Vermont, Revisted

After a good weekend with a client at a rustic resort in Vermont, I decided to wander memory lane and drove down to where I went to college my first year and a half. There are a lot of memories associated with Putney, Vermont and I had not been back in about 15 years.

The college is not the same--it went out of business years ago and is now a different school, a different color and a different era. Some of this helped with the memories and I was glad I had seen it once since attending there so it wasn't a big shock.

Windham College in the '70's was a 'hippy' college. Love, drugs, rock and roll and a kick butt education all happened at this very small liberal arts school in southern Vermont. The faculty was outstanding--John Irving taught English, along with Donald Harington. Most of the faculty had PhD's and were looking for a different life than the political world of the Ivy League. One of my favorite professors, Dr. Fox, had left teaching at Princeton to be in Vermont--many of the others were the same. If you remember the 70's Alan Funt movie 'What Do You Say To A Naked Lady'--it was partially filmed at Windham. Pretty much sums up the attitude of the school. The campus was designed by Edward Durrell Stone--same guy that did the Kennedy Center and the rumor was the Taj Mahal was his influence-he designed the US Embassy in New Delhi and had spent time in India. When I went there, the whole campus was painted white--similar to the Kennedy Center and the Taj.

Most of the student population of 650 (total population--my high school graduating class was 670) were from elite prep schools. Many of them were trust fund babies. Some were on the last college that would accept them after being kicked out of more mainstream and big name schools. Me? I went there because I got in. My neighbor a couple of houses away had gone there a semester before going back to Ithaca College and it sounded interesting, so I applied. I did not visit--not the way my family life was structured. I have often wondered what I would have done if I hadn't gotten in.

I was a public school graduate, and naive about A LOT. The general forum session when my mother and step-father dropped me off focused mainly on how the school had gotten drug use under control to which my 'step father commented 'we are leaving you with the wolves' and I was thinking the opposite. I cannot imagine what the drug use was like before I got there--it was rampant my freshman year, mostly pot and hash--if anything else was going on, I missed it. Walking down the dorm hall and breathing put you at risk for a pretty awesome contact high--pot was smoked all day, every day. It was what we all had in common and it bonded people fast.

The first day I was there, Nick Somebody knocked on my dorm door

and asked if I wanted to go swimming at the nearby swimming hole--and I went along, although I remember feeling socially awkward not knowing anybody. This was going to be a college experience and I was determined to push myself into it. Arriving along with other kids, I was stunned to panic when I noticed the body letting go of the rope swing was naked. Everybody was naked. And I didn't know their names. I froze where I stood and knew this wasn't going to be making me comfortable. Nick skived down to his own self and dove in, leaving me there with a look of get it going--and I realized I as invited for my 18 year old body, not my personality. I sucked it up and got down to bra and panties but that was it--and that was BIG for me. I laugh at it now and wish that 18 year old had just gone YAHOO and skinny dipped with abandon. It wasn't about sex at that moment, just swimming and a lazy late summer afternoon before school officially started.

Windham made pot and hash convenient and the most enterprising of the students would do the reverse of a drive up window--they would walk up to the dorm window

and ask through the screen if you wanted to buy anything. I met two friends that way, and the memory of it still makes me laugh. The amazing thing, is through all of this, I did really well in school--much better than in HS because of the challenge and the new awareness that maybe I really had a brain. A stoned one, but a brain.