Number Ten, Oak Street.

Odd to think how a sliver of the right side of my face ended up being printed in Wesleyan University's 1988 year book. Wesleyan University is in Middletown Connecticut. I wasn’t a student and I didn’t live in Connecticut. But there I was. Dressed in a bulky sweater looking unfortunately slack jawed at a school bus load of students being taken away by cops. There were straight-armed fists held out the windows in arrested defiance, a load of on lookers, and me. In of all places, Middletown, Connecticut.

In the winter and spring of 1988 I lived actually on the banks of the Hudson River in New York. I was working at the time as a volunteer on the sloop Clearwater. The winter finds the Clearwater undergoing repairs in it’s frozen and wintry dock up the Esopus Creek not far from where that small stream empties into the Hudson at Saugerties. So that was my address then - Number Ten, Oak Street, Saugerties. New York, winter 1988.

Saugerties is a small town with only a few streets, a diner, a pizza place, shops and maybe a bar or two but I wouldn’t have known about that then. Snowy and cold. We worked out of Lynch’s marina. Quiet and crisp in the mornings, we tended to our chores and projects. The Esopus creek was frozen with ice thick enough to walk on. We could walk straight out the mouth of the Esopus and go stand out on the Hudson for awhile and watch the iceboats across the way. The iceboats were these glorious contraptions with sails and skates and they flew at breakneck speeds across the ice on the brilliant and windy afternoons.

Days were spent quietly in Saugerties painting and varnishing, re-rigging Clearwater, and looking for signs of rot, as well to as any number of other tasks suitable to the upkeep of an old wooden boat and now temporarily forgotten.

At some point during the winter I had some break time. Some time off. I believe that it was worked into your stay with Clearwater that time could be taken off for other endeavors and I was on to visit a friend of mine living at the time in Middletown Connecticut and majoring in music at Wesleyan University. I put what little I had with me back into my backpack, picked up my guitar, and left number 10 Oak Street, Saugerties New York. Winter 1988.

I remember little about how I actually got from Saugerties to Middletown. There is a fleeting and vague recollection of a ride from another Clearwater volunteer at the time. The memory, if it holds up, puts me in an old van with this hysterical hippy fellow named Mit. Mit was with us working for two months maybe. He had a mess of long red hair and wire-rimed glasses. He was fond of saying that “Tim is Mit spelled backwards” and was a master at spending the idle evenings drawing psychedelic snakes on bits of paper and reading. So with no one to check this story with, and no other memory of how I made my way to Middletown, I’m going with the Mit explanation and hoping for the best.

I journeyed to Middletown to see my friend Jessica Lurie. At that time she was the most passionate, mysterious, energetic, talented, and beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. Jessica and I had gone to high school together. Well for a year of it at any rate. She being two years older than I, my first year in a new school in Seattle was her last, and I was in love with her from the moment I first saw her. We had chummed around certainly over the years and were established friends. Still though, the invitation to visit her in Middletown was a heart stopper and a heroic journey for a girl had to be undertaken. She invited me to stay at her house. I was dumbfounded.

However much of a heroic journey is was to travel in the passenger seat of a Ford van with a hippy named Mit from the Hudson River valley to central Connecticut I don’t really know. But the journey was undertaken, and I was duly deposited guitar and backpack on the steps of Holistic House on a clear day in March. Holistic House was (maybe still IS) a very large co-op house on the edge of Wesleyan’s campus. I think the thing may have had three or four floors to it with any number of housemates. Jessica wasn’t there when I arrived, or she was there and had to leave. I can’t remember. But I do remember passing the afternoon sitting in the kitchen talking at the table with a woman named Heidi who was eating vegan ice cream and who occupied a room at the opposite end of the attic hallway from Jessica. I remember little else really about the passing hours until the jarring moment when Jessica Lurie returned home, greeted me, and made the subsequent and somewhat immediate introduction of her boyfriend. This boyfriend business was a small detail about her life that seemed to have managed to go unmentioned until the exchange of handshakes. Or maybe it was worse than that– I think Jess may have just introduced him as her “friend” therein subjecting a perfectly good human brain to the insidious task of attempting to figure out the true nature of the relationship. At any rate my heroic journey for the girl of my dreams was undertaken and, though dashed, I had to admit Jessica’s boyfriend was a super nice fellow. I cannot though, for reasons perhaps of principal alone, quite remember his name.

