A League of Wanderers
[Harold and the Purple Crayon]
2004 Scholarship Weekend
"He should be a good knower of countries,
and well used to high wayes that by taking
the readiest paths to every Lake, Brooke, or River
his journeys may be more certaine, and lesse wearisome.
He should have knowledge in proportions of all sorts,
whether Circular, square or Diametricall that when
hee shall be questioned of his diuernall progresses,
he may give a Geographical description of the Angles,
and Channels of Rivers, how they fall from their heads,
and what compasses they fetch in their several windings."
Gervase Markham
The Pleasures of Princes
I have done these little after supper talks for a number of years and from year-to-year, it has always seemed like I knew what I wanted to talk about for the next year. This year, however, I have wandered in the temptation of several options—somewhat like the situation when you can’t make up your mind about a paper topic and it’s 3:00 a.m. and the paper is due at 8:00. Not that I lacked topics. I have often mentioned Dr. Seuss books in these talks and with the hundredth anniversary of his birth being just this week, I was tempted to chuck my writing and start over and do Seuss again. [If you are interested in where I might have gone with this idea, you will have to visit my website and read “Sewanee as a Seussian System”.]
I was strongly tempted also, however, to begin my talk by quoting from Maurice Sendak’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are”. I may yet do a lecture on this one since I discovered one day in class that there were students who had never read or heard of that book. I was alarmed at that discovery and immediately stopped class, walked back to my office and got my copy and came back to class and read it—upside down, pictures out, kindergarten style—to the class. You can’t be at Sewanee and not have heard of “the wild rumpus”. The Sigma Nus renewed the copyright on that activity just last weekend. I plan at some point, perhaps here another year, to address the ecological implications of the verdant if not fertile mind of Max who can grow oceans and jungles in his bedroom.
I must confess, however, what my truly intended topic was for tonight and for which I had written a good bit of the speech: it was Jake and Elwood “on a mission from God” in “The Blues Brothers”. There is a parable of life there that all road-tripping liberal arts students need to hear. I suppose it was the road-tripping idea that led me astray from that topic even though I had begun to write on it. [Do you begin to sense a pattern here—someone who can’t make up his mind? Hang on. I will try to confirm that hunch for you.] The morality play of Jake and Elwood seems a near perfect portrayal of good intentions gone berserk but redeemed by persistence and music—somewhat like college life. I even keep a copy of that movie in my office and from time to time declare a “Blues Brothers” break and some students and I will sit on the floor and eat Snickers and watch the movie. Yes, my office is rather oddly filled with an assortment of children’s books and my favorite movies like the Blues Brothers and Mad Max in “The Road Warrior” and Shane and other assorted cowboy and war movies—and two large bowls of Snickers.
I think it was the road theme in all of these that kept tugging at my mind for this talk tonight. Seussian characters are always on the go, even if they don’t get very far—as in “Green Eggs and Ham” or in “The Places You Will Go”. And Jake and Elwood were on the road—along with Jack Kerouac in the resurgently popular book of that title: “On The Road”. Read that one as a moral guide to college life. No, on second thought, don’t read that one. Some of you might then think there is a literary justification for collegiate craziness. And is your generation rediscovering “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”? I am beginning, after 25 years, to see that title pop up in my most terrifying of all pop quizzes when I ask students to write down the “last non-required book” that they have read. “Zen and the Art…” is the road-trip book par excellence—the classic, heroic double journey without and within.
Roads and journeys: it is,
of course, a classic theme. In another time, I might be talking about
“Pilgrim’s Progress” if not the “Canterbury Tales.” All of this musing and
indecision has led me by turns, several of them, to my chosen theme for this
evening: a little book entitled “Harold and the Purple Crayon”. My little boy
asked me a couple of days ago, “Dad, is that like what a king wears or what you
color with?” It is what you color with: cray-on. Now, I hope you have read this
book, or have had it read to you, although I find that so many of these moral
tropes enveloped in the garb of “children’s books” all too soon succumb to
neglect and disappear from our awareness.
