Chapter 9
Horse Heaven Hills: Community College Teacher
Pasco: 1965-69

The Horse Heaven Hills are an anticline in the Yakima fold belt, which was formed by north–south compression of the Columbia River lava flows. During late Miocene and early Pliocene times, one of the largest flood basalts ever to appear on the earth's surface engulfed about 63,000 mile of the Pacific Northwest, forming a large igneous province with an estimated volume of 174,300 km3. Eruptions were most vigorous from 17—14 million years ago, when over 99% of the basalt was released. Less extensive eruptions continued from 14—6 million years ago. [1]
_These lava flows have been extensively exposed by the errosion resulting from the Missoula Floods, which laid bare many layers of the basalt flows at Wallula Gap, the lower Palouse River, the Columbia River Gorge and throughout the Channeled Scablands. Over a period of perhaps 10 to 15 million years lava flow after lava flow poured out, eventually accumulating to a thickness of more than 1.8 km (6,000 feet). As the molten rock came to the surface, the earth's crust gradually sank into the space left by the rising lava. The subsidence of the crust produced a large, slightly depressed lava plain now known as the Columbia Basin or Columbia River Plateau. The ancient Columbia River was forced into its present course by the northwesterly advancing lava. The lava, as it flowed over the area, first filled the stream valleys, forming dams that in turn caused impoundments or lakes. In these ancient lake beds are found fossil leaf impressions, petrified wood, fossil insects, and bones of vertebrate animals
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The iron curtains of depression have largely passed out of my life, and they did so in two stages. Both of them took place not in the mountains at all, but during the two times in my life when I lived in the flatlands. The scene of the first Great Release was in the great flat rain shadow of Eastern Washington, where I got my first teaching job and where my children were born. Those were years that externally were filled with great joy.  The birth of my sons was a great delight and the shadow across my marriage had not darkened enough for me to notice it.  I was beginning a teaching career, which was work I felt called to do.

For the first time, recognition and promotions and raises rained down upon me. Within two years, I was promoted to Chair of the Department.  Most of my  students (the ones not experimenting with drugs) were intense, enthusiastic and responsive. One group of English majors  sat with me through a whole year of British Literature. The discussions were luminous: We argued about the influence of Christianity on Beowulf as if our lives depended on it, basing our arguments on the only criteria we knew:  the “energy” inherent in different lines.

T.S. Eliot died in 1965,  the year I began, and  the lines of Ezra Pound’s eulogy (“Let others note how we rucksacked through the Pyrenees”)  burned in the air when I read them aloud in class. I want to name five of those students whose names I do remember--to express my gratitude and confer whatever little bit of immortality these pages can: Roger Burke and Carl Mills and Pat Davis, and Chuck Malone and Charlie Waters and Roger Cunningham.  Three of them are dead now, and none are in touch.

Those were years too, when I had to figure out how to teach and why. The first weeks were agony. The little bit of substitute teaching I had done at San Francisco had been deceptive. It looked easy because I was working in short stretches, seldom more than a few days in a row,  always under direct supervision. But now I had a five-course load The Bible as Literature, British Literature, and three classes of Freshman Composition. There were no syllabi worthy of the name, no curriculum guides that I remember.  All the classes were small—20 or fewer—taught in seminar rooms were the students sat in a wide semi-circle at flimsy tables with a separate table for the teacher. They were rooms designed for discussion.

But what were we to discuss? In the literature classes, I had in my head (or could look up) background material, but I knew I was not supposed to lecture—there were separate rooms for that. I could read a text and sometimes get an insight, but I  had no idea how to consistently convert an insight—should I get one—into a discussion, even in literature; and Composition (which had no “content”) was even more of puzzle.  I had never heard the term “teaching idea” and could not have recognized one if I had found one in my desk drawer. I had been on the receiving end of hundreds  of  class hours, but planning one myself seemed to be a different skill, requiring a different language.  A gifted teacher named Scott Pierce talked me through the first few weeks, patching me up every night and sending me back into the fray.

