless all our food in ceremonial ritual, imbuing it with the power to heal and restore. For more information, please contact our manager Kathryn. 

The Sunrise Order. I knew the island was slightly anarchic but this was the first I’d heard of factions. I flipped the pamphlet open. 

New members are cordially invited to our Celebration of the Solstice, the most powerful of days, on December 21st. We will––

“Do you need to be seated?” A waitress clad in a long, embroidered dress stood behind me, the pale fabric shifting in the drafts from the door. 

“No, I’m already seated, thanks. Just browsing.” 

Her eyes rested on me. “Okay, if you have any questions, let us know. Would you like another waffle?” 

My stomach churned. “No, thanks.” 

Her mouth curled in a small smile. “Okay then. Happy Yule.” 

I scanned the deli. Sprinkled amongst customers drifted employees who all wore their hair in braids, the men in checkered plaid shirts and the women in flowing dresses that scraped the floor. 

“‘Scuse us.” Two pony tailed men dragged a pine tree into the deli, peering out from the branches. The one in front arched a thick eyebrow at me. I stepped to the side to let them pass. They pushed through the narrow gap between the booths and tables, then turned down the hallway to the left of the kitchen. 

 ———

Outside, the sky had deepened to iron. Shop windows shone amber in the light dusk. A pack of crows gathered in the street, tearing at an empty wrapper. Then a sharp crack rang out. Three men were pushing a large spruce into the deli, banging the glass door against the wall. 

“Hold it.” Kathy edged her way through the packed tables, apologizing to customers who pushed in their chairs to let her pass. She pointed at the ceiling as she talked to the men, who nodded. A man with a long braid tucked into his waistband stood in front of the others, his lips altered by a small frown. I strained to hear what she was saying. 

“It’s just too big for the room. Only trees ten feet or under can fit in there, and anyway, we need ones on the smaller side for the celebration, besides the central tree, of course.” 

The man in front’s frown deepened but he nodded at the men in back and together they edged out of the deli, their progress punctuated by the sound of the door colliding with the wall. 

What did they need so many trees for? This celebration seemed to be quite a production. I looked out the window. Night amassed in the streets, the shops casting shadows that seemed to lengthen by the minute.

I looked back at the deli’s rear. I rose and walked towards it, slipping carefully between the packed tables. To this day I still couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps it was the vague, shadowy curiosity that compelled me to go to the island in the first place. 

The hall opened onto a narrow staircase that spiraled upward into darkness. I checked my shoulder. Rowan was occupied with a family at the door. No other employees were in sight. I slipped into the hall and up the stairs. After a small landing I reached the top of the stairs.

Doors of knotted pine flanked a low-ceilinged hall. An unlit chandelier glinted in the half-light. Above the murmur of the deli I could just make out faint voices behind a door at the far end. I took a step forward and a creak rent the quiet, its ghost echoing through the empty hall. 

The voices stopped. I edged to the nearest door and closed it behind me. 

A man’s voice growled, “No one there, Zeke,” and then heavy footsteps rang out in the passage. They faded down the stairs, melding with the din below. I took a shuddering, serrated breath. I opened the door. No one was there. I padded down the hallway to the door where the voices had been. 

The room bristled with branches, large evergreens stacked in piles to the ceiling. There must have been twenty to thirty trees in total, stacked in a shadowed mass across the far wall. The air was spiked with the sharp scent of pine. Across the center of the room lay logs arranged in the shape of a cross. A rope lay at its base, something glimmering in its coils. I knelt down to look closer but just then, the door opened, a beam of light condensing the darkness into shadows that quivered on the walls and ceiling. I turned. Rowan stood there, his face lit by the fraying strands of his flashlight. In his right hand he carried a club. 

“Now, what might you be doing up here, Sebastian?” 

I stood blinking in the beam. “I—I was looking for my aunt,” I stuttered. 

He grinned, his teeth catching the light, then shook his head, still smiling. “The righteous do not lie.” The club connected with my temple and my vision erupted into whiteness. 

 ———

I woke to the sound of singing. The melody was high and clear, and it arched and spiraled all around me, shifting in the slight breeze. Rough fabric ground against my cheek, and when I opened my eyes, all was black. They’d hooded me. I closed my eyes again and listened. The chorus swelled, the voices braiding together into a serpent that wrapped me in its warm cocoon. Hands seized my shoulders and hauled me upright. I tripped on the fabric spread across my legs. It was then that I realized that I was wearing a dress. The hands pulled me upright and I tottered in their wake. Then they fumbled at my neck and the voices flared skyward. The cloth was ripped from my head. A crowd was gathered around me. The last notes died, disintegrating in the wind. I was in a forest clearing. Tall evergreens rose in shadowed columns above us and beneath them smaller trees ringed the proceedings, candles burning amidst their boughs. The singers wreathed me in a wide circle, men, women, and children now silent and watchful. Waiting. 

“Seb.” Aunt Kathy wore a long, black robe, her face shrouded in a hood. I could not see her beneath its shadow, but her voice rang out sharp against the dark. Rowan stood behind her, somber in his pale tunic. She drew back her hood to reveal a thin smile. “Don’t worry, dear, it’ll be over very quickly.” 

She forced my mouth open and gagged me with a strip of cloth produced from the depths of her robe. “I imagine you’re wondering what we’re doing. You see, our order was founded on light and blood, something people today take for granted. Just as the sun’s rays course through the world, providing life with sustenance, so too does blood course through our veins. Today, most of that is lost. People flip a switch and they have light on the longest night of the year. People cast away their families, their blood, as easily as bread that’s gone stale. But the Mother placed us where we are and how we are for a reason.” She inspected my wrists, pulling my arms outward so that the cord cut into my flesh.

Rowan strode over to me and picked me up with ease.

“We will hurt you as little as possible,” continued Kathy. Her disembodied voice hung in the air, suspended beneath the stars. “We will release you once our ritual has run its course. You may speak of what you have seen here freely. No one will believe you.” Rowan pressed me up against something hard. I could feel runneled bark through the thin fabric of the dress. Looking up, my head brushed with the lower branches of a towering fir tree, candles bathing its needles in pockets of light that pricked the darkness. 

“Each new year, we celebrate new life, new blood. Some members choose to join us, but others are chosen. You are one of the chosen ones. We have been searching for one of your kind for a long time. A male that is the Maiden. Tonight, you are both male and female. Tonight, you are a god,” she said. 

My head still throbbed from Rowan’s bat, my thoughts churning sluggishly in the warm glow. I grasped at them, but they slipped away with a mercurial ease. I had no idea what Kathy was talking about, but one thing was certain: they would hurt me. I swiveled my head, taking in the clearing around me. People in pale dresses and tunics were arranged in a vast circle, their eyes burning in the candlelight.