Ok. Here is the skinny on “Harold and the Purple Crayon”. There is this tiny little boy who has this fetish thing for his purple crayon. He takes it everywhere—or perhaps the point is that it takes him everywhere. His purple crayon is what we might say is a “magic crayon”—whatever he draws, however the crayon moves, comes true: he draws it and it is real. It is a delightfully beguiling story:
“One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight.//There wasn’t any moon and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight [he draws a moon with his purple crayon].//And he needed something to walk on.//He made a long straight path so he wouldn’t get lost.//And he set off on his walk, taking his purple crayon with him.” And on it goes, as you might expect. Harold is off for a walk in the moonlight and all kind of things begin to happen. He gets bored with the straight path [no moral lesson here—Harold is not a prodigal son] and sets off with is purple crayon to find more interesting places. When the horizon of the large field he is walking through becomes monotonous, he creates a forest, or at least an apple tree, by a few swift strokes of his purple crayon. He even draws a fierce dragon to guard the apples and then he becomes frightened of his own creation and his hand holding the purple crayon begins to shake and the shaking creates waves and before he knows it Harold has fallen into an ocean. He hangs on to the purple crayon, however, and soon he has a boat and sail and heads off for new adventures. He draws a beach and lays out a picnic—with his nine favorite kinds of pies. He climbs mountains, sees far away places, falls off mountains, and quickly draws himself a balloon and basket to descend in, draws houses and buildings and a great city with skyscrapers filled with windows. But in the midst of all this traveling, he becomes lonely and tired and wants just to be in his own bed at home. He remembers the moon which has been keeping him company on his moonlight journey—it is always just outside his window. So he draws a window around the moon, and then his bed and his room and now he knows exactly where he is—at home. He crawls into bed and as he falls asleep, the purple crayon drops to the floor.”
It is a simple, wonder-filled story and if you missed it, you must find it and read it. Crockett Johnson, the author, has written several other “Harold” books including one that might also serve as the basis of a talk, “Harold’s Trip to the Sky”—described in this fashion, “Harold is off again, this time to Mars. Very zany adventures of the very resourceful Harold.” We might want to send copies of this one to NASA or the JetPropulsion Lab; if we ever do go to Mars we might need Harold to help us get back. That, after all, is why I am talking about Harold and the Purple Crayon tonight. We often have life and college described to us as a journey—and journeys are fun—but part of the journey is getting back home.
I was rather strongly reminded of this last Tuesday when I was out with some students at a very remote research site. It is about forty miles from here, the last ten of which are accessible only by four-wheelers ridden up very steep and rocky streambeds to the upper benches of the mountainside. I have discovered these most amazing piles of rock that are stacked up in what are apparently Fibonacci number sequences. You know the Fibonacci numbers don’t you—1,1+1,2,2+1,3+2,5+3,8+5, etc? There are a couple of hundred of these rock piles in a half dozen or more sites and these number sequences keep showing up—organized on the ground into geometric forms—like the sides of equilateral triangles laid out on weirdly accurate compass headings. These sites are really remote and the trick in going there is getting back. Tuesday, it rained most of the day, the mountain streams had become small rivers, and on the way out one of the four wheelers popped a tie rod on the front steering and we still had about seven miles to go. I was reaching for my purple crayon! In this case the magic was not in a purple crayon but in an elastic bungee cord and after a couple of hours of delicate negotiation down the mountainside and through the streams, we made it out and home.
I will confess. I have a disease: it is called wandering. I got it from my father and uncle. It is incurable. I wander. My father wandered; my uncle wandered. Their favorite pastime was to get in the car and head out the drive to the highway. At the first side road one of them would say to the other, “Have we been down that road?” It didn’t matter whether they had or not. They would turn. When they came to the next side road, they would ask the same question and turn again. On and on, turn by turn, winding, wandering the countryside of Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and North Carolina—with some forays even further afield. You can find an account of them and these wanderings in one of my online essays called “Navigator”. One Sunday we started a wandering journey of this sort and ended up in Pennsylvania where my dad called my mom to say we would be a bit late getting home. Dad and my uncle refused to use maps; the whole point of their going out was to get lost and keep getting lost until at lengths, somewhat like Harold with his Purple Crayon, they finally got home. I grew up in that kind of world. I still live in it, but now it is rationalized by being called research—I study cemeteries and Indian mounds and I have converted most of my classes into wandering classes. I also sneak a bit of flyfishing into these wanderings.
