Restless discontent goes to college.
I had applied to and had been accepted to four universities. The universities were in Morehead, Duluth, Collegeville, and St. Paul Minnesota. Upon touring the schools as a process of making my decision on which one to attend, academic quality, the student body, nor campus aesthetics played no role in my final choice. Location was all that mattered. Having grown up in a small town, the only option for me was the university located in the biggest city. I needed something big, exciting and where all the action was. I chose Hamline University in St. Paul specifically because it was in the largest city of those four schools.
Some may wonder, because of my love of skiing, why did I not seek universities in the Rocky Mountains? That is a valid question. I certainly had friends and acquaintances that love skiing and attend Montana State University at Bozeman or University of Colorado at Boulder, but I never knew one that successfully graduated from one of those two schools. Oh sure, they did lots of skiing and reported great mountain adventures, but they never graduated. I think I feared the same fate would befall me. It is like the drug of cocaine. As I was growing up in the mid-80s and catering all sorts of high-society events, cocaine was ever present at those soirees. I must have instinctively known that if I ever tried that drug, which was described to me by people who did as a sensation greater than sex, I'd never be able to stop. I felt the same about attending university in a ski town. I feared I would have enjoyed skiing too much to the detriment of my education. Because as much as I desired the excitement of exotic locales, I also feared being labeled a failure. Oh yes, the fear of failure will also become a reoccurring theme in my multi-post work, "Almost Paradise."
Hamline University in the mid-80s was a semester school with both fall and spring semesters running about four months respectfully. But after Christmas break the school inserted a four-week single class episode called J-term. The idea of this term was for students to take one course of interest, presumably not in their major, and study it intensely for one month. That one course carried the same credits as a class spread out over the four-month semester system. My freshman year, I took a symposium course on Adolf Hitler. I learned a lot about that one-nut wonder, his rise to power and ultimate defeat, but I feared my professor did love the man a bit too much for my comfort.
I also learned that J-term could also be used for independent studies of almost any variety. All one needed was to find a professor that would sign off on an independent study idea and was willing to grade its results. That led me to a brilliant idea for a J-term independent study my sophomore year. In this scheme, my goal was not an academic pursuit but a location pursuit. Having spent my high school years working in a country club setting and desiring a chance to escape St. Paul Minnesota in the dead of winter, I cooked up a plan to do an independent study I titled, "Club Management." As I declared "Business Management" as my major upon my excepting enrollment to Hamline University, this independent study seemed a plausible fit into my overall academic plan. My feebleminded 50-year-old professor/advisor, a woman who spent her entire adult life in academia and who had never signed the front side of the payroll check, agreed to sponsor my independent study. As useless as she was a teaching business, she did buy into my big independent study idea and sponsor my Club Management excursion to Arizona.
So here was my brilliant plan. I had made the acquaintance of the golf pro that ran Apache Wells Country Club in Mesa Arizona. He agreed to give me an unpaid internship with access to the club for the month of January. In exchange for a couple of hours a day working in the pro shop, I got full access to all the amenities of the golf course including unlimited tee times. In a sense, I was able to finagle an approved independent study where I escaped the coldest month of the year in Minnesota to play a round of golf every day and hit unlimited range balls and all I had to do was write a 10-page paper regarding what I learned about club management upon my return. The best part about this J-term "end-around" maneuver of any actual academic merit was the ride home.
The golfing and sun vacation (I mean J-Term independent study) was just a vehicle to get me to the vicinity of the mountains west. So, the day after Christmas, I loaded my golf clubs, my ski gear and all my summer wear into the trunk of my 1968 Ford XL convertible and drove to Phoenix, Arizona. But the true piece de resistance of that month of independent study was the return trip home. For I had arranged for my girlfriend at the time to fly down to Phoenix and join me on the one-week excursion back through the Rocky Mountains enroute to our sub-zero low altitude campus in St. Paul.
Up to this point, the only downhill skiing in the western mountain I had done was at Bridger Bowl in Bozeman Montana. Finally, I was going to get a shot to ski some of iconic resorts of my youthful dreams. The first stop as I drove north from Phoenix was Salt Lake City, Utah. Alta was my destination and as I ascended Cottonwood Canyon Road from Salt Lake City at about 4,300 feet above sea level to the base at Alta of 8,500, the snow started accumulating. By the time I reached the resort, about 6 inches had fallen. I cautiously navigated that rear-wheel driven car up the canyon. No amount of snow was going to keep me from reaching the base at Alta. After much slipping and sliding on that ascent, we checked into the Peruvian Lodge and prepared for two days of glorious skiing in 12 inches of freshly fallen powder.
Understand, there was something simply magical about skiing at a resort like Alta in 1986. This was in the pre-cell phone/internet era and neither radio nor television waves extended to the end of Cottonwood Canyon Road. When one checked into the lodging at Alta, one checked out of hearing anything about the outside world. This reality became clear to me as I returned to Salt Lake City two days later only to find out that the Space Shuttle Challenger had blown up and none of us at the resort had any news of it.
