Carpe Diem Days
The summer of 1973, I had returned from nine months . . .
This piece is dedicated to the eleven friends who shared the experience of attending an all-boys Jesuit high school from 1967 to 1972 and who recently reunited via Zoom and long email chains. (Would this have happened without the Covid quarantine forcing us all to focus our attentions in some way?) One of the emails threads was “What happened to X?” This inspired a memoir of an unlikely intersection with one of my classmates . . .
The summer of 1973, I had returned from nine months of volunteer work with Glenmary Home Missioners (and with high school buds Jon and Michael) in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border. We were helping Brother Ralph (one of the most sweet-tempered men I’ve ever known) build homes for the Black families who lived on the Ridge, a segregated community a mile or two outside of town on the slopes of the Tuscarora Mountain. We were inspired by what that religious order considered a secondary objective: “to lift up and improve the moral lives of the people around us, regardless of their beliefs or lack of beliefs; regardless, even whether they will ever accept the Faith or not.” And we loved working with Ralph and learning the carpentry skills – actually all the skills – involved in building a house. For us, it became a gap year before the concept had really become popular in the U.S.
But now I was back home in Akron, Ohio, having been gently told by my girlfriend Bobbie that she’d found someone else in her first year at the University of Denver, having lost the rough carpenter job I’d held for a month or so. Restless, searching for the answers to hastily conceived questions, I set out in the blue 1952 Chevy Impala that Brother Ralph had bequeathed to me. I returned to McConnellsburg to help Ralph on his next building project. I was then invited by Brother Al Behm to come to Vanceburg, just south of the Ohio River in eastern Kentucky, where Glenmary had a summer camp of sorts for Catholic high school boys looking for meaning or purpose in their lives. I became an informal camp counselor based on cred I’d earned by the physical and emotional work I’d already put in. There I met up with an old high school classmate, News (Jim Ward). We never hung out much in high school. I don’t remember ever sharing a class with him. We weren’t from the same town. But we connected in those two weeks in Vanceburg, those late nights around the campfire, talking about who we were becoming or hoping to become. I discovered more depth to News than I’d ever sensed from our four years sharing the hallways and commons and parties of high school. We made plans to meet up later that summer.
From Vanceburg, I drove up to Ann Arbor to hang and party with Prch, Jimi, Grins, Alain, Keloir, Joy – were they all there? – and then headed to Cape Cod to meet up with Owen, Peggy and Schlemmer – and whoever else might be stopping by – in Provincetown, where they were working tourist industry jobs during the day and partying at night. En route, I got busted coming back across the U.S. border at Niagara Falls with two scruffy hitchhikers and a quarter-ounce of pot that Prch had given me to give to Owen. After letting me sweat for most of a day in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office, looking at posters outlining New York Governor Rockefeller’s new get-tough drug laws, I was released with no charges. (And that, my friends, is called White Privilege.) I had to scrape together $100 to get my car out of impoundment, twice what I had paid Brother Ralph for it, and then was on my way to Cape Cod.
I arrived before sunrise at the funky little beach apartment that Owen, Schlemmer, and Peggy shared. Jon and Billy Kirk were also visiting, and they had barricaded the door because of storms and electrical outages and ghost stories the previous night. After breakfast and tales of the road, I climbed into my sleeping bag and crashed in some corner of the apartment. That night we shared stories and bottles of tequila and got lost in the dark on the dunes. News met up with me there, with plans to drive up to Maine in his panel van and hike the last part of the Appalachian Trail and climb Mount Katahdin. We did spend a couple of days on the trail. I remember stopping in the evening at these sweet little lean-tos and huts along the trail. We hiked up Katahdin but didn’t reach the summit.
Some of these memories are a blur. I was just saying yes to whatever opportunity came along, with little forethought or afterthought. I was, at the very least, game, living in the moment, which is what you should do when you’re nineteen. News swung back by Provincetown to drop me off so I could pick up the Impala and drive Jon and Billy Kirk back to Akron, where I packed up to start school at Ohio University in Athens. On that drive, Billy talked to Jon and me about working with Glenmary, and because I sensed he was looking for a wingman, I volunteered. News and I exchanged a few letters after that, and then we lost track of each other, as I did with so many of these friends of my youth.