“Rowan, the knife, please.” She stood before me, palm outstretched. Rowan knelt before her, offering the leather hilt of the knife. I could see the tree reflected in its blade, the candles white hot stars amid the darkness. She took it from him, balancing it in the palm of her hand. 

“Now the cup.” He produced a chalice from his tunic, the crystal burning red-gold. She took it in her other hand, then bowed her head. All around me, I heard the rustling of the tribe as they joined hands. 

“Mother, let the blood of the Maiden flow within the Crone once more.” The wind ruffled my dress and I shivered. “Let the sun be reborn, and us with it.” She brought the knife to my wrist. The cold steel bit into my flesh and my cry hung silhouetted in silence. Then came the steady drip of blood on crystal. When she was satisfied, she brought the cup to her lips and drank the dusky liquid. She looked at me as she drank. I’ll never forget her eyes: aflame in the candlelight and with something like laughter in them. 

 ———

When I left the deli, it was raining. They brought me back in the morning as the first light crept across the streets. I double-checked my bags, but as I stepped through the door and heard its chime, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something important was missing, something irreplaceable was lost. Outside it was gray again, the only remnant of the night the blood-stained bandage that traced my wrist. As I crossed the street to the bus stop, I turned. The deli stood blank and silent in the downpour. Sheets of rain broke against its awning, staining the saffron an ever-deeper shade of ochre. 

 Excessive Issue | January 2020

The Way of St James

If Aymeric Picaud could see what the Camino de Santiago looks like today, he might eternally roll his eyes. Maybe with the words “blasphemy” and “heathens” on his lips.

800 years ago, Picaud, a French Benedictine monk, completed the treacherous, 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain on horseback and created its first guidebook. He thought the trek was sacred. The Camino de Santiago, which literally translates to “The Way of St. James,” was established in the 12th Century as a way for people to verify and worship the remains of the apostle St. James. People could start anywhere on the map, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France to Lisbon, Portugal, but they all ended in the same place: the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, a city in the Galician region of Spain known for elaborate plazas, stone-carved buildings, and St. James’ tomb.

The pilgrimage still draws around 300,000 annual visitors to Spain today and always attracts a hodgepodge of people from all social classes. Historically, kings, queens, and members of the nobility traveled by carriage or on horseback. Merchants and artisans traveled on horseback or on foot. Peasants, usually serfs, when they were too old to work, walked the way at the ends of their lives.

The average pilgrim braved mountain passes and deep gullies against sleet, hail, or the baking sun—traversing through untouched nature that was home to bears, wolves, and wild boars. They spent their nights in pitiful shelters, often sharing one big bed among 20 people and an army of fleas or just sleeping on a haystack if they arrived too late for a spot on the bed. They had to make dangerous gambles when it came to distinguishing between poisonous and safe drinking water, something Picaud devoted an entire chapter to in his guidebook. Bandits were so common that most pilgrims traveled in groups, even if they started out alone.

Pilgrims saw all of the dangers of the trail as trials of their souls on the path to religious salvation. Sometimes, they pushed themselves even further to show their faith by enduring sections on their knees or in chains—an undertaking probably dominated by the lower classes. If they could reach St. James’s tomb, they could ask for forgiveness of sins, spiritual comfort, or a physical miracle.

“This church, furthermore, from the moment it was started until today, has shined by the refulgence of the miracles of the Blessed James: in fact, the sick have been restored to health in it, the blind have been rendered their eyesight, the tongue of the dumb has been untied, the ear of the deaf unplugged, movement has been restored to the lame,” wrote Picaud in 1130 AD. 

But restoring my eyesight, speech, or movement wasn't the reason I decided to make the same pilgrimage in the summer of 2019. In fact, I’m not even sure why my friend Anna and I agreed to do it in the first place. With my increasingly complicated relationship with Christianity, dearth of knowledge about Catholicism or the saints, and skepticism about miracles, I certainly wasn’t doing it because I thought it was a sacred path to salvation.

I didn’t believe in miracles, but part of me was hoping the Camino would give me one anyway. I’d spent the previous year confining myself to my room because of chronic migraines and struggling to make friends at school. I lost the energy to do anything other than work and sleep, and finally scheduled my first therapy appointments. 

The Camino seemed like a far-off grasp for something more. If I could just make it through the 500 miles of trail, then maybe life on the other side would be different.

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I started out on the Camino with the newest edition of a guidebook stuffed in my bag, an iPhone with an international data plan and GPS maps downloaded, shoes an REI salesman insisted I needed, and a backpack stocked with gear I’d accumulated over the years but barely knew how to use. I spent late nights reading online blogs and Picaud’s guidebook, doing deep dives into the reviews of hostels, and researching exactly how I should train in preparation.

Even with all of these self-indulgent modern amenities, the Camino was kicking my ass by the end of the first day.

“If you do not watch your feet carefully, you will rapidly sink up to the knees in the sea-sand copiously found all over,” Picaud wrote.

The Camino wasn’t kicking my ass in Picaud’s I’m-sinking-in-quicksand-and-might-die sort of way, but in the obnoxiously privileged, self-inflicted-physical-pain sort of way that can only come from years of avoiding gyms. I may have done research into what kind of training I was supposed to do, but I kept it at that—research.

The first day carved a steep trail across the Pyrenees mountains. My jet-lagged, out-of-shape body was trembling so intensely that I counted my steps carefully and gave myself a break each time I reached 20. Blisters covered nearly every toe on my feet and both of my heels. In 15.7 miles, Anna and I stopped only once, at the only sign of modern civilization: a bar and café overlooking an intimidating cliff.

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That night, we stayed in a hostel that first opened in 1127, but today fills 183 beds on summer nights and still has to turn people away. Anna and I crawled into precariously high bunk beds above two snoring middle-aged men and slept in thin sleeping bag liners treated for bed bugs. I slept wearing my purse for fear of theft, but I was so tired that someone probably could have replaced my valuables with rocks without my noticing.

When I woke up at 6 a.m. the next morning, the first time in years that I was up before the sun, the hostel was almost empty. I felt like I was asleep at the starting line of a race. 

Our next hostel was 13.7 miles away, a distance I completed only after getting a few new blisters, bursting into tears at least twice, and somehow getting lost even while walking with a friend, guidebook, GPS, and heavily marked trail. After reaching the hostel, I spent the rest of the afternoon in bed and fell asleep at the ungodly hour of 7 p.m.

The next morning, everything repeated itself: blisters, breakdowns, and all. By the end of the third day, my feet looked so vile that they attracted the concern of a group of perfect strangers sharing a bedroom with Anna and me.

Four Irish mothers huddled around me spot on the floor and grimaced.

“Ohhhhh,” one breathed out. “You need to pop those. Do you have supplies?”

As it turned out, blister supplies had been some of the few things I left at home to lighten my load. So the moms all scampered to their respective corners of the bedroom to gather their own supplies, set up a makeshift operating table on the floor, and fed me instructions and encouragement as I dealt with my feet.