My girlfriend and I would go on to ski Steamboat Springs Colorado and finish up our adventure back in Bozeman Montana at Bridger Bowl before making the 16-hour easternly drive back to St. Paul Minnesota and an awaiting spring semester fully loaded with mundane econ, labor, and statistic classes. Steamboat Springs had a totally different feel from Alta. The buildings were more modern, and an entire village consumed the base of that resort. Nestled in the Colorado Rocky Mountains at 6,700 feet above sea level, Steamboat Springs in the mid-80s was positioning itself to become a premier destination ski resort. That trip ended at Bridger Bowl, it then felt like old hat and quaint compared to the other two stops in Utah and Colorado.
At this time, during my collegiate years, the one thing that was ever present in my life, apart from my restless desire to be anywhere but here, was alcohol. Once I broke free from my hometown, high school and parental oversight, alcohol became a daily routine. It's not like I was a stranger to it during high school, however I also participated in three seasons of sports. And back in those days, my coaches made it abundantly clear that if any of us lads got caught drinking, we would ride the bench for the remainder of the season. Remember, fear of failure, along with living in exotic locations of grandeur, were two maladies I suffered at that time. I certainly did not count alcohol as the third form of affliction, as that would not become apparent for many years to come.
When something worked so well, like my parlaying my university's J-term into a sun filled golfing and skiing extravaganza while earning college credit for writing an unmemorable essay, I was ready to up the ante. Going into my junior year of college, a few of us cooked up the idea for the next J-term independent study. The fall of my junior year, I was fulfilling one of the "arts" of my liberal arts education by taking a class on the history of music. This class was taught by a truly cool cat professor named Paul Pizner. He was also the leader of my university's jazz band. Prof. Pizner had stacks of vinyl records of America's famed jazz artists. After class, he would review his collection with me and send me off with one to listen to as some form of extra credit. My willingness to accommodate his love of jazz must have worked because I aced his History of Music class.
Now, for this next J-Term excursion, I aimed higher than mere domestic travel. We were determined to turn a backpacking trip across Europe into a full-blown independent study. But what were we going to study? Prof. Pizner came to our rescue. Being the jazz head he was, he informed us that in the mid-80s, American jazz was becoming quite popular in Europe. That was it! Our independent study was titled, and I kid you not, "A Study of European Jazz." And Prof. Pizner cheerfully signed on as our sponsor.
With an approved J-Term study abroad, plans were laid to travel to Germany, Denmark, and Austria in search for jazz. Now think about this for a minute, where would one find jazz being performed? These bands certainly were not playing in the finest opera houses and concert venues of those great European cities we visited. No, jazz was performed in smoke-filled clubs in the after-hours and often red-light districts of European cities. My J-term study abroad specifically took me into late evening drinking venues, where at a minimum, I could receive a contact high from all the dope smoking, while listening to jazz music. I'm sure all my buddies back freezing their tails off back in St. Paul wondered how two years in a row I managed to escape that frozen campus and earn college credits for drinking and traveling.
If it wasn't for the fact that I had switched majors my junior year from business to philosophy and desperately needed one more philosophy class to achieve my major requirement, one wonders what brilliant J-Term booze -soaked traveling scheme I would've cooked up my senior year. But alas, my senior year J-Term at old Hamline University was reserved for a philosophy class titled, "The Philosophy of Aesthetics." The drinks still flowed as I traveled the prevailing "art is in the eye of the beholder" relative minefield of a class on aesthetics, but this time from the confines of my dorm room on a frozen campus in Minnesota.
Growing up in the resort town of Detroit Lakes, waterskiing, sailing, golfing, and downhill skiing introduced me to a lifestyle of sorts best suited for the financially well healed, not some middle class schlub from the Midwest. For none of those favorited activities were inexpensive. They required thousands of dollars of equipment and to play them up big time, visits to some of the world's most expensive resort towns. I did not grow up in a family of great means so my participation in those sporting activities required me to work long hours in various restaurants and to pinch and save my resources until I accumulated enough cash to buy the next piece of sporting equipment or trip to the mountains.
It seemed then to be quite reasonable to resent the people of means that could readily begin each ski season with a new set of boards and boots and who could easily afford the thousands of dollars per week it took to secure a ski out condo at some Rocky Mountain resort town. One got the impression that the wealthy elite would let me into their privileged world only as long as I knew my place. I would be allowed to ski or play an occasional round of golf, as long as I remembered my role was to serve them drinks and dinner once the day was done. Resentments, especially for someone developing full-blown addiction, are dangerous things. Add resentments to "anywhere but here" and "fear of failure" syndromes and one has the makings of a perfect yet lethal cocktail of despair.
In my next installment of "Almost Paradise" restless discontent goes "California Dreaming." But this would be no mere “Mamas & Pappas” affair. Up to this point in my life, I had no accomplices in my “anywhere but here” alcohol ladened desires. But that was about to change.