We have this new program that you will be getting information about soon. It is called the First Year Program—a series of small seminars for first-year students. You will be invited to enroll in one of these if you come here. Several of them are designed for wanderers: Bran Potter in Geology has one called “Walking the Land”—geology by wandering. He leads students up and down the terrain around here looking at the rocks and other land forms. Several of the seminars incorporate rather long road trips—to museums in Atlanta or Nashville, and one makes a trip to the Holocaust museum in Washington and another to New York. My seminar is called “MemoryPlaceLife”—which totally disguises the fact that it is a refuge for wanderers. One of our goals in that seminar is never to be inside—so we are either walking the campus exploring the relation of place to people or we are on the road going up and down the backroads here and into the coves searching out the connection between the university and the surrounding community in which it is rooted. Look for the FYP announcement. The seminars cover everything from movies and women’s literature to ancient history and the stars. Last year, the FYP astronomy class led to a discovery of a new comet and a joint publication with the professor. And several of us who teach in the FYP program have promised ourselves that we will take all our classes to a nearby cave and re-enact the parable of the cave from Plato’s Republic. In just two years, FYP has become widely popular with students—92% of them reporting that they would take the same seminar again. That is a pretty high approval rating. This year’s seminars promise to be as interesting and diverse as previous ones. Gary Phillips, Chair of the Religion Department and Director of the First Year Program put my instructions for tonight this way:
The
central idea to convey is that the FYP is an intellectual and social jump-start
to the Sewanee education. Small, discussion-based seminar (14 or less),
co-curricular activities related to class, advising done by seminar faculty
person (or persons) and residence setting in proximity to seminar classmates. You
might mention the list of courses from THIS year's program . Admissions should
have the brochure. The new courses include coursed on cryptography,
bio-diversity, three dimensional computer modeling, education, the Presidential
election and Women in Islam. And you could mention that 92 % of those who
signed on would do it again or recommend it to a friend.
What students report that is most important: engagement with faculty, social engagements, intellectual excitement, connecting to Sewanee, making smooth the transition to college life from high school and home, sheer intellectual fun.
Perhaps one of the FYP participants can describe it better, however:
The theme of "Memory, Place, Life" is dependent
on one changing his perspective of a place he thought he knew. We come to
Sewanee, and we get a first impression of the school, its buildings, its roads,
its paths, and its surroundings. For some people, this is the image they will
graduate with. But those of us in this class, we get an early chance to
understand that the mountain runs deeper than we thought. …For many students,
the road from Highway 64 to Sewanee, or from Cowan to University Avenue, will
be just that - the road from the interstate to school. Yet our
perspective is different. We now understand that these roads lead to so many
other places than the Quad. Along these roads, and along the paths and highways
and gravel ways that run away from them, is another world, completely unlike
the modern realm people are conditioned to expect. If you truly understand
this, and want to discover what a treasure you have found yourself in the
middle of, then you see the beauty and mystery and overwhelming wonderful
physical feeling that brings tears to your eyes in ancient graveyards,
ivy-covered mills, country stores, small stone churches, and hidden backroads.
The memories of these places radiate from another time - a Scout and Jem time, a
Smoky Mountain bluegrass time. Being at Sewanee has fostered this
feeling. … However, it is an interesting place to begin my journey into the
"real world," or reality, because by nature it is such a surreal
place. What an incredibly close-knit community, atop a hill, with buildings
reminiscent of Hogwarts and weather and nature that illustrate the epitome of
every season! It is an absolutely gorgeous Rivendale, and studying up here has
truly brought out the writer and artist in me. I am focusing much more now on
poetry, painting, and photography than ever before. Everywhere I go, especially
during those brilliantly-colored autumn months and with the approach of snow, I
see the world as a photo to be taken or a picture to be painted. …. I believe
that I will take this with me whatever I do, even if it is something at the
farthest edges of science. I have also benefited from the great gathering of
people here. …
I am very lucky that I was placed in "Memory, Place, Life." In my
opinion, my schedule this semester consisted of three classes and an
experience. I already possessed an incredible love of exploring times and
places of the past in places hidden in beautiful settings of backroads and
Tennessee country. I am drawn to the mystery and ancient wonderfulness of what
this class represents and accomplished. It was a starting point, a spark, and
for me it led to my own trips off the Mountain, off the beaten path, and
without any real destination in mind, like something from the mind of Lao-Tzu,
who made the comment, "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not
intent on arriving." These trips change my perspective, of the land,
the people, and of life, that such a time and place really did exist and
thankfully still does. A true change of perspective is one of the most
important and fascinating concepts of the human mind - in the words of
Masahide, "Barn's burnt down--now I can see the moon."
