Deep Springs

It was thirty years ago this week that I graduated from high school. At the time I had no idea what I wanted to do--I had some notion that I was going to be a great writer, and imagined myself the next Woody Allen. Now that I'm well into middle age, and edging into my eighth month of unemployment, it's easy to brood about what might have been, and wish, like that recent movie with Zac Efron, to be able to go back and do it all over again, or at least be able to address the young me and advise him where not to screw up.

A particular place has come to be a metaphor for this feeling. Some years ago I learned about a college called Deep Springs, which is in the California desert, tucked between Death Valley and Yosemite, right on the border with Nevada. I had occasion to think about it again while reading an article on William Vollmann, the writer, who is an alumnus. If I had to do it all over again, I would have liked to attend this school.

Now, when I was eighteen, this place would have been the last school I'd have wanted to go to. For one thing, I wouldn't have been able to get in. They accept a class of about a dozen a year, and my grades were strictly state-school level (an F in Geometry one marking period surely would kept me out of private schools, had I the gumption to apply). Secondly, it is all-male. I had zero success with girls back then, but I would have liked to have the opportunity. One of the main reasons I chose the school I did (SUNY-Stony Brook) was reading in one of those underground guide to colleges that the "dorms are like brothels." This, of course, didn't turn out to be true (by the time I got there, the experiment in co-ed roommates was over with). Deep Springs is also completely isolated, and students live a life that is somewhat monastic, in that they don't interact much with the outside world. Today, with the Internet, that may be a tough thing to enforce, but in my day it would have meant no TV, and that's something that would have been very traumatic for me.

But what would have disinclined me the most about Deep Springs is that it's a working college. They run an alfalfa farm and cattle ranch, and students work hard while they learn. At that point in my life, manual labor was anathema to me. Plus, livestock would have played hell with my allergies. No, I'm afraid the 18-year-old me wouldn't have thought twice about such a place.

And that's a shame. I don't regret the experience I had at college, in many ways they were the best years of my life, but I do wish I had shaken the lethargy that I had then, and still occupies to me this day. Most of my problems stem from a passivity on my part, a reluctance to act boldly. I would have also appreciated time getting into good physical condition, and learning basic chores such as how to fix things. No doubt I would have also been required to acquire more intellectual rigor, something I find lacking today. I am well-read, but not nearly as much as I would like to be.

Unfortunately, those hoary old maxims about us having only one life to live are achingly true. All I can do is to keep trying to learn (I am taking a course in technical communication, in the hopes that will open some lucrative career paths for me) and live in the present. It's just that the present isn't a very good place for me right now, a re-imagined past is much better.