This turn of events led to an interesting question; namely – what the hell was I going to do for a week in Middletown Connecticut? And how is it that 18 years later I would sit with a friend in Portland Oregon as she showed me some photos in her old year book and I would discover Jessica Lurie, and the slightest sliver of my face and be immediately flooded with memories of winter, snowy sidewalks, geodesic domes, girls, kissing all night until the light comes, rallies, arrests, and in real time as I type this I also recall that I was pictured on the cover of the campus newspaper. Not bad for a novice shipwright on a failed heroic journey for a girl.

I remember Jessica taking me on a tour of the house which was gigantic inside. Up in the attic were two rooms connected by a hallway the shape of the pitch of roof its self. There was a small four-pane window at the top of the stairs which themselves curled down to the floor below. At some point or other I met Heidi coming out of her room and we fell back into conversation at the top of the attic stairs. She was a women’s studies major, had blondish brown hair, wore large bifocal glasses and spoke with a gentle lisp. I liked her right away and couldn’t help but vaguely notice that she seemed to be talking with me. Twice.

The day continues somehow and turns into evening. I am unsure of the events leading up to going to bed, and I am likewise unsure how it was that Jessica, her boyfriend, Heidi, and myself ended up sharing Jessica’s bed built for two. It was crammed in between two walls and a very uncomfortable place for four people to pass a night. There we were though, telling stories and jokes and packed in like sardines. I was squished in between Jessica on my right and Heidi on my left. I don’t really know how long we held out for, but it was some hours later in the dark when arms were numb and you couldn’t turn over that Heidi whispered that she was fed up and asked me if I wanted to go sleep in her room down the hall. Yes. I did. And there in her attic room down the hall from another attic room I slept in her arms for the rest of my nights in Middletown.

At some point Jessica hatched a plan that we would all go out to spend the night in someone’s dome. At least I think it may have been a dome. I do remember Heidi and I driving winding roads in the pitched dark and coming upon Jessica and her fellow riding bikes with no lights. I don’t remember anything much about the dome (or perhaps it was a barn) except the color yellow comes to mind and that there were insturments there.

Crisp and clear were the days. Heidi and I passed them together or I bummed around by myself when she was in class. Late at night we’d return to her attic room and kiss and sleep. The winter of 1988. I was on the road.

This story has another component to it’s telling. Another subplot for those uninterested in girls and backpacks and snow. This thread connects Wesleyan University to South Africa, and myself to the yearbook. It would seem that in the winter of 1988 that Weslyan University still had many stocks invested in companies that did business in South Africa which was still suffering cruelly under apartheid. There were more than a few moves on college campuses to pressure the institutions to divest those stocks by a round about way to pressure the South African government. Banners were painted, rallies were held, speeches, songs, and chants echoed out of throats across America - and Wesleyan too had its day for the brushfire of protests. In the winter of 1988.

Student pressure had been mounting on the school administration for a year or two leading up to the events which I would be part of. With little or no response to student demands for divestment, tensions and frustration were mounting and they boiled over the week I rolled into town.

The University's administration offices were located in a small church-like looking building made of stone. It was called North College. The president of the college had an office there and the building was crowned with a steeple. Rallies were held on the steps of North College and Jessica mentioned that we might go along and check out the scene. There were a good couple of hundred students, maybe a little less, surrounding the steps listening to speakers speak of divestment, human rights, racism, and justice. With my days open and Heidi in classes I started attending meetings of the Divestment Now organizing committee. I had time that busy students didn’t so I happily volunteered for anything I could do to help. I made posters, xeroed information packets for the press, organized a rally complete with bands. To pull that one off I had to go through administrative channels at the college – reserving rooms, filing forms, getting keys, talking to campus security. No body ever asked me whether I was, in fact, an actual student and somehow I got away with it.

