Previously, I wrote that I never attended grad school; however, I just remembered that’s not the case. Somehow I’d forgotten about the semester I spent at Utah State University in Logan in the fall of 1967. USU’s strong suit is forestry, animal husbandry and agriculture—hence the sobriquet “Aggies.” I suspect I was admitted because the university’s humanities department was desperate for applicants.
One of my classes focused on the works of William Shakespeare; that is, except during the deer hunt when our professor was out in the hills hunting wild game. One of my classmates, J.J. Platt., lived in a log cabin up Logan Canyon and subsisted on a diet of wild nuts and berries. Another lived in a tree house.
I lived in a basement with a former high school classmate who was an acomplished painter and beginning photographer. Below is a picture he shot of me in my room decorated with a guitar I didn’t know how to play and the obligatory bullfight poster. I call it a lintscape.
“I’m headed to the school darkroom to do some printing,” he announced one evening. “Do you have any negatives you’d like printed?”
“No,” I replied. “While you’re away, do you have any paintings you’d like painted?”
“It’s NOT the same thing!” he insisted. But of course it pretty much is, once you progress beyond the basics.
Logan is theoretically a college town, but I never could figure out just where the college kids hung out. There was a pretty good pool hall named The Owl and a nice restaurant called The Bluebird, but no bars and no coffee houses that I could find. Eventually, I quit looking after a local patrolman pulled up and demanded to know what I was doing walking the streets after nine p.m.
Logan is precariously close to southeastern Idaho and thus has something of a Napoleon Dynamite vibe. Chances of me impressing a farm girl were slim; nonetheless, I kept an eye out. I remember once I was tooling up scenic Logan Canyon astride my Honda 305 when I spotted a young woman perched on a ledge, her head buried in a book. “Aha,” I said to myself. “Perhaps we have something in common.”
I parked the bike and began scrambling up the steep slope, arriving at last panting and out of breath.
“Hello,” I said.
“Go away,” she said.
The descent was even harder than the climb up. A variance in relative altitudes only exacerbates the sting of rejection.
I kick restarted my bike and continued up the canyon, over the mountain and down to the shore of beautiful Bear Lake, where I spent the afternoon alone in the most romantic of settings. Then it was back over the summit and down through a national forest once the domain of pioneering mountain men and a nine-foot-toll grizzly bear named Old Ephriam—shot dead in 1923 by sheep man Frank Clark, who may or might not have been an authority on the works of William Shakespeare.
I hung around until November, at which time it became apparent why Cache Valley remains sparsely populated. Winters there are brutal, and in late November I decided to flee–south through Sardine Pass in a driving blizzard. On a motorbike!
After I thawed out, it dawned on me that I hadn’t finished the semester. Or had I? I don’t remember taking any finals, nor have I ever received a report card. Doesn’t matter. Academia was in my rear view mirror; whatever occupation lay ahead I had no idea, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t involve trapping beavers, shooting bears and swapping wampum with native tribesmen.