Eventually, slowly, I caught the rhythm.  I learned that if I read and reread a text or considered a concept, making notes,  for as long as I had—two hours would be nice but five minutes would do—it would almost always yield a teaching idea. An explosion, however small, would take place in my brain, and present me with  a  kernel of a lesson plan: a structured sequence of questions and activities that would include student participation, have a modicum of drama (including suspense), and  proceed to a modest conclusion in fifty minutes. I would enclose that kernel in a box squeezed into  in a one corner of my notes, boldly outlined. Once I had the idea in my head, I generally  didn’t need to refer to it again during the class,  but of course it would dissipate immediately afterwards and be gone forever. The stock image of a professor fumbling through his yellowing notes for the fiftieth time has never made any sense to me. Even after I had taught material a dozen  times, I would still  go through my routine, and every time it would yield a different  scheme.

Eventually I learned to apply the same sort of “pressure cooker” technique on a larger scale, using it  to planning a course. Not too long before each semester began, I would enter a period of silence and intense concentration, meditating  on the material until a structure emerged, a kind of stepwise progress through the course from week to week—so many weeks for this, so many for that. Once that structure was s locked in, it would reveal (but only one day a time) the material that had to smelted down into   each day’s lesson plan.

My spiritual struggles went on along my psychological ones, the two parallel but never touching. There was an Episcopal Church in Richland, the third of the Tri-Cities, and I might have gone there. I never cut myself off from what I called the “drama of the liturgy”, which I interpreted as a esthetic experience, like reading James Joyce. Beginning , middle, end. Rising action, Climax, Dénouement. Paradox and irony and tension. Death and life in a continual circle. The bread broken that we might be whole. It was a kind of game where the liturgy became a kind of living poem into which one could enter as into an ode of Keats—everything connected to everything else and the whole thing pulsating with interconnectedness so that it seemed unnecessary, even obscene, to ask, What does it mean? It meant its interconnectedness. It meant its pulsating life.

My wife and I quickly connected ourselves to small break-away group who were forming a satellite or mission halfway between Richland and Pasco, spearheaded by Ed Critchlow and his wife Mary. Ed was a shambling hulk of a man with  great shaggy thatch of white  hair. Mary was overweight and sweet. They were liberals in politics and low-church in religion and we easily fell into step with them. Somehow there was money for a small building to be brought in and a part-time priest secured.  In one sermon he defended the national church who had come under some fire for giving money to the Black Panthers, who had used it buy high-powered rifles. Bad luck, he said, but the gift was given in imitation of Christ’s grace: when you give someone a gift you cannot tell them how to use it, because then it is no longer a gift. I could never pick holes in an argument, and can’t do so yet, but it smells fishy. Another sermon struck more fertile ground, when he told us “Yes the church IS full of hypocrites, hypocrisy being but one form of sin.”  

 By now it was 1967 and the 60’s were at full throttle. We brought in an official “hippie” from Seattle, the editor of the underground magazine, The Helix, that I would later read regularly when I went back to school. He was a handsome and charming man who talked how he took acid regularly, especially when he was visioning about where to “take” the Helix.  He also talked about his open marriage, about how he and his wife encouraged one another to take other sexual partners, whereupon one lady in the congregations breathed out, “Geez Louise, that sounds to me immoral.” As one of the church school teachers, I was called to lead a discussion on the speech and put together a bland set of questions that implied none of them would be damaged by practicing the young man’s philosophy provided they continued to be practicing Episcopalians.

The college too, brought in speakers with news about the new frontiers of consciousness and behavior. One of our own graduates came back to talk to us, along with some classmates from an a trendy class at the state college nearby. He argued with great enthusiasm that the logic of Aristotle had been discovered to be “crap” and was being replaced by a new “non-linear” variety.  When I gently chided him, he assured me that all he said should be taken as an “oral rough draft.” But he later got a Ph.D. in Linguistics and taught at the University of Cincinnati until he died. Another graduate came to tell us about the commune in Seattle where he lived. When asked what people did, he said it was simple: “You do what you want to do.” I later saw an iconic picture of the stove in one such commune, caked in filth. Evidently in some communes, no one ”wanted” to clean the stove.