Let me now wander back into
my theme for the evening—Harold and the Purple Crayon as a metaphor not only
for what some of us do in our classes, but for liberal education itself. Here
at Sewanee we expect you to wander a bit—to take up the purple crayon of
imagination and to explore a variety of courses. Some of you though, having
been already prepared by your parents and by some of the other schools you have
visited, already know not only what you are going to major in but where you are
going to go to graduate school, what company you will work for and where you
will live and the color of your car, maybe [hard as that is now to imagine] the
names of your kids. You all are the planners, not the wanderers. Bless you. The
world needs people like you. Sewanee needs people like you.
But a caveat here: you
planners, and the rest of you, if you come to Sewanee, we will ask you to
wander a bit. In fact we will MAKE you wander: we will require you to take
courses across the curriculum. We have a longer list of those courses than most
other colleges. You will have to take history and English and social sciences
and religion and sciences AND math. And some of you will say, “But I know what
I want to major in, why do I have to take religion?” Or, “I am going to be a
banker, why do I need a lab science?” And how many times in my advising career
have I heard, “But Smith, do I really have to take calculus?” Yep. Calculus,
and religion, and all the rest. You need to take these things, no matter what
your major, not because of your job but because of your life. Liberal education
is not about majors nor even eventual careers; it is about having the skills
and perspective and imagination to see connections where others do not, to be
able to invoke new resources in the solution of a problem. It is about vision
and not just about plans, about service to others and not just about self-satisfaction.
Again, the words of a student can convey my sense better than I can.
This one wrote:
Smith-
…Among the most important lessons I have learned in my two years at Sewanee is
this. … In the past (pre-Sewanee), I have always found security in
a straight and narrow plan- I graduated first in my class with a resume packed
to the brim with offices and organizations and teams and charity work. I
had it all planned out- the college, the major, the graduate school, the
career. The first deviation came in the first step of the plan- Sewanee
was never where I intended to end up. I visited the campus and took the
tour, mostly because my sister was a student here. I loved the school and
the town, but, I'm embarrassed to say now, it didn't have the Princeton review
rankings that I thought I was looking for- I'd listened to too many tours from
Duke and Davidson and seen too many view books from Penn and Princeton. I
was convinced I was to go to the best school that my grades and SATs would
allow for. (I will say with each passing semester I tend to ponder just what it
is that the Princeton Review hasn't quite figured out- this place is hard!)
Thank goodness I somehow got some sense knocked into me. After two years
here, I am convinced that nearly everything I could have learned at many of
those schools I have had the opportunity to learn here. On the flip side,
I am quite certain that the most important things I have learned and discovered
at Sewanee are unique to my experience at this place. Needless to say, I
eventually got it right, and, like I had so desperately wanted, I did indeed
end up at the best school possible for me. I'm not quite sure what it was
in the end that made me cross Davidson and Duke off the list (I can easily
acknowledge that the idea of 4 winters up north nixed the ivy league
schools). All I know is my mind kept coming back to Sewanee- something
about the tour and the visits and the advice from students gave me the
impression that there was something unique, if slightly quirky, about this
place. So, I ignored what I thought at the time was my better judgment
and sent in my early decision application to Sewanee, going on blind faith that
this gut feeling was grounded in some sort of reality. Several weeks
later I came for merit weekend with a bit of a knot in my stomach, wondering
just what it was that I had gotten myself into. Your speech at dinner
Sunday night erased nearly all of my uncertainty- you talked about Gus and the
crooked river- most importantly, you addressed just what it was that sets
Sewanee apart from every other college in the nation. It was the first
time since I had begun looking at schools that I had had any sense of certainty
about my decision whatsoever. I can now say after just a couple of years
here that it was the best decision I have ever made- though I could not even
begin to define what it is that makes this place so unique, I can say with
certainty that I would trade a lifetime of an ivy league reputation in a
heartbeat for the chance to spend four years here. As of now, I am an
environmental studies major with no clue what I want to do in life.