By the time I woke up the next morning, the Irish women were gone. I never saw them again.

For 12 days, we walked half-marathon distances, and for 12 days, I got blisters in new spots and finished my days with the same anxiety-fueled breakdowns. Each day, I texted pictures and daily recaps to my family and tried to feign an air of peppiness. On day 13, we committed an act that Picaud and his peers might have considered sacrilegious.

We took a bus.

It was our third day of rain, and Anna had started to develop plantar fasciitis in her heel. She could only walk without limping if she taped her foot so tightly that it nearly cut off her circulation. 

I, on the other hand, didn’t have any physical excuses. I just couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less than walk another half-marathon in the rain. So we downloaded the local bus schedule and rode over to the next town. 

The bus got us there in about an hour. It would’ve taken us two days to walk.

After two days of rest, we went back to our regular schedule, sans the blisters and breakdowns.

For the following few days of walking, I felt extremely guilty for that bus ride. I had convinced myself that walking 500 miles in 35 days with barely any days of rest was most authentic to the Camino’s origins. With foolish pride, I was afraid that any other way of doing it would be admitting weakness and opening myself up to a world of criticism from a sometimes-competitive Camino atmosphere. By busing and resting, I felt like I was letting all of the Camino forefathers down—like Picaud was going to pop out of his grave at any moment and chastise me for being a “fake” pilgrim. 

But as it turns out, the pilgrims of the Middle Ages weren’t that much different.

“The pilgrimage to Santiago hardly ever meant an uninterrupted day after day march along the route stopping only for the mandatory nightly rest. Quite to the contrary,” wrote William Melczer, a scholar known for his translation of and commentary on Picaud’s guidebooks.

Picaud actually encourages pilgrims in his guidebook to spend extended periods of time at churches of particular importance. And sometimes wealthy men didn’t even make the journey themselves—they paid someone else to do it for them.

Some pilgrims in the Middle Ages walked the Camino as punishment for their crimes or as self-inflicted punishment to show loyalty to St. James. Others—who made up a much larger portion of the pilgrim population than I initially thought—didn’t choose the journey as punishment, but rather as space to breathe and grow in their faith.

After I allowed myself to believe that any guidelines for traveling the Camino were only determined by me, everything about my journey felt easier.

“Miriam, you look fabulous!” my mom responded one time to the day’s recap. “In spite of all the challenges and hardships (or maybe because of?), this trip seems to be agreeing with you … the word radiant comes to mind.”

By allowing myself the freedom to experience the pilgrimage in whatever way I chose, I focused less on any physical ailments of my body and became more aware of the original intentions of the pilgrimage: it wasn’t about me.

“Pilgrims, whether poor or rich, who return from or proceed to Santiago, must be received charitably and respectfully by all,” Picaud wrote. “For he who welcomes them and provides them diligently with lodging will have as his guest not merely the Blessed James, but the Lord himself.”

Thousands more pilgrims walk the Camino today for non-religious reasons than in Picaud’s time. Yet the path and the people on it are still sacred.

In my 35 days of walking, I felt more cared-for by random strangers than I ever had in my everyday life. 

It wasn’t just the Irish women and their blister supplies. One man quietly paid for Anna’s and my dinners when he overheard us whispering about our budgets. Another man gave me his only protein bars and some tablets for muscle cramps when he saw me limping. A local woman walked us all the way from our hostel to the grocery store when we asked for directions. When Anna got a stomach bug, one stranger made her tea from herbs in his garden and held her hair back while she threw up, and one couple spent an hour tracking down plain white rice for her to eat.

While on the Camino, we were gifted a hiking pole, a hat, a pocket knife, homemade meals, and bracelets from strangers whom we had only known for a few weeks, days, or minutes. 

Everything about the Camino has changed—but at the same time, nothing has. When it comes to the Christian ideal of being a good “neighbor,” people walking the Camino today are pilgrims in the most authentic sense of the word.

“When he finally reached the Cathedral of Compostela through its north portal, he probably entered it, as Master Matteo would do later at the Portal de la Gloria, on his knees,” Melczer wrote about the pilgrims in the Middle Ages.

When Anna and I finally entered the city of Santiago de Compostela, I was wondering if the cathedral would be as beautiful and elegant as Picaud had hyped it up to be. I wish I could say that I strolled up to the cathedral with my head held high and full of profound thoughts and reflections. But by the time I was entering the plaza, I was stiffly waddling from exhaustion and hunched over, holding my stomach from a bout of nausea.

When we got there, the front face of the cathedral was tall, ornately carved with detailed columns, patterns, sculptures—and lined with construction tape, swarming with workers dangling off the sides of the building. 

We didn’t even try to go inside. Instead, we bought a bag of cookies at the nearest grocery store and found a spot to sit in the cathedral’s courtyard. Friends we had made on trail came and joined us, and we all assembled in a row, facing the front of the cathedral. 

For two hours, we didn’t move.

While construction workers and tourists frenzied around and our plastic grocery bags threatened to drift away in the wind, we stayed right there, simply staring at the cathedral in reverent silence.

Excessive Issue | January 2020

Butterfly Hippie Cowboy

Up on a small, grassy hill sits an old dilapidated home overrun by the elements. Ivy winds through ancient windows of thin, warped glass. The porch is falling in on itself. The home is a product of the early 60s, its facade yellow paint on thin wood board with burnt brown trim work. The paint is peeling. No one lives in the home anymore. Its name is the Nittany House, on the dead end of Nittany Road by the Nittany Trailhead.

 Inside, there is a man on the second floor of this long-abandoned yellow home moving a giant taxidermied deer head from side to side out one of the ancient windows. Next to the man, a chess board and an ashtray full of cigarettes sits on a tiny card table.

 The man explains that sometimes he’ll sit up in this second-floor room and freak out onlookers by moving the obviously dead deer to create the comical, eerie illusion that it’s alive.

 ———

I am in State College, Pennsylvania, surrounded by cows and dairy and a large educational institution known as Penn State. I am about twelve minutes away from the university at the base of a trailhead which winds up a humble hill—a mountain by East Coast standards—named Mount Nittany. Along the path are tall green maples with iridescent leaves that let in the July light but keep the heat down in the comfortable 70s. The trailhead begins at the dead end of Nittany Road, melting into the modest property and old yellow house.

While standing at this intersection of house and trailhead, I am greeted by a man tanned and modestly wrinkled by the Arizona sun. He is wearing a cowboy hat slightly reminiscent of one that might be found in the aisles of a costume shop. His skinny but healthy frame is covered with a t-shirt and jeans fastened with a worn leather belt. Average, thin, black-framed glasses rest on his nose. I notice a small silver earring. He has a peppered mustache and beard.

 His vibe is simultaneously wild western cowboy and cool uncle.

 His name is Dan Loerch.