About this time, our first son, Brian,  was born, in May of 1966.  The momentum in the church community flowed toward baptism. I wanted our good friends, Robin and Jean Koch, art teachers at the community college and active Unitarians, to be godparents.. But when I approached our earnest young priest about that, he startled me by gently insisting that  godparents be Christian. I was stunned and outraged. How could this hip young man, who defended giving guns to Black Panthers, be so old-fashioned as to believe that Christianity actually contained a core of doctrine that excluded anyone, especially Unitarians, who even had a church building and discussion groups about serious writers like the Camus?.  I ranted and raved for a week to my wife, threatening to leave the church, to become a Unitarian, or nothing at all. But my wife pointed out that since  neither of us believed in Christianity anyway, objection on principle did not make much sense.  Find godparents acceptable to the priest, dress the child in a nice baptismal gown, take some pictures. Isn’t that what it was all about really? Well, put that way, it seemed reasonable, so that is what we did.  Ed and Mary Lou served as godparents. I have the pictures yet, and it breaks my heart to look at them—my wife in a white dress with embroidered eyelets, Brian in a white baptismal dress, the gathered community on the porch of the little make-shift church on a gorgeous summer day.  

We did not believe, and don’t believe now,  that Brian’s soul was being saved from hell and guaranteed eternal life. I don’t think even fundamentalist Christians any longer believe that. Evidently  Augustine did think something like this, but all theologians talk nonsense once in a while and one of the jobs of the larger church is the clean up those messes. For us, and probably for many of the others, it was a pleasant social ritual,  using an honored tradition as an excuse  to gather with friends, like a birthday or a party on the Fourth of July. I teach now that infant baptism is a chance for parents to commitment themselves to raise their children in the church. But we did not even believe that.   Like most parents who have their children baptized as a social event, we had no intention of raising Brian in a church setting beyond the point at which was pleasant and convenient to do so. The little church ran out of money  a few months later, closed its doors and sold the building.  We moved to Seattle and never went to church as a family again.

So we were hypocrites and liars, my wife and I,  as we sat on the railing of that little church in the radiant sunshine, surrounded by our friends, filled with joy and hope. We were what Kierkegaard would call bourgeois Christians, who saw church-going as part of the package that included holding a job, paying your bills, going to PTA, voting—things good citizens do. For some years after my commitment to faith, I looked back with regret, even disgust, at those years when I dropped into church occasionally—at the 8:00 service--for the “beautiful ritual.” I quoted the book of Revelation: “Because you were neither hot nor cold, I spit you out of my mouth.” Or I quoted T.S. Eliot’s quoting Baudelaire: “So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.”

I once thought it would have been better—for me and for everyone--to have resolutely stopped attending  church the instant that I could no longer say, “I am a Christian.” I once thought that I might have come back more quickly to faith if I had not stayed so long in my wish-washy state, dallying with  the fruits without helping tend the vine. If, as Luther taught,  it is despair that brings us to faith—and in my case it was—then the more despair and the quicker it comes, the better.

I have softened around the edges now. Perhaps despair is not the only road to faith. During most of our waking moments, we are neither hot nor cold, and we cannot always know at any given moment  whether what we are doing is good or evil. Henry James, in one of his short stories,  was as least as wise as Baudelaire when he said, “We do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” I heard John Updike say once that going to church with one’s family was, in and of itself, simply the most wholesome and healthy human activity he knew of. If one drops in on church once in a while, there is always a chance one will hear the word of God preached and that, for whatever reasons, it will make sense.