However, contrary to my past outlook on things, there is a surprising comfort
in the uncertainty. Based on my experiences with choosing a college, I
have come to the conclusion that the flexibility of uncertainty is the most
logical route to securing happiness. I am admittedly not yet (and may
never be) to the point at which I can throw the conventional plan to the wind,
but my experiences at Sewanee have at least begun to teach me that every once
in a while you've got to forget the plan and go with the gut feeling.
A very daffy wanderer once said:
"A
human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,
design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall,
set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for
insects."
This is from Robert Heinlein (as
quoted by Wilson in Prometheus Rising). Heinlein is the author a 1960s
classic, “Stranger in A Strange Land” itself a kind of hippie bible of
wandering. Not many recognize that Heinlein’s title is itself taken from yet
another classic of the wandering life: the Bible. This text is from the time of
Moses sojourn with Jethro in the desert of Midian before he is summoned by God
to lead the children of Israel on their great wandering out of Egypt. Whacky as
it is, there is nothing in this list of Heinlein’s that Sewanee students
haven’t done.
You might think wandering is
bad, pointless. And that wandering in either life or the woods is some kind of
moral failure. I know most of my early teachers thought that and I am sure they
saw some kind of failure in my subsequent career that went from chemical
engineering to math to English to Old Testament to Religion and Culture,
Science and Religion, Asian Religions, and finally Rural Religion. My teachers saw any kind of wandering as the
sign of a wandering mind and worse, of a wandering heart. Wanderers were bad,
headed for trouble. We were forbidden to wander, color outside the lines, play
any note but those on the music sheet. All our little desks were in neat rows
and columns. Those teachers were the high guardians of order and they lived by
a fear of divergence that characterized industrial America and its high
moralisms of the directed and regulated life. Some teachers and parents like
that are still around. I can understand the fears they hold, the fear of
disorder, of chaos, of loss that can come when unplanned things happen or are
tolerated. They, and perhaps you, want the world to be in order.
The Austrian poet Rilke once
commented on order of this kind in his cluster of poems called the “Duino
Elegies”. Rilke wrote:
"And
we: onlookers, always, everywhere,
turned toward everything and never from!
We are surfeited. We set it in order. It breaks. [It = “the world”]
We put it in order again and break down ourselves.”
He is describing the sensibility
of a person who has been turned inside out by the fear of losing control and
who has become externalized to human feeling and society—the perpetual
“onlookers” who are always “toward everything” and never truly a part of
anything. He was talking about the destructive effects of the controlled,
directed mind that cannot imagine, cannot think outside the box—and does not
know what to do next. “We set it in order. It breaks. We put it in order again
and break down ourselves.”
In liberal education we want you
to wander because we know life is neither a box nor a perfect plan and we want
you to know what to do next—particularly when there is not script, score, or
pattern for the decisions you must make or the life you must lead.
You will encounter the boxes
frequently. One of them is called “I am pre-med.” Another is called “I am a
writer.” Another, “I’m going to law school.” Or the box might innocently be the
safe major where you made your first “A” here. There are always people offering
you choices to solve the problem for you of the meaning of your life and what
you must do. Tempting as those solutions may be, when they take away your
freedom to choose your course, when they take away your vision of the texture
of life, when they begin to do your thinking for you—then they become boxes and
your liberal arts education is defeated. Worse still are not the boxes of major
and career, but the boxes of thought. When you default to your preconceived
categories and then spend your time here protecting yourself against thinking.
My only advice to you is, if you need boxes, if you need to be given forms of
order, if you need to be shielded from thinking you had better not come here.