 ———

Anyone who parks their car at the Mount Nittany Trailhead is immediately presented with the charming absurdity that is Dan Loerch. He has constructed a makeshift visitors center, the quirkiness of which some hikers gravitate towards while others adamantly avoid by veering steeply to the right and beginning their hike—but they still have to pass his bulletin board full of animal photos at the end of the gravel road. People have left notes of appreciation and excitement: “First birthday hike with my son (: ” “I held two snakes today! One peed on me :/ but still so cool!” There is also a picture of two black bears: Bears Last Seen 7/8/19. 

 Dan has set up a porta-potty for hikers that find themselves in an emergency, and there is a table adorned with trinkets of the trail: an Easy Button to press after a hike, a guest book to sign, a globe to mark where you’re from. I put a dot on Colorado. There’s a wooden bowl of green acorns, fossils, arrowheads, and small violet minerals. Beside the table is a big plastic tub filled with mulch. A snake that Dan captured rests inside. If you appear curious or scared, Dan will encourage you to hold it. Sometimes, snakes will hang around his neck all day while he greets hikers and does yard work.               

At this time of the summer, Dan has also set up a large blue tent behind the bulletin board and table. Key lime green chrysalises with thin golden stripes hang from the tent: inside, little caterpillars grow into monarchs. The black and orange insects will emerge and then migrate in the fall. Dan seems to love the butterflies. 

 ———

It was 1963 when Dan came to the edge of the Mount Nittany trailhead located in the small, unincorporated town of Lemont, an offshoot of State College and an overpass away from the University. Dan’s father served six years in the Air Force and was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, for a year before the family arrived. Dan would’ve been around four years old at the time.

 His father, “Liked having his own space. He liked the seclusion.”

 But today the seclusion has morphed into a frenzied hubbub of locals and visitors and there are almost always cars lining the gravel drive to the trailhead. During busy hiking days, parallel parking is a pain and turning around becomes almost comical. The days where the trail was merely a deer path that went straight up the mountainside are long gone.

 “It was wild,” Dan remarks. “Nobody even knew it existed. Rarely would anybody wind up here.”

 Down in the town of Lemont, a mile and a half away, there’s an elementary school that was built in 1938. It is stone and squatty and angular. In some ways it’s beautiful—you can imagine all the wonderful childhood memories made in the schoolyard—yet the building itself is arguably ugly. Locals have nicknamed the school Rock View (presumably because of its resemblance to the Rock View prison nearby), cementing its status as a landmark in Lemont. This past summer, the school was shut down and now it sits empty.

In the ‘60s, Dan would walk home from the elementary school, about a mile and a half up Mount Nittany Road to his family’s property, a world that was entirely separate from the town. Dan was a small, scrawny kid, and a jokester. Never popular. But he knew trees. He knew that you could bake acorns into a bread-type meal if survival depended on it. He knew when the butterflies came into town for the annual monarch migration. He knew that the milkweed had a sticky sap that would get all over his math homework. He knew that every time he crossed the intersection at Thompson Street, there would seldom be another soul on his walk up the dirt road to the yellow house at the Nittany Trailhead.

 His seclusion, his feeling of not belonging, was a product of a cultural and educational divide which Dan found himself precariously placed within. His father was a 30-year-old bio-chemical engineering professor at Penn State, yet they lived a good distance from the University up on a hill: a rural mode of living that didn’t traditionally jive with the high class of academia.

 Growing up, Dan felt like half of the population of the area was the University and the other half were the mountain folk, the type of people who would chop their own firewood and survive off the land. Dan didn’t fit in. He lived as a “hick” but also considered himself a scientist.

 “I didn’t socialize much,” Dan says. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience.”

 ———

The trees surrounding the yellow house are overgrown with vines. They create a canopy with their tangled branches—tree forts for children, fairies, and dogs to play in. In the yard, Dan is trying to grow seemingly everything under the sun. Pots are grouped together around the entrance to his property. He is in the process of labeling pretty much every living thing—even simple plants are given labels: hydrangea. It’s very helpful for me, given my dearth of plant knowledge.

Dan is continuously curious and eager to share with the world: he’s playing and talking and chatting at the corner of his residence where his land begins, and the Nittany Trailhead wanders up the mountain. He invites visitors to walk on a nature trail that he has constructed on his own property. There’s a sign that reads:

Real Bear Den

5-minute loop

Follow the bamboo!

Self-guided trail open to the public.

Today: Sunrise to Sunset.

Will YOU dare the bear?

The sign is an exaggeration. The 5-minute loop is probably correct, but the bear den is questionable. It’s a big overturned log, and yes, a bear could likely fit into it, but it’s clear one never has, or at least hasn’t recently. The bear apparently walks around the property on occasion and up the trailhead, so it seems to me that it just hangs out at the log. Dan insists he once found fresh bear poop on the massive piece of fallen timber. Enough justification for a den classification apparently.

 Along the trail are blackberries ripe for eating. Dan delicately picks several with his rough, tan hands. They roll around in his palm and stain his skin a purplish pink. The berries are sweet and small with soft flesh and disproportionately hard middles. I suck off the sweetness and then crunch the bitter middle. Dan points to more plants on the walk.

 “This was my solace. This was my home. This is where I fit. This is where I understood how things worked and why. This is where the patterns made sense. The people didn't make sense to me. The oaks, the trees, the relationships of the life: that makes sense.”

 It seems that Dan is principally concerned with the segmentation of our world. He theorizes often about butterflies, about the butterfly effect: that cheesy adage where a flap of a butterfly wing can cause a storm on the other side of the world. He speaks knowing the phrase is tired, but he genuinely believes in its principle. Love and acceptance are essential to connection. The natural world is an unquestioning incubator: it has accepted Dan, and it embraces everyone in some form or another.

 Dan locks eyes with me for a second and then tilts his head and moves his arms to gesture towards the sky and plants that surround us. “Love the world. Love nature. You’re part of it. Love yourself. You know love yourself because you’re part of nature.”

 His philosophies are endlessly cliched, but they hit harder the more I talk to Dan. His intention is far from surface level. You can feel that he truly cares.

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 ———

Dan and I return from the garden and sit at a picnic table. Hikers mill about behind us during our conversation and Dan’s dog, Shane, occasionally runs off to greet other dogs on the trail. Dan gets up and ties him off on a very long leash and returns, apologizing. 

He begins to tell me about his past.

 “When I had the opportunity to go to college, because that's what you have to do, I was only seventeen and a half. I chose the University of Arizona, because it was about as far away from here in every way possible. The desert, the climate. Everything about it was different. And so, I sought to find out what the real world was like because this microcosm couldn't be it, I figured.”

Dan was a Chemistry major at the University of Arizona for two years before dropping out and getting married to Tina, who he met at 20. By 21, he had his first son. It was 1981. Dan and Tina moved back to his family quarters in Pennsylvania and lived on food stamps.

