I received the notice inviting me to attend an AP college course in Archaeology two months before the end of my Junior year of high school. I thought that meant I could now claim a level of certifiable intelligence among my peers. Little did I figure it didn’t mean that, or even that I knew something. Rather it would come to mean that I didn’t know much yet– about life.
I thought I knew a lot already. I was fearless because I just didn’t know what to be afraid of. I knew there was a world out there, away from home, and I wanted to join it. My mother was already experiencing difficulty holding me back. I was ready and willing, and now I was acceptable enough to join forty-nine other fledglings at a six-week seminar/life test-flight in Pennsylvania.
Actually, I didn’t care or reflect on what it would mean- I was just going.
“What it meant” hit me while I was sitting in the pre-flight boarding area with my mother when the silence was punctuated by a disembodied voice offering an ETD update: “Flight 319 to Pittsburgh will be boarding now.”
I was going to be on my own in a few minutes.
When the plane was fully cruising at 25,000 feet, stress and fatigue got the best of me and I succumbed. I woke up to the controlled chaos that is 70 or so strangers trying desperately to shed their fear of flying in a mad rush to the exit. Everyone was hurriedly abandoning the controlled strangeness that cross-continental travel at 600 mph invokes.
The next six hours would be an equivalent blur of unfamiliar faces and places, punctuated by a hotel door being slammed behind an untipped, disgruntled valet in a now frigid hotel room 2000 miles from home.
I woke up in that room the next morning, my brain churning out questions.
How far to the bus depot? How do I get there? Walk or Taxi? Breakfast… where? How will I tip people- I’ve only got Traveler’s checks? How much do I pay them? This city is big. I’m alone.
I fumbled my way downstairs to the lobby, where I crossed paths with the valet who had slammed the door as he left my room last night. It was a valid response to being stiffed when I didn’t know I should tip him. I didn’t know his revenge plan was already in place when the overly-friendly concierge told me extra cheerfully that walking twelve blocks to the bus depot lugging a forty pound suitcase was his best pennywise advice. It was also intentionally vindictive. I could still hear them both laughing when I collapsed at the bus depot.
And the real fun had only just begun.
“The bus leaves at 6 o’clock tonight” was delivered without eye contact or emotion by the terse ticket agent.
“Are you sure there’s not another bus?”
“Oh, there’s another bus. Tomorrow night at 6 o’clock. You want that one? Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable.”
I took up residence in one of the hard plastic orange chairs in the bleak lobby and nervously watched a steady stream of riders come and go before my stomach had something to say about how good my life wasn’t.
So, it was back to the ticket counter with a suddenly urgent question about food:
“White Castle, one block that way,” was the no-frills answer, accompanied by vague hand signal directions. It was clear he was more than a little grouchy. Just say ‘thank you’ and beat it. You’ve been lucky so far, not everything you don’t know has really hurt you, yet. Shortly, the pain that only tiny, tasteless hamburgers can produce was replaced by the ear-splitting terminal loudspeaker: “The bus to Clarion is delayed with mechanical problems.”
OK, it can get worse. This must be what Purgatory feels like. I know I’ll get out, I just don’t know when.
“Sometime after eight o’clock. Best I can guess,” was all I was gonna’ learn in the moment from the grumpy Greyhound guy.
Then, quickly anticipating my next question, he pounced: “Joy’s Cafe. Three blocks that way. Stay away from the Chili.”
Joy’s Café was a veritable oasis. Even after finding out a blue-plate special wasn’t anything to write home about, I was comfortable enough to ask the unhappiest guy in the Pittsburgh about my release date.
“Eleven o’clock.”
All things come to he who waits. I’ll survive the next four hours, somehow. Relief was soon enough delivered from overhead: “Number 29 coach to Coreapolis, New Castle, Eau Claire, and Clarion will be boarding in 15 minutes.”
Sweet release! The bus is finally moving. Tired. Getting dark. Going into black hole. Everything feeling strange. So tired… then-
“Clarion.”
I’m here! In one piece!! Hey, those other kids are getting off the bus, too!
“Hi! I’m Jerry, from Akron. Where you from?”
