LA - Deep Springs

Term 5

Reflections on a year – I ride desks, not horses – cute lambs

As I did for the previous semester, I feel compelled (more for myself) to provide a brief reflection on the period of time that has just passed. I’ve found that each passing day makes me think harder and harder about what this past year has meant, especially considering that its almost over. Because half of my class will be taking the next term off, its becoming more and more obvious (in a disturbing way), that these next two weeks are the last stretch of time that we, the second and first years, will exist together as a class.

Deep Springs is interesting because of the rapid turnover rate in student bodies. Contrasting this with the intense personal environment that the student body exists in, one is presented with a simultaneous and often confusing feeling of complete camaraderie, yet an impending feeling of finitude. Once these two weeks are over, Deep Springs as I have known and experienced it for the past year will no longer exist. And while I’m sure this exists to a certain level at all schools (classes graduate every year), nowhere else is it so pronounced.

None of this is helped by the fact that time seems to be moving at approximately 2x speed. I’ve been writing all these blogs on the same Microsoft Word file, and I recently decided to scroll all the way up to the top of the document. I reread the post where I wrote about my first day here, and it doesn’t feel that long ago. In fact, it seems like yesterday that my first year classmates and I sat atop Chocolate Mountain, lying in sleeping bags around a campfire, sharing our uncertain thoughts about the year to come. Even then, there was some form of connection…whether or not it was formed from a mutual fear of what lay in store for us, or out of the genius of the application process, I’ll never know. All I can attest to now is the fact that this last year has been one of the best I’ve had in a while. And if I haven’t yet come full circle, it feels as if something great and unexplainable has happened. And the ways in which that momentous shift has occurred have yet to make themselves known.

Phew. I apologize for the reflection-rant. I’ve been thinking of these blogs as a more and more of a writing exercise…and its 2am and I’m listening to The National. It’s a veritable perfect storm of over-sentimentality. So without further ado, the news of Term 5.

Unfortunately, I am no longer the butcher. After a glorious two terms, I have been relegated to riding a desk as the Office Cowboy. In fact, there is no riding or cowboy involved. I simply work in the office – doing office things. I answer the phone, organize billing, make spreadsheets, shred paper (the best part of the job!), and many other exciting things that I wont bore you with. That beings said, I still get called back to do what I like to call “consulting work,” on periodic butcher projects. A notable one was the recent bull slaughter. This deserves it’s own paragraph.

Normally you don’t kill bulls. They’re expensive, taste bad, and are generally a real bitch to deal with. Unfortunately we have (had) one particular bull who had become a nuisance. He had charged several of the cowboy’s horses, refused to move between pastures, and wasn’t “doing his job.” Therefore, it was decided that the best use for him would be in the form of ground meat, and it fell to the brave men of DS11 (myself and my former butcher partner along with several other classmates) to do the deed. Now, a normal cow slaughter takes place on a weekend and usually lasts about 3 hours. This slaughter was different for several reasons. Firstly, the bull pen is several miles away from the slaughter pad. And secondly, bulls are about two to three times larger than the cows we normally deal with.

The whole deal got off to a bad start. It took 9 shots to drop the animal. 9. Shots. To the head. 9 rounds from a .30 -06 rifle. That was completely insane. Additionally, since the bull was so large, we were afraid to hang it from the normal gambrel system we use for cows. So instead, we used a backhoe to suspend it off the ground. However, it was so long that we couldn’t hoist it all the way up, necessitating some convoluted finagling to skin and eviscerate it. Also, when animals are eviscerated, a backhoe bucket is normally placed underneath them so that the entrails are easy to collect. However, because the backhoe was already being used to hold the damn thing up, we were forced to let all the innards fall on the ground. Once again, I’ll spare the graphic details – but lets say that getting hundreds of pounds of bull offal into a backhoe bucket was not particularly enjoyable.

The final step in the process is sawing through the backbone, and since the bull was so big, this took considerably longer than nomrla. In fact, it took so long that we worked into the dark. We were working by headlamp before we called it quits, hauled the carcass high enough off the ground so that coyotes wouldn’t get to it, and returned in the morning to finish it off. Just in time for biochemistry class at 9:30! That’s Deep Springs for you – a life of contrast.