There then came a very big day. The day in which students occupied the administrative offices, including the president’s office. They were going in to stay put and simply weren’t going to leave without some respect. Now the whole shooting match clicked into a higher gear. Now we had people to support who were on the inside and who weren’t coming out. Food was collected, messages sent, sleeping bags rounded up. Hailstorms of fliers invited the entire student body to visit what was going on. And they did too. The size of the rallies grew. I got my picture on the cover of the campus newspaper playing guitar on the steps of North College. (Woefully as I recall, but what can you do).

The occupation went on for six days. I had extended my stay in Middletown but had to get back to the Clearwater soon. I was fully immersed in the workings of this protest and making new friends. Decisions were made by consensus, and I was blown away by the amount of cooperation and respect that people had for the process. These folks operated at levels which completely eclipsed similar actions out west – namely in Olympia. It was an amazing process.

By week's end though the writing was on the wall. Folks were tired and behind on school work. The administration was completely exasperated at not being able to work at their desks. At one point a truce was proposed that protesters could stay in the offices if the administration and president could go back to work and simply just work around them. As I recall consensus was reached in record time on this one. “Um, no. Any objections? Passed.”

We knew that the cops were coming in the morning of day seven. That was the final and expected ultimatum from the school. Meetings were held throughout the night. I remember returning to Heidi’s bed for 45 minutes and then back to wait it out for the cops.

Along the way somewhere, and several day's before, I had met a painter and woodworker, a cool dude with dreads named George. He was interested in seeing the Clearwater and offered me a lift back to Saugerties, and in one of those odd poetic twists of timing he wanted to leave during the afternoon of day seven.

The police arrived with a yellow school bus and gave the final word to those inside and out on the steps of North College. No one moved and with throngs there to watch the police began removing the students one by one. A woman broke into the steeple of the building and was playing “We Shall Overcome” on the church bells as the cops continued to clear the offices. She was the last one out. They had to go find her up there. She appeared a moment after the bells went silent framed in the front door with a cop on her arm. Her fist in the air, smiles and tears and her body and her face.

Somewhere along the line I was talking with someone who was arrested and inside the bus. A black and white picture froze the moment. Jessica’s face is in the lower left hand corner. There’s a crowd and a bus and a hat full of memories.

After, at some point in the afternoon, I said goodbye to Jessica and her sweetie, and loaded my gear into Gorge’s VW bus for the trek back to Saugerties. Heidi pulled open the door and kissed me in the middle of the intersection and that was us. I have never seen her again.

George played live Bob Marley bootlegs as we descended into the Hudson River Valley. Back to Number Ten, Oak Street.

Years later (and just last night) my friend Orna wants to show me the photos that she took for her old college yearbook. I have to admit a certain small (and passing) feeling of trepidation. I had spent the day moving. I was grouchy and tired. Orna’s pictures were absolutely beautiful but to be honest I hadn’t connected the name of the university to my life. My brain was turned off which was all right with me considering the day. We had gone through the yearbook. Had left it be, and then I picked it up again. I opened a random page and my eyes settled on a a photo of a hand painted sign on a piece of cardboard calling for “Divestment Now!” In front of the sign is a woman’s face partially hidden behind her hair. My brain wakes up – what the hell year is this? 1987. The woman in the photo with the sign is Jessica Lurie. “Orna,” I ask, “Have you by chance got the yearbook for 1988?” She does. I devour every photo, scanning every face. There’s George. Jessica. Amy. Eliza. And, I find a large picture of Heidi in class looking up something in what looks to be a language dictionary. I feel like I’m looking through a window where nothing has moved and no one has changed. Other faces are there too that I vaguely recognize. And there are four pages on the push for divestment and subsequent occupation of North College. And I'm in there, a small sliver of face in the crowd…. Standing next to the bus talking to someone on day seven. I'd been up all but 45 minutes of the night. I hadn't slept really for days. I remember that morning feeling very, very alive. My mind spins. Not bad for a novice shipwright on a failed heroic journey for a girl. Or a journey perhaps that simply took an unimaginable twist and I went with it.
Winter 1988. I was on the road. Anything could happen. And it did.