For if you do come here, we are going to upset your boxes, disturb your forms of order, and invite you to begin thinking. And we will do this by leading you into the protracted wandering of liberal education. For some of you this wandering might take the form of simply following the mind of your professor as she leads you through the complex inner narrative of “The Tempest”. For others, the wandering might lead you quite literally into the bowels of the earth as it is doing this very evening for a group of geology and religion students who are exploring the hydrology and human cultural impacts of the extensive cave system around here. For others the wandering is the real wandering of the mind as you read a rich text and try to re-enter the thoughts of a world centuries ago. The call to wander will be extended to each of you. It is a high tradition here and we are proud of it. It has been practiced by a fabled league of extraordinary people, Sewanee’s League of Wanderers. Let me recall some of them for you. Some are retired now, but they set the standard for others to follow and if you come here you will be drawn into the web of wanderings they have imprinted upon this place:
Let me recall for you Professor Maurice Moore, somewhat affectionately known as “Boothead”. Professor Moore taught English here faithfully and well for forty years, patiently enduring the wandering minds of many generations of undergraduates. Then in his golden years of retirement began to dream much in the manner of the sailors of Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem—of newer worlds, beyond the western skies: and off he went to Timbuktu—still a very difficult place to get to. And he made it there only to find he had been preceded by another Sewanee wanderer. On the wall in the men’s room of the dusty African hotel, he found scrawled on the wall: “Yea, Sewanee’s Right.”
Or another truly global wanderer of that generation—former dean Robert “Red” Lancaster. He was my first dean and set what I thought was a very good example for a dean. The very first time I saw him, he asked me, “Do you hunt? Do you have a gun?” Not a word about whether I had finished my Ph.D. “Yes sir, I do,” I replied. “Good, he said, I’ll pick you up at 1:00. We are going dove hunting.” I learned more about Sewanee and this area and its people from those days of riding the roads with him than I would have learned in a dozen books. Red Lancaster did not limit his hunting nor his vision to the fields of Franklin County. He was indeed a great wanderer—and hunted as far afield as Korea, Japan, Africa, Scotland and Iran. He never left his learning in the classroom. Every hunting trip with him was a liberal arts seminar where a passage of Locke or Hobbes might be discussed while waiting for birds to fly.
George Ramseur, another of Sewanee’s wanderers, worked out his wanderlust closer to home, but his wandering were exemplary in any case. George taught botany and was [and is] an excellent field scientist. I took Ecology from him. George loved to do linear studies of land that are called “transects”—a line laid out across the terrain along which an inventory of trees, wildflowers or plants is conducted. One of his favorite transect exercises was to take students to the Great Smoky Mountains, up in the high country, and then point to a peak and declare a transect route. Straight from where we stood to the peak or ridge line which might be miles away. Straight as compass could make it up and down hills, through laurel hells, across streams and up cliffs. I don’t know that I have ever done harder hiking—or learned more about how to explore a natural landscape.
Not all of our League of Wanderers are professors. One, who may be the best of the lot is a young man who graduated a few years ago named Jon Meiburg. Jon was an ardent hiker but also a musician—an accomplished guitarist. He had a band and they had cut an album that got a bit of play in some collegiate circles. He came to my office one day to ask if I would write a letter of reference for him. He was applying for a Watson Fellowship—a year-long fellowship that supports interesting proposals for study and travel abroad. Jon’s proposal: to take his guitar and wander over the earth searching out folk music traditions of stringed instruments. We worked on a proposal that eventually took him to Siberia, Tibet, and to the tip of South America. He is now a formal student of wandering theory in the department of Geography at the University of Texas.