But after a story of death, comes a story of life! Its lambing season, which means that there is a whole host of cute new baby animals to cuddle with. In practice, this means that students need to keep a continuous watch on the ewes. Scheduled times are at 9pm, 1am, and 4am. It has made for lots of sleepless nights, but all of that has been more than made up for by the ability to watch this pretty incredible process. And lambs are completely adorable.

Tidbits

One of the newborn calves was having trouble walking, so he lived on the lawn in front of the dorm for several days. We named him Lawn Calf.

I’ve been meaning to mention this before, but the timing seemed apropos: several months ago, I was surprised to find a hawk wrapped in a plastic bag in one of the basement freezers. This odd object continued to spook me on a regular basis…I mean, imagine that every time you went to put away some packaged meat or get frozen vegetables to cook with you discovered a frozen hawk…It was weird. But eventually I learned that it was found dead and put in the freezer with the intent of taxidermizing (sic) it. So last weekend, that’s what we did. It took about five hours of agonizingly precise work, but we now have a stupid looking preserved hawk. Sweet!

My dog Olive has spent this term here. It’s been wonderful having her here and she’s had a great time running free around the ranch, but she is wholeheartedly determined to eat as much trash as possible. Every time I let her outside, she makes a beeline to the compost and slop buckets. Her voracious trash-atite even forced me to take her to the vet due to stomach issues. It was a real bummer, and honestly, given the price tag for a few x-rays…I should be doing pre-vet rather than hanging around on a farm and reading philosophy.

I’ve taken to stocking cup-a-noodles in the bathroom so I don’t have to walk the 20 feet to the dining hall to get a snack. My laziness is spectacular.

Cattle drives during snowstorms are interesting and cold affairs – and I get the distinct feeling that the horses hate being ridden.

Can you believe it’s almost the summer? To all of you unlucky enough to have finals, good luck!

Love,

Rhys

Back from the Dead

Well, it appears that the infamous Term 4 has come and gone. Snowstorms, applicants, and the winter blues now seem just as distant as the first day of term almost seven weeks ago.

Please excuse the lack of blogs, or really any other form of communication for that matter. I’ve found myself (for no discernable reason) going completely incommunicado this term. I can’t help but think that it was temporarily a good thing (once again for no clearly discernable reason), but I hope that this post represents a proverbial emergence from my little mental hole. I personally hope to talk to a lot of you (at least I hope there are people reading this) soon, and feel vaguely crappy for dropping off the map.

But enough, on to the meat (hehe)

Term 4, where…

Applicants invade – I create a curing chamber – the pig population declines – things happen

By far the most salient experience of this Term was the arrival of applicants. Known colloquially as “applicant season,” this is the time of year when all of the people who made it through the first round of the application process are required to spend 4 days at the college participating in labor, attending Student Body meetings, classes, and generally existing and sort of getting in peoples way. In total, from week two to week 6, 9 groups of anywhere from three to six people visited.

To be honest, I quickly found the applicant process to be quite painless. Firstly, my labor position of butcher generally does not require much outside assistance. Most of our time is spent working in the butcher room in the basement, and there isn’t enough work for more than two people (and even if there was, a third would just get in the way). The only time I had to work with applicants during labor was actually under the best possible circumstances. During cow slaughters, it is necessary to halve the cow after its been eviscerated and skinned. This requires the annoying process of sawing through the 10-12 foot long backbone with a handsaw, a job that can take up to two hours. However, with five eager-to-impress highschoolers, it is possible to run a literal train on the backbone and get everything done in about a half an hour. Secondly, no applicants stayed in my room. Because we don’t have a couch in our dorm and the other room in our suite is occupied the Applications Committee Chair (applicants have traditionally not stayed in his room), our entire suite was Certified Applicant Free. This automatically designated us as the “safe haven” for stressed out classmates who didn’t want to deal with the capital O “Others.” We made sure to keep a candy bowl stocked and several cases of soda available. Needless to say, I spent a large portion of this term sitting in my room eating candy.

Besides my (perhaps manufactured) sense of cynicism regarding applicants, I really didn’t mind having them around. Most of them were genuinely interesting and smart people who were fun to talk to in most cases. However, I am quite disappointed that nobody from Wildwood applied. Somebody from Crossroads got into the second round…Have you no shame!? I’m expecting better from next year’s class.