 A year and a half or so later, Dan found himself in Oklahoma for three months. After a workers’ strike, the Reagan Administration was recruiting air traffic controllers. Dan passed the aptitude test and went to Oklahoma to train. Then he was sent to Los Angeles to direct air traffic. Dan and Tina, with their one son and another son on the way, packed up and moved across the country. The family stayed in Los Angeles for ten years, and then moved back to Arizona. At this point, the Loerch family had three sons and a daughter on the way.

 At this point in the story, Dan’s voice begins to get shaky. He looks down at the picnic table and his eyes focus hard for a second, like he’s searching the wood grain for something that’s not there. He doesn’t make eye contact with me when he speaks, his eyes darting around at the plants on his right, and past me towards the butterflies.

 “Tina was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, which is the skin cancer that kills you and the mortality rate’s 95% in three years, and when you get that kind of a diagnosis, so to speak … So, it took about two years and … I don't remember a lot of those two years.”

 Dan’s voice is now raw, but he moves past the painful memory quickly. No need to dwell. If we linger longer it feels like something might pop.

 ———

Dan remembers thousands of Monarchs flying above Mount Nittany on their migration route towards Mexico when he was a kid, but now he says there are only hundreds. He talks about how milkweed used to grow up all along Nittany Road to Lemont. It was a nuisance. It would get all over his hands, all over his math homework, so they cut it. People around the country did the same. Monarch populations were decimated.

 Dan’s demeanor becomes positive, “You just gotta try … and I can create one extra monarch. I'm pretty sure. I've got this. And who knows what that's going to do? What difference one can make, because one can make a difference. One flap of a wing can make a difference.”

 The key lime green chrysalides with thin gold stripes that rest under Dan’s blue tent are testaments to this belief. They are delicate. Small. Unaware of their human caretaker. 

 ———

Eventually, after Tina’s death, Dan remarried, but Dan and his second wife had conflicting priorities.

 “We never shared the same goals in life,” Dan explained. “I didn't want to work until the day I died, you know, living in a city, and she thinks you should do that. And she worked 60 hours a week, and I wanted to do other things … ”

 A certain type of detachment and rawness comes across when Dan speaks of his past. It feels like he pushes his words away from his mouth. A peculiar pain rings through, heavy and accumulated: glossy healed scars. Wounds re-exposed through words, wounds that you’d prefer not to agitate. Rub some more Neosporin on and call it a day.

 But Dan Loerch would be the last man to just hand you Neosporin.

 Dan seems like the type of man who would wrestle through your struggles with you. Who would sit down and listen. He seems steadfast in easing any pain that others feel, yet there’s so much percolating up through his words. His own pain is quiet, shiny—it glistens and stings. 

 Dan continues, “We stuck it out for about 20 years and relationships take compromise, but eventually when you've compromised everything that matters to you, both people just have what's left.”

 “So, I moved up to the mountains of Arizona for three years, finished all of the legalities of getting divorced. All my kids are grown up and moved on. I don't have a job. I sought what to do. And once everything got resolved last April, a little over a year ago, I planned a trip. I was going to travel across the country. I was going to visit every one of my nieces and nephews.”

 ———

Ajo Arizona is near the U.S.-Mexico border, in the middle of nowhere. It has tall reaching Organ Pipe cacti and charming brown desert scrub. Dan’s aging parents had a parked trailer out there in the desert, ten miles from any building. On a long trip once, Dan visited their camp before moving onto Flagstaff to fish for trout. He caught one and moved on. Dan was on a quest to catch a fish in almost every state as he visited his nephews and made his way to the East Coast. One down. And he was off. A quick pit stop for family, a remnant of home.              

He went to San Diego next and caught a mackerel off the Ocean Beach pier with his son Andy. Then he caught fish in New Mexico and Texas. He skipped Louisiana. Couldn’t catch a fish and didn’t want to pitch a tent.

 “I was free, and my goal was defined.”

 Dan looks around his property and out at the visitors buzzing around his table of trinkets and venturing up the trail. “I made it all the way back here,” he says, “and when I got here, I knew I found home. This place was where I felt like I belonged. I traveled across the country, met a lot of people. And I never felt like I belonged. I didn't belong in Texas and I didn’t belong in Arkansas. I didn't belong in Tennessee. I didn't belong in Ohio. I belong here.”  

 A month after Dan arrived home at Mount Nittany, his father and mother returned from Ajo. Dan’s father wanted to die at home. He had stage four cancer. 

 “He lived life in control up until the very end.” 

 Dan’s view on death and life is holistic and all-encompassing. He spews bits and pieces of philosophical ramblings, “Disease is disease and life is a state of disease and every organism is a disease to other organisms in the environment.” Some meager and unassuming things survive, unique in their own way. Other bigger, supposedly smarter things will die. You never know when something will die, when a spouse, or parent will pass; all you can know, all you can believe, is that the earth will produce something useful and great afterwards. 

Where some turn to insular communities to cushion their egos and ill-founded beliefs, Dan turns to the refuge of the familiar, but ever-morphing natural world: a place where everything is in some way accepted, the comforts of a backyard where hikers from every corner visit, where “invasive” and “native” species compete—a microcosm of the larger reality. “Everything’s invasive, but some things will work and succeed and thrive and others will hang on until conditions change.”

 Dan’s garden is all encompassing. The dirt has just as much value as his butterflies.

 ———

Since his father’s death, Dan has begun to revive the family’s land. I’ve caught him in the middle of this process. He now rents a home down the road, complete with hippie tapestries and beads hanging from the doors. Every day he comes up to where the trailhead meets the family property and hatches a plan to transform the small, old, yellow home into “the Nittany House,” a cultural hub for hikers and nature lovers in the area. He plants flowers and welcomes nearly every hiker. Here, he’s a servant and protector of the land and those who enjoy it.

As we talk, Dan picks a small orange flower. Its silk-like petals and stem are no bigger than a fingernail. He reaches down and picks a seed pod off the same plant, a light green, scraggly thing. He explains how the pod will shoot out little seeds with an unbelievable force when touched. He holds up the flower again. It is dwarfed by his hands.

 “Could you think of anything that you could engineer to make that more beautiful?”

 Nature creates angles, and colors, and a world that humans are both a part of and could never quite engineer and control themselves. In the end, all we can do is try. Dan tries with his signs and his bear den and his snakes and his bugs and plants.

“I’ve got butterflies and I think they’re beautiful and I love it.”

On Potatoes and Higher Education

1:23 a.m. The front of Worner Student Center. Black hoodies, ski Buffs pulled over mouths, and faces tilted conspicuously down and away from security cameras. My guerilla potato planting, formerly a solo operation, has recruited a small army. As a team we have become efficient, our procedure refined to the surgical precision of a McDonald’s assembly line. My ambition has grown with our efficiency, and now we find ourselves planting seed potatoes in the flower boxes lining the front of Worner—a long-time goal of mine. The first guerilla planter digs quick 4 inch by 4 inch by 6 inch holes spaced a foot apart with a Home Depot hand trowel. The second carefully places two to three cubed potato pieces into each hole. The third follows the procession covering the pieces and smoothing out the dirt, sealing in both the potatoes and our secret. 