“Boise. Idaho.”
“Wow, that’s a long way! Maybe we’ll be roommates. How long does it take to get here from… boy… Idaho?”
“Too long… but it was fun.”
I lied. I had barely passed most of the flight test with a “C–” grade. I still had a lot to learn, but at least I was standing at the entrance to an obscure college campus in Pennsylvania, in the dark, a few thousand miles from somewhere I didn’t want to be anymore. The world was now MY oyster.
The reasonably jolly man who greeted our seedy group of ten or so sleepy travelers streetside at 1 a.m. sounded like he had done this before.
“Gather round sprouts, welcome to my life this summer. I’m Jim, from the Archeology department and your best friend tonight. I can’t promise this summer will be the time of your life, too (ahem). Only you can make that happen.” After he hit that note, all the testy, irresolute interactions of the most recent hours in Pittsburgh vanished. As we walked and he talked, I started to reflect on the trip so far.
Deeper thought was interrupted by Jerry with the horn-rim glasses, who had sidled up beside me.
“Pleased to meet ya.”
“I’m Al. Likewise.”
Life does improve. Compatible friendship was finding me– randomly.
The next morning, it was pretty easy to spot the young cohort in the cafeteria, but, ever the wallflower, I demurred their company until Jerry, now my best friend, called me out while I carried my tray to the corner table.
“Hey Boise, over here!”
“Wow. Boise. Idaho. I don’t even know where that is,” was someone’s unemotional comment.
“Hey Boisey, meet Joisey. Guess where he’s from?” Joisey smirked the way you’d expect him to smirk.
As we got further into introductions, “Your roommate is Jeff? Sorry. I met him yesterday. He’s a dork. Too bad.” The group fault lines had already started to appear.
My heavy sigh of relief was surely audible. I had found my way to the fun table. Only a day into the event, abject strangeness was slipping into yesterday. If I didn’t yet know where I was, it was comforting to know who I was going to be sharing it with, and they were comfortable sharing it with me.
Jerry had an attitude. I liked that. We were kindred spirits. During breakfast, we discovered we had a lot of things in common, but few of them could be called rigorous academic leanings or scholarly pursuits. Being here was a lark for both of us and we vowed to take best advantage of the fun wherever it could be found– together.
In the hallway after Monday’s first class, we agreed the Archeology lecture we just sat through was interesting but stiff, and the professor was more than a bit pretentious. Worse yet, he was a living, breathing parody of every archeologist we had ever seen on TV.
He spoke in fluent English, but it came with a thick German accent that was going to take some getting used to. The hidden laughter we had to suppress while he droned through a lecture was going to be hard to hold.
It didn’t help that he wore Khaki, below-the-knee shorts, and the tops of his black socks poked out of his scruffy desert boots– the ones with the re-tied broken laces. His chin sported a reddish-brown goatee that didn’t match his balding, soon-to-be-white hair. We respected him because he knew something and we didn’t, but if this was what being an Archeologist looked like, well, “what were we thinking?” It was going to be a stretch to think any of us, including the prone-to-giggle-at-anything girls were heading into this profession. Naturally, my dorky roommate Jeff worshipped the ground he walked on.
At the end of the first week in class ‘Fritz’ (as he became known) revealed we would be partnering in groups of four for the field work next week. It was like Noah’s Ark all over again when he delivered the selection protocol:
1) Each partnership would need two girls and two boys;
2) No partnership would contain any best friends. “Choose someone you don’t know yet. There’s plenty of time to socialize elsewhere”; and
3) We would need to self-select – NOW! Then he exited the classroom quickly, vowing to return in 15 minutes, and we were left to sort it out.
Items 1 and 3 were no-brainers, but 2 was going to prove challenging for some, already. What did he expect?
We were all trembling on some level outside our familiar social environs, and most had already formed tightening friendships in a week. The library, the cafeteria, and the dorm lobby proved productive bonding grounds, even if some of us were a bit prone to shyness. This order was almost draconian.
