Pre-Orientation Talk, August 1994
Gerald L. Smith
Thank you for inviting me to speak. The Outing Program at Sewanee goes back a long way, but it began to be organized as a formal club in 1969-70, my first year in Sewanee. In those days, Dr. Hugh Caldwell of the Philosophy Department, headed the program and there were a couple of dozen of us who went out hiking or caving or canoeing nearly every weekend. The highlights of our program were our annual trips to Mt. LeConte and the southeastern canoe championships. Dr. Caldwell organized this group as the "Sewanee Ski and Outing Club--SSOC" just at a time when student interest in outing programs was beginning to rise. In a year or so we divided responsibilities and he became coach of the canoe and ski teams and I took over direction of the other activities. We supported hiking, caving, technical climbing, canoeing, kayaking and kayak building; we had equipment for all of these activities including both mountain tents and family camp tents.
By 1974 I had added a bike shop, aquired several very decrepit vehicles, and had even opened a tool shop for the Harley and motocross crowd. I began to use work-study students to help with the bike shop and storeroom, and by 1975 there were 22 students working for the SSOC. On weekends my yard was full of canoes, my house was full of gear, and it was clear that Dr. Caldwell and I needed more help. The University responded by hiring a director for the program--probably one of the first such paid outing directors in the country--and the rest is a history of good experiences for Sewanee students. A few years ago the name was shortened to the Sewanee Outing Club or SOC. The program has continued to change and grow as new interests and needs have emerged. The "Pre" or Pre-Orientation program you are part of is one of those developments.
For most of my life I have had an interest in outings of all sorts: in hunting, fishing, and camping; in hiking, climbing, caving, canoeing. My life has been a delightful clutter of all these activities and the gear that goes with them. Hardly a room or closet in my house or office does not show some sign of this interest--fishing rods behind doors, sleeping bags in the closets, hiking boots, walking sticks, binoculars, paddles, caving helment and lamp on the bookshelf. It has been hard to draw a line between this outing life and the other things that I do. In fact, I haven't even tried to draw the line and Sewanee is the kind of place where I don't have to.
At Sewanee, the outing life became part of my professional life as a faculty member, and I began to incorporate experiences from outings into my growing interest in environmental matters and eventually into my courses that deal with religion and ecology. All along the way in the development of my outing interests, I have read widely in the literature. I have an interest not only in the usual kinds of outdoor essays but particularly in the grand literature of the outdoors: the great exploration literature of the world--of North America and Africa and Asia. Teaching comparative religion has given me a good excuse to read a lot of books other professors can not quite justify reading.
I have a special interest in the literature of "cold exploration": the high altitude or high latitude explorations of the Arctic, Antarctic, and of the mountains. There is great reading fare in the likes of Scott, Amundsen, Shakleton, Perry, Byrd [Alone], Mawson, and hundreds of others. Byrd's account of a winter season alone in a weather station on the ice in Antarctica makes a reading of terror no horror movie can match; the Mawson Expedition in Antarctica becomes even more frightening and finally grotesque. Mountain exploration, mountain climbing, has been a particular focus of interest for me. I read the accounts of the several classic Everest expeditions, of course, but also Annapurna and K2. And, in this hemisphere I like to read about Mt. McKinley or, as it is now correctly designated, Denali. The accounts of these places constitutes a great literature, and I hope that your liberal education will include exposure to some of it. You of the Farley Mowat generation of prepschool students should at least learn the great tradition of northering that produced Mowat and the likes of Barry Lopez and Northern Exposure.
In my work with the outing program, in my classes, in my work with schools and scouts, my work over the last 12 years as a hunter safety instructor, and in my writing about fly fishing I find a common theme emerging in twenty-five years of work: I have been concerned with the ethical use of wilderness--the fundamentals of right and wrong in the out of doors. The variety of issues have led me to abandon and oppose duck hunting, to practise catch-and-release fishing, to oppose Himalayan trekking. Where we go--or don't go--is as much an ethical matter as whether we hunt or clear cut forests or pollute waters. How we do some of these things is also an ethical matter: it is a matter of right and wrong. This is particularly true in mountaineering. Let's consider two examples:
In the mid seventies, a young climber inspired by his peanut butter sandwich lunch at a gas station in Ohio decided that it would be fun to climb Mount McKinley. At 20,320 feet McKinley is the highest peak in North America and it is especially difficult. As Davidson traveled west to his home climbing country in the Rockies, he put together a team and made "expedition" plans. It was a hurried, slap-dash affair. The six team members were all technical climbers, but they lacked Alaskan wilderness experience and they were heady with their prowess on the high-angle peaks of Europe and the western states. They got to the mountain quickly and began their climb in the late spring. Intital good conditions may have deceived them. Certainly their naivete and their arrogance betrayed them. Conditions above 18,000 were merciless. When a late spring storm arose, wind chill reached -148deg..