 ———

When I arrived at The Colorado College during the setting sun of the Obama Administration, I had committed myself to hating it. The Colorado College had not been my first choice. I had applied early decision to Middlebury College, I wanted to be a Feb Start, and I was going to ski down the Middlebury Ski Bowl in full cap and gown to grab my diploma in December 2019. I was rejected—and thank God I was, because I would have hated it anyways (or maybe I just tell myself that). 

I rejected higher education right back, deferring my enrollment in order to take a “gap year” (pause to roll your eyes). Upon arriving to The Colorado College in August 2016, I quickly learned that no one gave a shit that I took a “gap year,” and that acting like a haughty bitch on my first-year orientation trip would not help me make friends. I was under the impression that being an entire year older than my classmates made me far superior: they, who had only just graduated high school, could not possibly comport themselves with the level of maturity that I now possessed. These children had only just taken the ACT and were excited by the options in Rastall (Given that I now regularly stand outside Rastall at 12:15 begging for swipes, I must say it has grown on me. Also, to all the underclassman that pretend they do not even see me when I ask for swipes: rude), while I had managed to do my own laundry and cooking for a year.

I was completely unaware that I was dripping with privilege, and entered every interaction with a snarky superiority. Unsurprisingly, I sulked around The Colorado College entirely by myself. In my defense, I was busy—my First Year Experience course was a West in Time, I enrolled in Calculus 3rd Block and Chemistry 4th Block, and my roommate and I disagreed on things, to put it mildly (she never quite figured out the whole sock on the door handle thing, and instead deferred to the unspoken sexile). 

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In summary, I, like many freshmen—I mean first-years—was initially unhappy upon entering college. But operating with an engorged ego, I sought some existential explanation for my restless disgruntlement with the college experience. While it is true that I struggled socially, I also had a crippling issue with the institution that was The Colorado College, which stemmed from my not-so-cute, semi-unjustified problem with all forms of authority. 

Governed by my own self-righteously indignant moral code and fueled by a youth saturated with “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” I sought an outlet in some form of covert institutional sabotage. Despite frequently assuring anyone who would listen that I was going to drop out at the end of the next block, I needed an undertaking that would not result in expulsion.

Enter the full bags of abandoned potatoes that I noticed starting to crop up in the communal kitchens of dorms across campus. The average college student is pretty inclined towards a “more is better” mentality for everything from White Claw consumption to the unnecessary purchase of twenty-pound bags of potatoes with their parents’ Costco membership. But unlike a case of White Claws, the average college student almost always fails to consume the entirety of their potatoes. Many a bag of seemingly past-their-prime potatoes were being thrown out of the communal kitchens of dorms by exasperated Sodexo employees. Lacking friends, desiring a subversive cause, and possessing some knowledge of potato cultivation from a stint on a farm during my “gap year” (I, too, am cringing), I started planting these potatoes around campus.

The true genius of the potato is that all one needs to plant a potato, is a potato. They are aggressive rooting vegetables and prolific in their regenerative properties. Once a crop of potatoes has taken to a patch of soil, it is impressively self-reliant and will continue to propagate un-aided by the hands of a guerilla gardener. Before potatoes are shoveled into a red box and served, sizzling, through a takeout window, they exist as rough, light brown ovoids with dimples on their skin. Those dark dimples are called eyes, and it is from these eyes that the potato sprouts in its insentient efforts to reproduce. If left uneaten in a semi-lit environment within a temperature range of 60-70ºF (conditions commonly found in the average Colorado College dorm), a potato’s eyes will begin to sprout.

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A not-so-brief interlude into the history of potatoes: the potato, Solanum tuberosum, is native to the Andes and was cultivated by the Inca in modern day Peru as early as 8,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. Spanish colonizers brought the potato back to Europe, and it is thought to have been introduced to Ireland within the last twenty years of the 16th century. I myself was distraught when I learned that potatoes were not a blessing bestowed upon the Irish by the leprechaun gods, but instead yet another cornerstone of Western European culture exploited from the New World. 

Adapted to the high elevations of the Andes, the potato can survive both harsh and variable growing conditions. Its environmental versatility enabled it to survive the cloudy, wet, and temporal extremes of the Irish climate. Unlike cereals, the potato does not easily rot above ground, and its comparatively nutritious composition added much-needed vitamin content to the European diet. Potatoes were at peak performance by the end of the 1700s in Ireland, feeding livestock and comprising the entirety of the peasant population’s diet, even gracing the noble dishes of the elite. 

Speaking of the elite, the women’s soccer field was a prime destination for potato planting. The field formerly had an employee, Daryl, whose job it was to ensure the pitch remained in a pristine vegetated state. In order to do so, he was authorized to use any means necessary to remove students who strayed too far from the Preserve Hill onto the field. The temptation here—fueled by a resentment regarding my own lack of a college soccer career—was far too great to resist, and my first cohort of potatoes proudly germinates beneath the field’s center circle. Or at least, it did. The guarded grass field was replaced this fall with turf made of an organic blend of coconut and cork, which lacks the carcinogens of traditional recycled car tire turf. Regardless of the eco-rating, turf fields are not hospitable environments for even the hardiest potato.

The potato gets a lot of flak because of the potato blight, but let us not blame the potato for its agricultural mismanagement. As the 18th century rolled into the 19th, the integrity of individual potato strains was violated through unintentional but nonetheless irresponsibly promiscuous crossbreeding, which resulted in the less-than-desirable Lumper potato. This watery pigmy root was nutritionally deficient in comparison to its refined relatives, the Cup, Black, and Apple strains. However, the Lumper potato was better able to cope with inadequate growing soil, and its significantly higher production rate made the Lumper’s overall lackluster taste palatable, if not forgettable. 

The Potato Blight, caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, was first recorded in the United States and spread into Canada during the early 1840s. Phytophthora infestans appears as black splotches on a plant’s stems and leaves, and eventually results in fuzzy fungal growth that causes a potato to rot into stinky inedible mush. The blight hopped the pond during the unusually wet, cool, and windy summer of 1845. The Lumper potato, our favorite rooting scapegoat, was supposedly more susceptible to the blight than other potato strains, and since Ireland had essentially slipped into a Lumper monoculture the blight decimated Ireland’s potato crop. Potato harvests in the summers of 1846 and 1848 were destroyed by the blight, launching Ireland into a full-blown famine. Those that could emigrate did, and thank God for that, because their plight went on to fuel overly violent early 2000s movies with archetypal plots, like “Gangs of New York,” a fantastic film starring a stormy Leonardo DiCaprio.