Jerry and I, of course, were built to eschew rules when presented, and we already had a ’fun at any cost’ pact in place, so we formed the male half of a group without question, and began scanning the room for girls whose standards were low.
“Over there, blonde, good looking… damn. We moved too slow!”
“By the window, short, funny nose, nice smile. Look, she’s already got a girlfriend. No guys yet. Let’s move in.”
Speed dating was not yet invented, but we did our best to improvise. Ten minutes of pleasantries were soon over, and Professor Fritz came back as promised to survey the damage. He looked momentarily disappointed when he found out everyone was seated in seemingly appropriate partnership groups, but didn’t press his luck any further by asking too many questions.
He did, however, catch us on the back foot.
“O.K. Now that you all know each other a bit better, it’s time to find out how much you really do know. It’s Pop Quiz time.”
Everyone did their best impression of one hand clapping, which was quickly followed by a fifty-person gulp.
“Don’t worry about your grade,” he chortled with his too-merry, English-German accent. As if a group of high grade-achievers would give a damn about achieving a high grade!
He continued: “After a week in class, I’m just trying to get a handle on what you still need to know.”
The break-neck learning curve presented so far was my own pop-quiz, but none of it would expose me as the poser I was like a random written version. Jerry gave me a slow, eye roll. Neither of us relished any more tests after a week of random life testing. Commiseration was surely called for.
I wasn’t finding anything yet about this adventure to regret, though failing an early pop quiz qualified. Even so, I was enjoying being a student for the first time in my life. I was reading all the pull-out material in the library. I had excelled at the first week of in-class conversational summaries of lectural dronings, even though the subject matter was unfamiliar. I knew what I didn’t know already, and breathlessly looked forward to inhaling the early morning dew at “the site” when we actually started “the dig” next week.
I had even started to like cafeteria food. I was in charge of my life for the first time and it felt good. Maybe this was finally a subject I was interested in. It could also have been that inclusion in a group of brilliant teenagers was finally going to my head because I wanted to shout “Bring it on, life!”
There was something new and wonderful around every corner. Even three-hour interminable archeology labs sorting potshards couldn’t dent my enthusiasm. The prospect of “fieldwork” was luring me on to the extent that I didn’t resent being told over and over what was unlikely to happen. Finding anything significant under a couple thousand years of riverbank deposits was remote at best.
By the end of the first “dig” week, I didn’t mind that there was nothing to BELIEVABLY like about digging large square holes a half-inch at a time while the sun baked you and the biting flies lunched indiscriminately. None of us were there for the warm bologna sandwiches we all ingested with fervor. We just loved being there, all of us- the whole group of sweaty, mostly cheerful, new friends. You had to be there to know why the time together held so much promise.
When the first artifact of worth was barely uncovered, you could have sworn hearing a shout of “possible fire-pit” meant that “GOLD!” was discovered. Nobody complained about the self-imposed double-time digging that this induced for the remainder of the afternoon. Finding the pre-contact Paleo-Indigenous Native artifacts (and cultural evidence) we sought was going to be a slog, but a beautiful one.
The evenings were beginning to turn golden, too, as Jerry and I dug deeper into available diversions. Exactly what we were looking for I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure we found most of what we sought in a 3 a.m. walk to skinny-dip in the river. We dared not expose it to those who were unable to ponder adventure successfully– like my roommate:
“Geez! It’s 3.a.m!! Where have you been?” he groused when startled awake.
“There’s a class tomorrow. Go to sleep already.” I forgave him; he was a dork.
Soon enough, there were more things to explore without Jerry. In the third week, I had started making eyes at Hope, the dark-haired, mousey girl who sat nearby in the back row, and she returned them. I didn’t throw him over immediately, but Jerry had to know he was now a short-timer. If he minded, he didn’t let on. He was proud of me and explicitly encouraged “getting some action.” Raging hormones must be obeyed, after all.
Hope represented the last vestige of shackled youth to vanish that summer. It was liberating not to have to ask mom to borrow the car to see my girl. She was right there on campus, and she didn’t need to ask her mother to receive me. Anytime. Oh, she still had a curfew, but there were ways around that.