Probably, people cannot have any more religious faith than they can have, any more than one can run any faster than one can run, though we can run faster and have more faith if we practice.   Our beliefs may, at any given instant, lie beyond our will, though certainly not beyond God’s. No one can buy the whole package without reservations, and in any case, what is the whole package? Even clergy cross their fingers for one part or another of the Creed. The best we can do is to choose what we want to believe, or—what is more likely--say, “I want to believe the same things as some person, living or dead, whose personality I find attractive and compatible.” For me that person was C.S. Lewis.   When I say the creed as a clergy person, I am not so much describing myself at the end of a completed journey as I am setting my face toward a future one.

Through our relationship with the Critchlow’s we were drawn into southeast Washington state’s version of the Civil Rights Movement. Ed and Mary belonged to CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, which sat well to the right to the Black Pathers and SNCC. It had been founded right after WWII and had provided leadership for much of the civil rights activism in the 1960’s, after the NAACP had won the key court battles.  CORE had pioneered the lunch sit-ins and the Freedom Riders.   The three young men killed in Mississippi, whose stories were told in the movie Mississippi Burning had been CORE members.

Our local group had a focused mission ready to hand. Many of the members, including the Critchlows and us, lived in Kennewick, which, along with Pasco, formed the Tri Cities. Kennewick was all white, though there were plenty of Blacks in the Tri Cities. Blacks had been brought in during the  40’s, to help build the atomic reactors that produced the plutonium for the second bomb dropped on Japan. They had always lived in West Pasco, across the tracks. The commonly accepted story was that the Tri-Cities agreed to accept the Blacks, provided they stayed in West Pasco and provided Kennewick would be kept all-white, a safe haven for people who did not care to live in the same city as Blacks, even across the tracks. There were legends that, years ago,  a Black man who wandered into Kennewick after dark had been  found the next morning hanged by the neck from the bridge that crossed the Columbia between the two cities. Our friends, the Koch’s, knew Blacks who had been harassed in Kennewick after dark, followed by police car who kept a spotlight on them until they crossed the bridge. We knew that blacks who tried to buy or rent in Kennewick were routinely told the space was taken,

We even had some direct experience with this. At one point, my wife and I had looked for a house to rent in Richland, where the white workers at Hanford lived in housing originally  built by the government but now owned privately. When we pulled up, we saw a car with several Blacks in it, sitting at the curb. The landlord begged us to take the place, saying that some niggers (he gestured at the car) wanted to rent it, but if he did, the neighbors could spread the word and ruin his business. I wish I could say we told him we could not rent his house under those conditions, but instead, we told him it was not the place for us and walked back out to our car, past the car with the Black family, who were waiting patiently for him to run out of excuses.

To change this, we needed two things. One thing we already had: our CORE members included a Black family in the Sidney Poitier tradition: young, good-looking, educated, well-spoken and well-employed. They were willing to move to Kennewick with their two children. The other thing we needed as a fair-housing law, prohibiting renters and sellers from discriminating on the basis of race. These laws had been passed, state-by-state and city-by-city  in the 60’s. I could remember an Episcopal Church service in San Francisco in i963,  when people had walked out in response to a Bishop’s letter in support of the California version.

When the Kennewick City Council refused to consider the law we drafted, we arranged for a march. I don’t know how this was done. I suppose Ed, the lawyer, worked it out. All I had to do was show up at the city park on a lovely afternoon with a sign. My wife chose to take care of our toddler son, but she lettered the sign I carried, with the quote I had found somewhere, from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The male pronoun did not cause a stir at the time.

I marched in some fear, not that I would be pelted with rocks from on-lookers, but in some fear for my job. I was untenured teacher,. I felt secure enough within my department but I had no idea how the president and vice-president might respond. I had no savings (but no debt either, in the days before student loans), but the risk seemed minimal. If Ed could risk his law practice, I could risk my job.

If we took any pictures, they have disappeared, but I thought at the time that I would remember this as a golden moment in my passage through the 60’s, something I could hold up when my children asked “What did you do I the 60;s, Dad?” Talking about his role  at the fringes of the French Revolution in its early stages, Wordsworth wrote that “to be alive in that dawn was glorious and to be young was very heaven.”  I was young and stood on the side of the true and the good.