Disease follows famine. Irish hospitals became horrendously twisted versions of Hospice while prisons became sanctuaries due to the consistent meals provided to inmates. The exact death toll associated with the “Great Irish Famine” is unknown, but based upon censuses and predicted population growth rates, the estimated net change of the Irish population (including emigration) is roughly two and a half million people. Meaning, in the decade of 1840 to 1850, over two million Irish were lost from this small, cloudy island.

Potatoes have now been proudly absorbed into the canon of American heritage. Idaho is the single largest producer of potatoes in the United States and McDonald’s is the single largest purchaser of potatoes. American grown, American purchased, American consumed, and American weight gained. The Russet potato type was developed in 1872, and the Russet Burbank variety in particular is responsible for the sprouting of the Idaho potato industry. The Canela Russet is highly rated for its storage potential, and it is superb when baked. 

However, it was with the Mercury Russet that I launched my potato crusades. The Mercury Russet matures incredibly quickly, requires only a short growing season, and is diverse in its suitability to both the culinary arts of baking and frying. For these reasons, but also because it was readily available in most dorm kitchens, it is my preferred potato strain to grow in the semi-arid high elevation environment of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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A potato is ready to be planted once its eyes are pierced by tenacious sprouts. It should then be chopped into golf ball sized pieces with at least one sprouting eye on each piece. Make smooth cuts with a knife that has been sterilized in bleach between potatoes in order to limit inter-potato disease transmission.

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The pieces can then be placed out on your favorite newspaper to not read, like The Catalyst, for no longer than seven days. This gives the potato pieces time to develop calluses over their circumcised edges, which prevent rot once they have been planted. This step is not absolutely necessary, but since it takes at least seven days to finish any menial unassigned task anyway, it is an effortless way to increase the health and size of one’s yields. 

On the topic of health: The Colorado College Emergency Medical Service (CCEMS) is a student EMT squad that provides medical aid to The Colorado College community. They have a pretty neat siren-less minivan (fondly named Lucille) that is used to quickly respond to emergencies. I enlisted CCEMS’s help on several inside jobs where Lucille’s speedy transportation doubled both the range and overall yield of a standard night of potato planting. My planter-in-crime and I squeezed into Lucille’s girthy trunk with a shovel, a bag of prime Mercury Russets, and a yellow backboard. Thank you for your service, CCEMS.

 I can only imagine that Campus Safety does not frequently check their security footage (or maybe they do, but actually just have bigger things to fry than potatoes). If they did check their footage, specifically from a Saturday night in Block 7 of 2018, they would find a scene pulled straight from a bad crime movie: Lucille slams to a halt on the curb. Hooded hooligans dive out as she takes off to circle the block. With a practiced hustle, our criminals frantically shovel chunks of dirt from in-between the tufts of grass planted around the well-lit facade of Cornerstone Arts Center. Hefting a large bag of spuds, the ruffians just finish covering their implants with soil before Lucille hurtles back around the corner. They dive into the getaway car and peel out at a crisp thirty miles per hour. 

By the start of my sophomore year in the fall of 2017, but before the potato planting had become a seamless inside operation, the Charles L. Tutt Library had finally been completed. After inhaling a dreadful gaseous cocktail of what I can only hope are not mutagens wafting from the construction site, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take this grandiose eco-building to achieve carbon neutrality, given its construction footprint. But families visiting for Parents’ Weekend deserved to see where their tuition dollars were going without having to walk an inconvenient distance, so the school constructed a most beautiful—and most temporary—parking lot on the north side of the Charles L. Tutt Library (where The Academic Walk is now located). 

The Parents’ Weekend parking lot had the darkest of asphalt and the sunniest of parking lines. It is a shame that skate culture had not yet found its way to The Colorado College at this point, for I assume many an elbow could have been abraded on this fine, smooth surface. Alas, the elbows of the skate community will have to bleed themselves elsewhere, because this parking lot was immediately ripped out following the conclusion of Parents’ Weekend. The Academic Walk was installed in the parking lot’s place and lined with non-native iridescent sod. 

But before the cement was lain, potatoes were planted—five pounds of diced Mercury Russets at 4:45 on the following Tuesday morning, to be exact. Did I know these potatoes were to be drowned in molten cement? Of course I did, but the planting was in defiance of the absurdity that was constructing a parking lot solely for the duration of a busy weekend. The school was likely doing its best to balance the Colorado Springs Municipal Code that caps the size of parking lots, its historically tenuous relationship with the Old North End Homeowners Association, and the general feeling among the student body that there is not enough parking. These tensions are reflected in the price of on-campus parking passes which are an egregious $100 a semester for students. The average price of a five-pound bag of Mercury Russet potatoes is $2.50. The average price of a rogue potato planting at 4:45 a.m.: priceless. 

 Planting potatoes does not require a shovel, but the experience is significantly improved if you use one. Many spades can be found in the backyard garden shed of Old Synergy house which in my experience, has never been locked. Like the blatantly unsanitary nature of their kitchen and bathrooms, this is something that the residents of Old Synergy have yet to recognize as a potential issue. That being said, the entirety of the potato crusades would have been severely limited if not for the shovels in Old Synergy’s unlocked backyard garden shed, and I implore all current and future democratically elected residents of Old Synergy to not lock said shed. I have consistently planted potatoes in Old Synergy’s garden beds for the past three years as a small form of repayment. While I have been the primary consumer of these potatoes, the residents of Old Synergy could also eat the benefits if they would stop digging up my sprouts to plant egregious quantities of fennel. Anyway, once a shovel has been procured, it is important that it is used to plant potatoes at least two weeks before the last killing frost, which is anytime between January 17th and June 24th in Colorado. Alternatively, one can test the temperature of their soil (which should be between 45ºF and 55ºF for optimal potato germination) with any common metal-tipped thermometer inserted several inches into the soil repeatedly for a few consecutive days to ensure the consistency of your measurements. The end of 6th and beginning of 7th block is also a decently safe temporal zone. 

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During the 2017 to 2018 academic year, The Colorado College stripped the name Slocum from what is now South Hall after allegations of sexual misconduct against William F. Slocum came to light. At the time of Slocum’s presidency, hundreds of stories were circulated regarding his sexual misconducts, but only twenty-two affidavits were ever officially received. The 26 members of The Colorado College Board of Trustees unanimously voted to remove Slocum’s name from what many consider to be the nicest dorm on campus (although it lacks the loose party culture of Loomis and the apogee of the sophomore housing experience that is the lofted fourth-floor Mathias dingle). The rather large portrait of William F. Slocum that was formerly drilled into the Wasatch Sandstone walls of Palmer Hall—locally sourced from the Red Rocks Open Space Quarry—was not removed until well after Slocum’s name had been stripped from South Hall. Before the portrait was removed, I spiked 22 Purple Majesty potatoes into the gardens outside Palmer Hall in my own small protest. 