My new life was everywhere I looked. Significantly, I found a lot of it in becoming a learner in my own right– for myself. For the first time in my schooling, I could converse on a subject with others in a group, and feel like I had something unique to add to the conversation. My peers started respecting me for what I knew as well as for who I thought I was.
I was the bad boy from Boise, and most of them contributed where they could. When Martha, my pit partner, offered to replace the tattered liner of the leather bomber jacket I proudly sported, I took her up on it and promptly marched down to the local Woolworth’s for a fabric solution. Shortly, I would feel even badder wearing my hidden fake-leopard-skin persona-liner, and that was a good thing. I didn’t need a motorcycle to make the scene, but I wore that old jacket even more proudly wherever I went. Staying out past curfew with Hope was done with a new conviction now.
I wasn’t the only one finding a wrinkle in the learning time that was supposed to be A Summer Love Affair With Archeology. July 4th was coming up and Joisey was hatching a plan for the extended weekend.
In short order, Joisey and his goil, with Hope and I in tow, were all water skiing behind the wake of a power boat on the Sound in Seaside, New Jersey. To call it the time of our lives didn’t do it full justice.
After the rapture, the final week of Fritz’s lectures were somehow less… rapt. Suffering through biting flies in half-dug square holes to nowhere was never the same kind of fun. It wasn’t just me, or the thrill that was New Jersey. Even my pseudo-scholarly roommate Jeff started drifting somewhere else. When I caught him red-faced studying comic books in our dorm room, the only thing I could think was, “Jeff, we hardly knew ye.” That leaden THUD you just heard was the experiment in crafting future archeologists falling on the floor.
The focus was now turned squarely to fun, and there would be no looking away from it for the duration of our conscription. Fritz must have picked up on the vibe because his hard-hitting lecture time was morphing into plot-simpler movies. The only thing missing by the end of the 5th week was the popcorn.
On site in the 6th week, we dug faster with less diligent searching. We didn’t find less, there was just less to find, and everyone was less interested in not finding it.
Thursday, Fritz changed the strategy of attack to finding geological strata. Two selected half-holes would now become ‘find the bottomless’ pits. “Dig ’em to China,” was the directive.
By the time we hit the water table, the rigorous pursuit of knowledge was officially over. Fritz dutifully proclaimed the next and last day useless, except in that we would all, instead, scrub off the dirt one more time and take the bus on Friday evening to his villa in the country for a goodbye party. He was an OK guy, after all.
At the party, Hope couldn’t see us ending yet. As the fireflies flickered romantically in the waning twilight, she invited her other best friend Sally and myself to an extended week of fun in Richmond, Virginia. With her parents onboard, we piled into their family sedan on Monday, and the vacation of a lifetime that would not end, didn’t.
By the time we landed in Richmond, the provincial southern parental mood had swung away from “it’s going to be fun to have a little Catholic boy in the house to “count the silverware before he leaves.” I guess I stole too many kisses in the back seat on the drive across Pennsylvania. They had seen the lining of my leather jacket.
Sally was soon deployed as an extra-duty chaperone (as she related the conversation with ‘Mom’) for a few days. Fortunately, her truer loyalties remained with teenage girlhood because there were still plenty of kissin’ and cuddlin’ moments to come. Hope’s older, wiser sister (the devil’s handmaiden) even participated in the debauchery as our chaperone one evening when she found a way to sneak us into the local 18-or-older bar in the neighborhood. I thought the caterpillar now grazing my upper lip sealed the deception, but knowing the bouncer was also critical. We had found a way to subvert parental discretion one more time. Then EVERYTHING crashed mid-week, when Hope came down with mononucleosis.
Being bedridden is no way to end a romantic episode of your life, but it was there. The anticipated, tearful goodbye scene at the airport was now even sadder, in another way. The only thing left to do was exchange fond memories with Hope’s father, shake hands in a manly fashion, and ride off into the sunrise of my new life.
By September, when ‘finishing school’ resumed in Boise, there was only one thing I really needed to admit I had learned at summer school camp: growing up is easier when you’ve got nothing left to prove.
Author: Al Tietjen
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