My favorite Sewanee wandering story, however, happened last year. I was at home and received a raspy, scratchy phone call. Some one with a very poor cell phone connection was speaking with a gasping, whispering voice: “Write down these coordinates…” it was my friend Timothy Keith-Lucas of the Psychology Department--TKL—who was on a trip to Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. “TKL, where the hell are you?” I asked. He replied in his typically matter-of-fact and totally un-ironic mode: “I am in a tree.” “What are you doing in a tree?” “I am darting lemurs.” He was panting with exhaustion and excitement, “And we don’t know what kind they are.” He and the Duke University team he was with were about to capture previously undocumented primates—totally new species that had never been seen or recorded before. So I got out my laptop, plugged in the coordinates and as I might have predicted, he was right where I thought he would be: in the small area in the center of the map of Madagascar—the place that is a blank because all the roads end before you get there. Tim brings this passion for applied knowledge and wandering into his First Year Program class and especially into a marvelous program he invented called he Island Ecology Program. Do you want to learn world-class ecology and field methods on a sultry sea island? Do you want to shoot wild pigs, count sea turtle eggs, steer a research boat through the breakers, and observe whitetail deer at night? Go with him and other faculty who teach on St. Catherine’s Island off the Georgia coast in the summer. Tim is not only a fabulous primate ecologist but an engineer and sailor. That is his boat under construction out near the stables. He is the best expedition planner I know.
Sewanee has a long tradition of wanderers. My former student research assistant, Lonsdale Green, now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard spent much of her time here as an undergraduate with me and on her own exploring every back road south of Nashville. That girl could read a map upside down as we drove and she mapped nearly every cairn burial cemetery in Middle Tennessee. Each year I find one or two like her—people who hold in their hands not an Exxon road map nor a GPS unit but the purple crayon of imagination and the willingness to stay lost until they learn something. And it seems like more and more of these wanderers are women.
Certainly Sewanee undergraduate women have good examples in the faculty. Professors Celeste Ray, Sid Brown, Tam Parker, Mae Wallace and Yasmeen Moihuddin have logged more globe-trotting miles than all the men recently. From China and Tibet to Bangladesh and Israel these women and others lead students afield and bring a richness to Sewanee classrooms we have long needed. Their influence has shown up in students like Christy Nelson, double major in biology and religion, pre-med [yes, you can do that kind of thing at Sewanee, but not at Duke], who honed her passion for Third World medicine in her hospice work in India. Or senior fine arts/photography major Kate Cummings who has turned her Asian travels into stunning views of dissonance between beauty and brokenness in her very creative photos.
And now one more Sewanee wanderer and I will leave off these stories. This one, though, is about Sewanee’s greatest wanderer—one of our graduates by the name of Hudson Stuck. He was a student here around 1890. He became a priest in Dallas and in 1903 decided to spend two years as a missionary in Alaska. The two years turned into the rest of his life. He became the greatest missionary priest of the Episcopal Church. He was the old kind of traveling preacher called a “circuit rider” except that in his case he rode a dog sled. He estimated in one of his books that his missionary travels had amounted to more than 60,000 miles on dog sled. Stuck became globally famous in Alaska. At that time the highest mountain in North America, Denali at 20,300 feet had never been climbed. Attempted many times, but never climbed. Stuck put together what he called his “Sewanee expedition” and after enduring nearly three weeks of winter storms above 18,000 feet, Stuck’s team made it to the top. He had with him as assistants one young man who had graduated from Sewanee and two others who were prospectives—whom he planned to send here. During the storm, they were trapped in their tent day after day—and spent their time reading Shakespeare, Gibbon, Thucydides, and other poets and historians. Stuck took his liberal education everywhere he went and was one of the greatest extollers of a “Sewanee education” as superior to the narrow limits of specialty educations. He lamented the mean spirits and limited vision of people who were educated but not in the liberal arts.
Stuck’s greatest outdoor feat of wandering was not his ascent of Denali but a journey that even today stands as unbelievable. About 1918 Stuck decided to make a winter trip to visit the northern-most villages which had no church services because of the freeze-up and the winter darkness. He left Anchorage in October, as soon as the rivers had frozen. By dog sled he went down the Yukon River, and then turned northwest and north headed for Point Barrow. I hope you have a bit of geography in your heads here. Stuck was headed north on the Arctic coast of Alaska in the dead of winter with temperatures running 50 below zero. Along the way he stopped at every Eskimo or Aleut village, held a simple communion service, buried the dead, baptized babies, and performed marriages. And on he went month after month, spending Christmas at a village on the North Slope [where Prudhoe bay and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are] before traveling on eastward. This has to be one of the most heroic winter journeys ever made, rivaled only by Shackleton’s boat journey from Antarctica or Mawson’s attempted winter traverse of Antarctica. Stuck had no supporting team, no base camps to return to, no hope of rescue if an accident happened, carried all his supplies on his sled and slept with his dogs for warmth. By spring he had made it to the Mackenzie River in Canada where he eventually turned south and then west along the Porcupine River to make it back to the upper Yukon and eventually to Anchorage. He was one of ours. There is a stone tablet in his honor on the south wall of the chapel. It records his ecclesiastical title: “Hudson Stuck—Archdeacon of the Yukon”.