The Colorado College Board of Trustees rescinded the honors bestowed upon William F. Slocum by the college in 1917. However, in a statement published on The Colorado College website, the board states that in an effort to be, “Consistent with our mission and values, the college should neither ignore his accomplishments nor his disturbing flaws.” So instead of releasing Slocum into the shit brown waters of Monument Creek, the portrait has been placed in a “non-public repository on campus.” The face of former school president William F. Slocum is now buried somewhere among The Colorado College’s other dirty secrets.

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The summer before my junior year I was employed by The Colorado College Grounds Crew. Although only the male student employees were ever allowed to operate the power tools, this was a great on-campus job with extremely flexible hours. Moreover, I had finessed the school into paying me to inundate their grounds with potatoes. Actually, I was being paid to weed, but every weed I removed was replaced with a potato, and Operation Potato saw its most successful quarter yet. Grounds Crew also gave me access to a golf cart that, like Lucille, accelerated the whole planting process. Better yet, the golf cart was an unquestionable entry pass to any location on campus, like Dean Edmund’s backyard.

I was exposed to many sneaky nice spots on campus while working for the Grounds Crew. A truly precious corner of campus is the German Language House garden. There is a delightful koi pond, a garden house designated for sophomore pre-games, and the most fertile, well-weeded soil I have found on campus. Although I was abroad the following fall and thus unable to personally indulge in the yields of this prolific summer, the small army of guerrilla gardeners I had recruited to help me were rewarded with a bountiful autumn harvest. 

Diced potato pieces should be planted in holes approximately four inches deep hole and situated such that the eyes are facing the sky. The Colorado State University Center for Horticulture suggests you plant only one potato dice per hole. But I will tell you that two or three potato pieces per hole has worked just as well, and the decision to do so did not require a masters in Horticulture (I am a matriculating grandfathered-in Bachelors of Arts in Integrated Environmental Science major, so obviously I know what I’m talking about). Potatoes are most successful when ensured a consistent water supply, which again, is challenging in Colorado. However, The Colorado College’s persistent desire to be awarded the same prestige as the New England Small Colleges Athletic Conference (NESCAC) categorization of the academic liberal elite—a desire that is both slightly embarrassing and vaguely reminiscent of an excluded middle sibling—has led to an ensured irrigated water supply to most locations on The Colorado College’s campus.  

 In aspiring to the NESCAC beacon of prestige, many students feel The Colorado College has lost some of its quirky character. Perhaps a desire to be defined as the liberal arts Harvard of the West (a title also claimed by both the University of Michigan and Stanford University), has resulted in the hike in average test scores of students admitted to The Colorado College. In addition, the drop in the college’s acceptance rate has left this upperclassman feeling that I would not be accepted had I been applying this fall. But test scores and acceptance rates are metrics easily used to quantify excellence in the competitive market of private colleges. It is increasingly expensive to run an institution like The Colorado College. The population that can afford the tuition continues to shrink while the demands of students as consumers are ever expanding. Colleges compete over the quality of the services they provide (IT, boutique meal plans, a new library, a climbing gym, ect.) in order to attract students that want these services, that can get into the school, and that can afford to pay for them. 

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In an attempt to avoid making this piece a one-sided rage manifesto and to gain a bit of much needed perspective on the matter of higher education, I sought out “The Man.” In an interview I conducted, a member of the Board of Trustees stated, “CC’s endowment is large, and it is healthy and if managed correctly, will continue to provide for the students of the future. But we are starting to see colleges within our peer group and within our endowment level start to really struggle to both enroll students and to pay the bills at the end of every year. That’s really scary and it means that CC has to keep playing this quality fight, has to keep adding amenities in the hopes that we can attract a more selective group of students every year.” An amenities war.

The Colorado College plays this game in order to survive. But in doing so, it has allowed a student’s selectivity to be increasingly defined by quantifiable measurements such as test scores. Does this method of quantifying filter out potentially excellent applicants whose intellect and worth are not expressed through test scores? Certainly, it does, and maybe this is partially responsible for the recession of the school’s historically unique culture. The administration and admissions team of The Colorado College are not unaware of this, but culture changes slowly and in ways that are not necessarily measurable. That said, The Colorado College admission process, while test optional, is not need blind. 

The above-mentioned trustee joined the board this 2019-2020 academic year. “Watching and sitting in on and listening and participating in the board meetings has really showed me that the people in that room are thinking about the future of CC 25, 50, 100 years down the road. Which is not necessarily something the average student thinks about.” The board absolutely considers the day-to-day experience of its students when making decisions, but it also operates on a much longer time frame with a larger body of responsibilities associated with running an academic institution. My favorite trustee continued to explain that, “It’s difficult as a student to go through with advocating for change that you’re not going to see, but that’s really what it takes to make long term change in the institution— stepping outside of your four year perspective and saying ‘what’s good for CC students generally, not just me, not just my class here, not just the people who are on this campus at the same time as me?’”

“I’ve heard whisperings,” the trustee responded when I asked if they had heard about students planting potatoes around the school. “As a board member I find it pretty frustrating. I understand that people are mad at CC, I get that, for a lot of really valid reasons. But there are so many people, faculty, administrators, staff, etc. that would answer those questions if students figured out how to phrase them and who to ask. Doing that leg work is important and it’s an important life skill to learn about affecting change in the future.”

The seemingly absurd aspects of this school and the decisions it makes often have reasonable justifications that were reached through the efforts of people that genuinely want the best for the college now and in the future. That is not to say that some of the school’s actions aren’t absurd or that the school’s culture hasn’t changed, but there are probably better ways to address one’s problems with The Colorado College than to plant them in an act of Resistance De Potato. I had a desire to be a productive, if mischievous, member of The Colorado College community. Not so productive as to actually join the Colorado College Student Government Association, or to attend any of the office hours President Tiefenthaler hosts every block, or to ask why The Colorado College makes the decisions it does, but still a desire to be constructive. That is an attitude the school continues to select for in its admitted students. The different ways that these students express this sentiment is what will make The Colorado College unique and continue to push it to evolve. 

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During Block 2 of my senior year, The Inn, an asbestos-filled-former-motel-gone-dorm, was razed to make way for the Edward J. Robson Arena. The arena will house The Colorado College Men’s Ice Hockey Team, but until the projected opening date of 2021, the hockey team will be forced to continue toughing it out in the Broadmoor World Arena. For now, the city block where the arena will preside is a fresh expanse of unattended dirt (PSA: anything grown in these soils will undoubtedly be laced with the sins of students past and should absolutely not be consumed). With a bag of sprouting fingerling potatoes strapped to my bike, I stop by Old Synergy on my way to the future home of The Colorado College Ice Tigers. Old Synergy had never locked their garden shed in the past and I hope for the sake of my potatoes that they will not start doing so now. 

Excessive Issue | January 2020