I don't think we're at Amherst anymore, Toto.
A gale swept me up, suddenly, in the early morning hours of August 16, 2005. It threw me into a stone wall, busting my knee and ending my senior soccer season before it had begun. It let me hover for a week in a French hospital, before tossing me (gently, with plenty of painkillers and without bending the knee) back home to Boston and then to Amherst, where, dizzy from spinning in the tornado, I worked less, partied more, remembered less and regretted more than in any of my previous six semesters. Finally, it plopped me down in Los Angeles, where I am spending a semester off before finishing my academic and athletic careers next fall.
More specifically, I was plopped down at Long Beach Airport, which is not to be confused with LAX, the legitimate L.A. airport. About an hour south of the city, Long Beach Airport has no docking gates. Its 'terminals' are trailers-this is not hyperbole; they are vinyl-sided trailers of slightly above-average size, propped up on three-foot metal stilts. And the baggage claim? It's outside. Should it rain, your luggage will get wet. But of course, it never rains.
It is 70 and sunny every day. Even a New England boy like me knows that-that's why I came out here in the first place. But the layout of the whole airport not only reflects this truism, it depends on it. Waiting for their bags outside, everyone flipped on their sunglasses, officially signaling the switch from New-England-sepia tones to California Technicolor. Which is all just to say that I am quite a long way from home this semester.
The first thing I've come to better appreciate from afar is that at Amherst everything required is provided for you. Room and board; a bed; a gym membership; cable TV; heat (albeit often insufficient heat); electricity; running water; condoms; wireless internet; even toilet paper, light bulbs and maintenance: not only are they all covered by the exorbitant tuition, they're presented to you on a platter, and in unlimited quantities. Even weekly movies and all-you-can-drink beer are provided gratis, at the campus center and social dorms, respectively.
It didn't take me long to realize that the real world does not function this way. I arrived in California without a place to live, a job, a car (which, in Los Angeles, is not optional) or any support system whatsoever, save for two of my former roommates at Amherst, who had graduated and now lived in the area. Them and my Amherst liberal arts (read: utterly void of practical uses) education.
Dorothy, over the course of her adventures in Oz, learns a very simple lesson: There's no place like home. Is there, similarly, no place like Amherst? I would propose that most of the other NESCAC schools are places very much like Amherst. But is there no place like Amherst for us after we graduate-or in my case, simply leave?
The day I arrived, Zack-perhaps because it was his house I was crashing at until I found my own place-urged me to start apartment hunting right away. Dan, however, championed a different plan: going out and getting drunk.And just as I had the whole previous semester at Amherst, I chose play over work. About seven pitchers of beer later (though I can't be sure about the exact number), I found myself with Dan and an old high school friend of his under the Santa Monica pier, having just invented a new game, the "Santa Monica Pier Challenge." The object: touch the fifth post out from the water line. It was very much like the game of "Full Contact Fetch" Dan, Zack and I had played down a snowy Memorial Hill the winter before-exceedingly simple, explicably ill advised, and yet exceedingly, inexplicably fun.
When Dorothy and the gang finally meet The Wizard, he tells The Scarecrow, "Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma."
After three-and-a-half years at Amherst, I assume I've already gotten just about everything I'm going to get out of college, save the diploma. But how much will that liberal arts education even provide without the signed piece of paper that comes with it? Will it help me distinguish the good potential roommates from the psychotic ones, for instance? Or have all the hours spent reading the nuances of Nabokov made it, in fact, harder for me to sniff out the Humbert Humberts on Craigslist?
Ian takes a shot at the answers and ponders life after Amherst in upcoming installments of his new column. He welcomes comments and questions at iglovett@amherst.edu.