In many ways, it was a cheap thrill. I risked  my safety and security hardly at all and  my reputation only a little. History was flowing in our direction, and there had been no organized resistance to our campaign, not even an angry letter in the paper. Most of the on-lookers cheered and waved. Many had risked more and lost more, including their lives. The French Revolution turned bloody, and Wordsworth grew alarmed and older, and the 60’s turned venereal and drug-ridden. But ages and people need to be remembered for their best moments as well as for their worst, and surely this was one of our best.

 At the next meeting of the City Council, we were to present the housing ordinance again. CORE members who were willing were to be there, and if it was not considered or not passed, we were to disrupt the meeting in a non-violent way, by locking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome” until we were arrested and removed.  I chose not to go, explaining that arrest and a prison, even overnight, would put my job—and thus my family—at more risk than I was willing to accept. But the Council passed the law, the Black family found a house and moved in, and all went well.

The other battles were less dramatic and less satisfying. I sat on a committee to set up a tutoring system for minority children. The Great Society legislation poured money down on us. We had money to burn. Today it would be used to buy computers, but All we had was services, and no one would buy. We set up tutors in West Pasco, but no one showed up, even when we offered money. The CORE committee (the same well-spoken man who had moved in to Kennewick) writhed in agony. I remember  him saying at one meeting, “There’s gotta be people out there who want to learn.”

Up to that point, I think I had believed that most of the evils of the world result from defective organization, accumulated bad habits,  and lack of good will.  If only people of good will (like myself) could somehow get into power and organize things differently, the world would quickly fill up with justice and plenty. But here I was, sitting on a committee which had some power and plenty of money, and we could not even get students who knew they were failing in school to sign up for tutoring. I worked with plenty of these students. I believed I could teach anything to anyone who would come regularly to my classes and do the work I assigned,  but many students did not.

Scholarships were available to Black Students. There were even programs that bribed students to come to classes or do other middle class things. There was plenty of Great Society money not only for tutoring, but to place Black students in a protected environment where they could be eased into a tolerance for boring work done for enough money to barely get by. One day, a  supervisor from the reactor plant called me one day to inquire about a student who was attending Columbia Basin on scholarship and simultaneously working in such a program. He was not coming to my classes nor was he showing up regularly at the workplace. We agreed there was nothing we could do. I am sure we succeeded with many students, but the failures were more memorable. Many of the students lacked, as we said, motivation. They were embedded in habits that were too hard to break. They took short views. Their values did not include learning, let alone learning for its own sake. They had no immediate role models to demonstrate what most White children absorb from their environment—that deferring some  gratification now leads to more gratification later on, at least it does so often enough to make it worth the risk. Yet I believed it could be changed and that I could help change it.

One of my gurus at the time was Paul Goodman, author of Growing up Absurd, whose essays appeared regularly in the freshman readers we used to teach Introductory Composition classes. He was one of a whole army of thoughtful and articulate idealists with a radical view of human improvability. In his view, the schools and workplaces were, in essence, prison camps where people were tricked into doing meaningless tasks so that teachers and business leaders could maintain their privileged status as managers of the tyrannical enterprise.  One of his examples was  the whole set of activities by which we taught children to read. It was, he thought, absurd. Left their own devices, he said, children would learn to read “naturally” by the age of 7 or 8.

I remember talking late into the night with a colleague, whose name was John deYong, lamenting my part  in a corrupt system that I could not escape because I needed an income to support my family. I can remember the room, and the couch he was sitting on when he demurred, and I can quote one thing he said, word for word:  “Much of life is inherently absurd.” He said that if  all the reforms Goodman advocated could somehow be put in place overnight,  new sufferings would emerge to take the place of the old ones, made even worse no doubt by the dislocation of people who had at least gotten used to the old sufferings.

I saw in an instant that he was right and I was wrong, though it would take me years—decades—to fill in some of the details, for example  that most children left to their own devices would NOT learn to read naturally. Most children need to be taught to read, using complex techniques based on facts about language that have been  discovered by great geniuses and then painfully accumulated by scholarly drudges over thousands of years.  The whole enterprise is fragile and could be lost in a single generation.