Davidson described his experience at the peak of the storm:
I couldn't sleep, and the wind only grew more vicious. I tried to ignore the cold along my backside, away from Dave, but when the first shiver ran through my body I turned to check the sleeping bag where it touched my back. To my horror it was no thicker than its shell, two pieces of nylon. The wind had pushed away the down....[We] missed the foam pads. Without them, we were only able to place a spare wind parka or pair of wind pants under our buttocks and shoulders, leaving the rest of our sleeping bags on bare ice...Suddenly the food we counted on was gone. The gnawing cramps in our stomachs weren't going to be quieted. Immediately we were angry for being so cruelly cheated, but only after several minutes did we realize how the spoiled food had transformed our trial with hunger into a confrontation with starvation. We had almost nothing left to eat--three bags of gorp, a dozen slices of cheese, some hard candies, a little coffee, a three-ounce can of chopped pork, and maybe a dozen cookies. The combined calorie count of our remaining food was probably adequate for one person for one day....Although Dave battled with the stove long after his fingers were insensitivefrom handling the cold metal, he failed to get it going. There was so little gas left that he couldn't build up enough pressure to vaporize it. At thirty below the gas was sluggish--he had to give up. Just like the punctured cans of food, our last drops of gas mocked up with their uselessness.Davidson's expedition ended pathetically, tragically. Before it was done, one climber was dead in the glacier fields, and Davidson and the others dangerously exposed and finally were lifted off the mountain by helicopter. If they had had to walk out, they probably all would have died. It was an ill-conceived, ill-executed venture stupid in its leadership, base in its vision. It was exactly the kind of thing that gives climbing a bad name and associates it with adolescent testosterone rushes and bad manners. Davidson, unfortunately, started something of a trend. Denali has become the most assaulted--abused--high peak in this hemisphere--and the prevailing style of mountaineering has had stupidly tragic results. In the spring climbing season of 1992 thirty-one climbers died on the approaches to Denali--some in sheer idiocy attempting the summit carrying no more than day packs.--Art Davidson, -148deg..
Let me set along side these unethical abuses of wilderness another story. In 1911 four men--Walter Harper, Robert Tatum, Harry Karstens, and Hudson Stuck--set out to climb Denali. All were experienced Alaskan winter travellers. Leaving Fairbanks in March, they arrived on the Denali approaches in April and began to ferry supplies to their base camp. By the end of May they were well-positioned high on the mountain and ready to attempt the south summit. Their base camp was run by Johnny Fredson. Then what might have been disaster struck. A late storm made up and kept them tent locked for three weeks. Here is Stuck's account:
We were now (at 18,000 feet) within one day's climb of the summit with supplies to beseige. If the weather should prove persistently bad we could wait; we could put another camp on the ridge itself at nineteen thousand feet, and yet another half way up the dome. If we had to fight out way step by step and cold advance but a couple of hundred feet a day, we were still confident that, barring unforeseen misfortunes, we could reach the top. ... We always slept warm; with sheepskins and caribou skins under us, and down quilts and camel's hair blankets and a wolf robe for bedding, the four of us lay in that seven by six tent, in one bed, snug and comfortable. It was overcrowding, but it was warm. The fierce little primus stove, pumped to its limit and perfectly consuming its kerosene fuel, shot out its corona of beautiful blue flame and warmed the tight, tiny tent. The primus stove, burning seven hours on a quart of coal-oil, is a little giant for heat generation.It is almost as if the Davidson expedition were the exact opposite of the Stuck expedition seventy years earlier. Sometimes in my reading of Davidson, it seems almost as if he had read Stuck's account and was determined to do everything the opposite way.--Hudson Stuck, The Ascent of Denali.
They ascended--Stuck would never refer to climbing as a conquest or an assault--reaching the summit near mid-day on June 7, 1913. For two hours, they conducted experiments with primitive altimeters and boiling point thermometers to determine the height of the mountain--at 20,320 feet. There was no sense of arrogance about their climb: they felt that it was a divine, providential privilege they had been granted and they sang the Te Deum in thanksgiving for their safe ascent.
Who were these men? Who was Stuck? Hudson Stuck was a Sewanee alum--a student who graduated from the School of Theology in 1889, served as a priest in Texas, and who went to Alaska in 1904 intending to be a short-term missionary. He fell under the spell of Alaska and of the great mission need there and never returned except for short visits to the states. His greatest venture as a missionary occurred in 1918 when he travelled the north slope of Alaska in winter visiting the mission stations along the way. It is one of the great, heroic, missionary journeys of all time. Stuck's missionary work earned him the title of "Archdeacon of the Yukon and all the territory to the north thereof". There is a plaque in his memory on the south wall of All Saints' Chapel.
