Middlebury College, an expensive habit

Being on the East Coast has got me reminiscing not infrequently about the good ol’ college days. They were good, and now they’re old. And they all happened in Middlebury, VT. Nowhere is quite like the place, where coffee runs free as the wind and gay deans freer than even that. I miss it.

Here at Northwestern U, people talk casually of salaries and “settling down.” It creates the illusion that no Middlebury exists, that nowhere in the world are there people like one Martin J. MiddKidd, a real boy whose story was told to me this weekend, and must be retold here.

Martin was an idealistic lad when he entered the college, prone to smoking a doobie now and then to aid in his musings on the perfect world of his parents and an elder brother – let’s call him “Rex” – all of whom lived a happy existence in the grand state of Vermont. It wasn’t long after Martin’s entry into the school that Rex graduated, and off to the Panamanian oil rigs did Big Rex skip, to hop them and perhaps makes some good of himself in this oft bereft world.

Over the next three years, Martin availed himself of all the pot he could find – but not to make the happiness happier, as had previously been the case; no, now it was to ease the pain. For Rex had disappeared. The rigs swallowed him up, or so it seemed, as not even the hiccup of a brotherly word had come from the land of famous hats.

Here I interrupt the narrative to explain a ritual of great importance at Middlebury College. At the end of each January, a hundred students can be seen skiing down the mountain owned by their school to accept a diploma at its foot. It is the graduation ceremony for Febs – students who rather than enter college in the fall with their peers, instead “find themselves,” often in the wilds of Costa Rica, and so graduate a full semester behind.

Martin was one such student, having found himself in a treehouse in Chile.*

So it was that Martin trekked up the school-owned mountain one particularly cold day in January, a full four years after his first day at the school, his friends at his side and his parents waiting below to watch another son graduate and hopefully not vanish this time. Little did our hero know the workings on the other side of that mountain.

For Rex, not fully a spectre yet, had hitchhiked his way across oceans and back to his home state, where, by his internal calculations, his younger brother would soon be skiing down a mountain known intimately to the boys since childhood, and into the wide future. Rex had tracked down that mountain, and with only his will and a knobbly stick to aid him, hiked up its back.

In the blue light of a January noon at the mountain’s highest point, the two brother’s met, Rex with an unmarked letter in hand, and Martin streaming tears marked by a myriad emotions – the strongest among them, confusion.

Whether any words were exchanged between the two was impossible to note by onlookers.

All that took place for certain was the transfer of the letter – its contents also unknown – and the retreat of Rex back down the mountain’s flank in the face of impassioned pleas from his brother to stay. The reunion was momentary and pregnant with loss from the get-go, the kind usually reserved for the most tragic of lovers.

Martin sailed down the mountain that day, but only with the speed of circumstance (there were skis on his feet). In his heart, he trudged. At the bottom were his parents, who bore the news of his brother’s sudden reappearance and immediate exit with the kind of unsentimental questioning Rex was no doubt attempting to escape: “He’s here?” “What the hell?” “Why’d he leave again?”

The answer was staring them plain in the face: Middlebury. It makes people crazy.

*I presume.