The insight was not enough to destroy my naïve idealism, but it weakened it and led me toward another philosophical beacon whose work was also wide anthologized in freshman readers—Albert Camus.  Later a copy of his essays came into my library in an ironic way—as one of my first wife’s textbooks in her honors English class.  It still has her name inside the front cover. She left it behind, along with an anthology of German literature,  when she took the children and walked off to her new life in 1979.

Camus was  the existentialist novelists who had won the Nobel Prize in 1947 and been killed in an auto accident soon after. One essay was called “Summer  in Algiers.”  In it, Camus offers lyric descriptions of the implacable, laconic, Brown people in Northern Africa who have subsisted in desperate poverty as long as anyone can remember. They do not believe that a change of regime or even national independence is going to radically change their lives. They  find comfort—particularly when they are young—in  their steadfast contemplation of the bleak beauty around them: “the bay, the sun, the red and white games on the seaward terraces, the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls.” In fact, according to Camus, their hopelessness is their salvation;

There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing. There are words I have rarely understood, such as “sin.” Yet I believe these men have never sinned against life. For if there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. These men have not cheated. Gods of summer they were at twenty by theier enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all hope. . .  From Pandora’s box, where all the ills of the humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for contrary to the general belief, hope is the equivalent of  resignation. And to live is not to be resigned. (This is the Justin O’Brien translation, slightly modified, to match my memory of the version I first read.)

I made an  impassioned plea for it every time I taught the essay. “Don’t you see,” I would say, “If you are sustained by hope for some condition other than the one you have, you have already written off your present condition. If you have lifted up your eyes to a ‘someplace else’,  you have already shut your eyes to whatever beauties there might be around you. “

Camus makes the same point in another essay that was also widely anthologized, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In Greek legend, Sisyphus was condemned for crimes unspecified to endlessly roll a rock up a hill and, when he got it to the top, release it to let is roll back down. The Greeks obviously took this to be a terrible fate, but Camus turned it into an existential fable in which Sisyphus embraces his fate. For Camus, the absurdity of Sisyphus’ life is the key to his happiness:

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. . . All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. . . I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I remember only one student—an ex-convict trying to go straight--who seemed to respond Camus with the same intensity I did. It sometimes seemed to me in our discussions after class as if we were the only two people in all of Washington state who did. For both of us, at those moments, Camus’ essays seemed enough to sustain our lives. I wonder were he is now, that student, and if he found Camus enough in the long run.

I obviously did not. Camus and Paul Goodman seemed to agree that life was absurd. Goodman thought it could be fixed, and Camus did not. Camus seemed closer to the truth than Goodman, but neither seemed enough. I needed something larger, large enough to contain both social idealism and lyric confrontation with the abyss.  

Neither protest marches nor lyric prose was enough to stem the tides of self-loathing  when they would sweep over me every few weeks. They felt as if they were  generated my solar plexus. They threw me into the grip of a pervasive and physical pain, as if the membrane separating each cell were being squeezed by a vice.  Anyone who has been through it will recognize the condition instantly. For the first time I sought professional help, or help of any kind. I sat in a darkened office and talked to a kindly doctor who suggested I might be homosexual. It was a common diagnosis at the time.  He gave me a book to read, called Every Fifth Man. I dutifully read it but found the possibility neither tantalizing nor repugnant but simply meaningless. It did not compute.

But then in connection with my teaching, I read a book called How Children Fail, by John Holt. In it, he describes a technique for teaching writing, called memory chains. Students write down any sensory detail they perceive at that moment and then remember another context in which that same detail occurred. In that context, they locate another sensory detail and remember still another context in which that occurred and so on, in theory, forever.