But there is more to Stuck: he was a man of great moral passion and lent his voice in the first decade of this century to the passing of those laws which abolished child labor in America. He was also a great advocate of liberal education--particularly as it was practised at Sewanee. It was Stuck's view which he argued in lectures and writings that liberal education more than technical education suited people for both jobs and life. Time and again he lamented the ignorance, dogmatism and "narrow professionalism" of those who knew but one discipline and knew no history, poetry, art, or literature. For Stuck, the unity of knowledge implied broad learning and night after night on the trail, he tutored his protege and climbing companion Walter Harper in Shakespeare, history, theology, philosophy, and science. On the side of Denali, they passed the time in the tent during the storm reading the plays of Shakespeare. With a prescience that is unnerving, he commented in 1902 that he feared that "We shall have to open night schools for scientists where men who have been deprived of all early advantages may learn the rudiments of English literature." His concern reached far beyond the sciences, however. He wrote, "And surely it is time someone started a movement for suppressing illiterate Ph.D.'s."
Stuck and mission work, his ascent of Denali represent something very different from the familiar concept of missionaries or mountain climbers. Through-out his work, his life, was infused with his vision of Sewanee. I would submit--here in the earliest days of your Sewanee career--that Sewanee education is different and that what you will learn and experience here will set you apart. As a Sewanee student, as a graduate, you will be and will be expected to be different. Some of the difference is a matter of knowledge; a lot of it is a matter of character and class.
Your Sewanee education is not provided or conducted so that you will get a better job; it is not essentially about employment although--despite your fears--you will all eventually find ways of surviving, getting by, and even of succeeding quite well--if the record of past graduates is any indication. Education here is about something else, something I want to call the Sewanee Way. At Sewanee, liberal education is set apart by its style, its content, its vision. On our campus we expect an atmosphere of civility to prevail as we go about our work. It is the custom here, for instance, that you speak to people you pass as you walk around. As old-fashioned as it may seem, we still expect you to know a bit about a lot of things. We are still possessed of the notion that liberally educated people should have a broad base of knowledge, that literate citizens of our country should have both some knowledge of art as well as science, history as well as language. That means that we will not let you choose your major until two years from now; it also means that we will make sure that most of the work you do here is outside of your academic major.
And we expect you to acquire that knowledge while at the same time developing a lot of skills that can only be learned outside the classroom. And when it comes time for us to write reference letters for you, we will be able to comment on your ability to use a paintbrush or firehose or your patience with school children as well as upon your academic average and your knowledge of a particular field. And what is more, it is our assumption that most of you will end up working in fields or careers unrelated to your major. At nearly every point our vision and our practice here will cut across the grain of education as practised elsewhere. We just are not here to do what other people are doing, and it is not our job to bend our curriculum to imitate other places. If that was all that attracted you, our similarity to other places, you might as well have chosen to go elsewhere. We are glad that you didn't, that you chose Sewanee. But you need--as I think you do--to understand that education here will be different and you will be different for it.
And also, we are not content to educate you as if that were some neutral process that can be applied to you without changing your fundamental vision of the way the world is put together and your place within it. The Sewanee Way in liberal education looks far beyond your lives and careers important as those are. We believe that those who know better are, by the grace of God, supposed to do better. You will graduate from this school with one of the best liberal educations in America. You will belong to a group comprising less than one tenth of one percent of the human race. The dollar value of your education translated into food or shelter for the poor would be enormous. In a very tangible sense, there is a cost of life and death in your education. So then, we have high expectations for you: we expect you to make a difference. We expect you to change the world.
Ultimately it does not matter what you do with your life--as long as the choice was yours and you lived it as a choice: not as a random choosing but as a covenant between yourself and your responsibilities however they are measured. It does not matter whether you climb mountains or flip burgers or drive for UPS or go to grad school and get a Ph.D. What matters is how you lived. Did you live with arrogance and claim or with humility and deference? Did you lead others to folly or did you lead them to excellence? Did you make a difference for others or only for yourself? Did you, in the long tally, give more than you took--did you put back some of yourself, your wealth, your life into the system so that you made the way easier for some who followed you? Were you a good citizen?
Denali is the highest peak in North America, but for Stuck the longest shadow was cast by another Mountain far away. Stuck ascended Denali, but the Mountain that was his guidepost, center, reference point was not Denali but Sewanee. In all of his writings, it was Sewanee that he kept coming back to, not his ascent of Denali. Some of you may climb Denali, Everest, or the Matterhorn. Good for you. If you climb ethically, you can be proud of all you achieve. Mountains are good for teaching you about yourself, for teaching you the meaning of limits. Some of you may not set foot easily on grass or soil the rest of your lives, and if you live well--ethically--you too can be proud of all you achieve, because you too will have climbed a Mountain. Its name, like Denali, is an old Indian name: Sewanee. Welcome.