This is the great tradition of wanderers you accept as mentors when you come here—these men and women whose vision was never defined by narrow specialties and who never turned back in the face of danger or obstacles and people who never felt for a moment of their lives that their Sewanee education put any limits upon their abilities or their opportunities. Men and women who have served God and country and the human community—and represented Sewanee—in uniform and out, as missionaries, teachers, statesmen, ambassadors, entrepreneurs, doctors, explorers, and scientists in every corner of the world. Men and women who carried with them the passion of the Sewanee story and its importance to our world.
Yet in the end, their hearts and minds, and sometimes their bodies, came back to Sewanee. After all, Harold does not wander with his purple crayon forever. His adventures come to an end and at last he draws around him the secure world of his bedroom at home. Descartes reminded us long ago that,
“Conversing with the ancients is much like traveling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, in order to judge our own more objectively, and so that we do not make the mistake of the untraveled in supposing that everything contrary to our customs is ridiculous and irrational. But when one spends too much time traveling, one becomes at last a stranger at home…”
Wandering is our existential dilemma, rooted in our being, and our impermanent culture takes away all sense of place, of home. Augustine knew this dilemma well when he wrote in the Confessions, “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, and they will not rest until they find their rest in Thee.” Perhaps that is the goal of our liberal wanderings, that in the end, we should not be wanderers, but pilgrims: for the pilgrim, the journey eventually ends; for the wanderer it does not. For many of you as for some of your parents, the pilgrimage and the journey, the final answer to our wandering will be found in Sewanee—the home that remains when other homes disappear.
It seems almost senseless to say it, but for many of our alumns, Sewanee is the most permanent thing in their lives and many of them come back here to live and to die. In a world marked by restless uncertaintly and the perpetual change of place we call careers, Sewanee is like Eliots’ “fixed point of the turning world”, a place that lasts.
It is a place that lasts, but it is also a hard place tell people about who don’t know it. One of my students wrote this to me:
…
I love the quirkiness of this place. I like the lack of pretentiousness
and the lack of uniformity. I like that my roommate, whose wardrobe since
middle school as consisted of little but pearls and pointy stilettos, now wears
carhartts and bean boots. I like, odd as it sounds, that nearly every
pair of shoes I own, nice or not, has a thick stripe of mud around the bottom
inch or so. I like that I have the opportunity to take classes such as
this one, where I learn as much off the subject as I do on the subject. I
like that many of my classes here have stood as a starting point to look
further and question more, rather than an ending point defined solely by a
grade and an accomplished core credit. I like getting to describe on my
tours that the seemingly stray dogs are actually quite well taken care of, as
they are believed to be reincarnated bishops. I like the isolation-
though it is sometimes nice to make it down the mountain. I am currently
trying to convince my cousin, who will be here next weekend for smart kids
weekend, to come to Sewanee. The more I have tried to explain the place,
the more I have realized that it really just can't quite be explained.
Archdeacon Stuck wandered
the world, but he never ceased to speak of Sewanee, never stopped reaching for
words to convey the freedom he found in liberal arts education here. It was the
one place in his wandering, traveling life that remained constant—constant in
what it stood for and constant in his affection. Sewanee is home. It is the
reference point, the place you come back to. So we come back now to Harold and
the Purple Crayon. Like Stuck, Harold knew how to get back home. He knew where
home was. Sewanee is not just about where you will go for college. It is about
what you will do for the rest of your life. Here you will earn not just a
diploma but a purple crayon. And with a Sewanee degree you are never lost and
you always know where home is.