I decided to try it, and before he I had half a dozen lines down, I felt an overpowering sense of release, a great loosening in the knots of my  solar plexus, a physical sense of heat flowing out from my spine along my arms into the tips of my fingers. I felt as if a great emptiness were filling up, as if great gaps and tears in my psyche were knitting together, as if fullness of life were suddenly possible in ways it had not been 10 minutes before, as if I had broken through the hard crust of psychic desperation into a reservoir of molten substance that warmed my blood.  

I knew about creativity. Like everyone else, I had read the little Mentor paperback and yearned to have happen to me the things described happening to Auden, and Beethoven.  Since then, I have happened across a half dozen other books that describe this  phenomenon.    I know there is a whole discipline of Art Therapy that draws on this experience At one time I thought about making a systematic scholarly study of it, weaving my own experience into psychological accounts or at least using the energy from my personal experience fuel my research.   I searched the data banks under the term “scriptotherapy” and found some entries. Yet when I have looked at this literature, I have found it pedestrian and mechanical, pale dead coal next to the hot flame of the experience itself.

Over the next few months, I tried the technique again whenever the curtain of anxiety would begin to close  around me, and I almost always found relief. At about this same time I wrote my first short story, called “A Genius for Compromise,” about a young professor who becomes  infatuated with a talented and beautiful student. They study British history and explore the professor’s thesis that Great Britain’s genius for compromise is at the heart of her success as a nation. Gradually, their classroom encounters pick up erotic overtones in his mind until one day he realizes that that his infatuation is not returned.  The story is slender and predictable and derivative, though whenever I reread it, it still seems to have a certain energy.

 More important I found that composing it had the same effect as the memory chains with the added advantage of leaving behind a recognizable artifact. A few months later, in Seattle, I began a novel by writing a single sentence, “Lewis coughed and rolled over.” Over the next few years, whenever the cloud of anxiety closed around me, I would return to the novel and  write my way back to a tolerable mental state. The longer and deeper I slipped into the abyss, the more days of consecutive creative work it would take to bring me out of it.  Over the next ten years or so, I accumulated about 70 pages of prose, a page or two or three at a time.

Yet I could never turn to the novel until my inner life had become filled with dread.    
It was as if life depleted my emotional bank account, and creative work created a deposit. Yet I could never bring myself to make a deposit until I was desperately overdrawn. And as soon as I had brought the balance back to zero, I would gratefully stop writing. Only after religious faith had stabilized my inner life, was I able to write as a discipline and not as a mode of therapy.

After four and half years and two children, I grew restless. I wanted more education. I wanted to study and study and study some more. I wanted to teach upper-division classes. It was  not that that I wanted anything different from what I had, I simply wanted more of it—bigger books, more serious students, more complex ideas. Then came the Viet Nam GI bill. Though I had never been closer to Viet Nam than 1000 miles—when our ship had started there from the Philippines and then turned back—the law was written to include me. With that stipend and teaching assistantship, it looked practical financially, So I applied for graduate school at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, and the University of Washington at Seattle and was accepted and given a teaching assistantship at both places. The WSU program was in American Studies, a program that looked trendy even then and has since become obsolete. The UW program was the old reliable English Ph.D., and Seattle sounded more glamorous than Pullman. So I resigned my position the same month that our second son, Marc, was born.  I worked picking cherries that summer, and  in August, I somehow got  the two boys and their mother and our 1960 Volkwagon and a U-Haul full of furniture over to Seattle in a couple of trips, since she never learned to drive and her lessons were interrupted when Marc was born three months early.


If I had stayed at Columbia Basin teaching five classes a semester until I retired when I did, in 2001, I would have been there 36 years. I would not have depleted my savings. I might have saved my marriage. I would  not have started my life over, broke and single, as did in 1979 at the age of 42. But I would never have met my second wife, never have become step-father to wonderful children. I might or might not have gone back to the faith. I almost certainly would not have become an Episcopal priest. But what of that? It is useless to speculate about what one could have done and should have done. At every fork in the road, we choose, but we cannot send a clone down the other path and compare results at the end. I am full of regret for the bad things that happened and full of gratitude for the good things. All is not well that ends well, nor does the final bad ending—death—make all things ill.