But by far the most interesting phenomenon I noticed during this term occurred when the first applicant group arrived at the beginning of week 2. Almost as soon as they walked through the door into the dorm, all the students immediately coalesced into small, tightly packed groups of people. There was loud laughing, gregarious conversation, and generally excessive merrymaking. We were just louder and more obvious than normal. While none of this was explicitly unusual (I like to think of us as a generally jolly group of people), it certainly was strange for 9:30 on a Tuesday night. It was as if lemon juice had suddenly been introduced to milk, and we all curdled into tiny, self-contained groups. When the Others arrived from the outside world, we went into some odd form of self-protection mode. This eventually dissipated by the time the first group left, but it was certainly interesting to watch the way a self-contained community reacts to outsiders.

On a totally different note, this term has seen the emergence of an odd new interest of mine: charcuterie, or various cured and processed meats. My guess is that this all began once we started slaughtering pigs. Firstly, I‘ll lay it all out on the table. When alive, fully-grown pigs are truly disgusting animals. They roll around in the mud all day, they eat, well, like pigs, the noises they make are awful, and they have no hesitation about eating the blood from their freshly slaughtered compatriot. (chills). However, once dead, pigs are one of the most amazing and interesting of all the barnyard animals. The sheer variety of tastes that can come from the different cuts, to its general delectability, and most of all, its incredible fat. We have a cookbook devoted entirely to fat, and the chapter on pigs is named “Pig Fat: The King.” Need I say any more? And apparently, our pigs are especially fat. I can’t really make any comparisons, but the back fat (the fat covering the loins and backbone) is about 3 inches thick. I feel like that might be a difficult thing to visualize, so just imagine that your back had three inches of fat covering it. It’s a lot of fat.

But, back to the main issue, charcuterie. Somehow, through this process, I started to get interested in the process of curing different cuts of meat. Common examples would be prosciutto (dry-cured hams), and salami. I think it all started with bacon. We normally have bacon delivered to us in our monthly food shipments, and the cooks wanted us to do something about that. Bacon normally comes from the belly of the pig, a generally useless cut that we wouldn’t do anything with normally. However, once turned into bacon, it really becomes a thing of beauty. The process of making bacon is quite simple, just combining sugar, salt and spices together and letting a pork belly sit in that mixture for about a week. But the end product is much much better than anything you can buy at a supermarket and is kind of a revelation. And we made a lot of it. About 100 lbs to be precise. I don’t think we will be buying bacon any time soon.

After this, I felt like pressing my advantage and moving on to more interesting meats. The process of dry-curing is tricky. Essentially, you take raw meat, combine it with salt, spices, and a tricky little ingredient called sodium nitrate (a slow release preservative), and hang it up to dry. There is no cooking involved, and the meat is never brought above room temperature. This is prime territory for things to go wrong, and necessitates a very specific environment. Approximately 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit and 70-75 % humidity. The fact that we live in a desert, with winter temperatures hovering around the mid 30s and about 10% humidity, makes this all quite difficult. However, I decided to geek out on this one, and managed to hijack an unused fridge to modify. In order to get the climate needed, I’ve attached four components: a humidifier, a small thermostat-like device connected to the humidifier that allows me to control the humidity numerically, another piece of equipment that allows me to override the thermostat in the fridge to keep it at a constant temperature much higher than a normal fridge (right now its sitting at about 55), and a fan to keep airflow moving around the chamber. Also, for full ghetto affect I blacked out the glass windows in the fridge with plastic bags. It looks pretty cool.

Surprisingly, it actually worked! At this point, I have four pieces of meat curing. Two guanciales (an Italian recipe for dry cured pork jowl), and two pieces of my own creation that I call Lomita (dry cured pork tenderloin with fennel, pepper and cognac. Dry cured pork loin is called Loma (Spanish), so I thought that the name Lomita was apropos). Hopefully by next week I will have three more pieces of meat drying: two rounds of bresaola (an Italian recipe for cured beef, similar in some ways to prosciutto), and my personally favorite, lardo. Lardo is dry cured pig fat. That’s it, just pure unadulterated fat cured in pepper, bay leaves, and salt. Mmmmm. All of these pieces will sit in the chamber for anywhere from 1 to 4 months. At which point they will be delicious.

But, I suppose I’ll stop rambling now. I’ve found that its difficult to provide a good, broad scope of what has been happening here, especially when I haven’t posted in a while and a lot has happened. I hope this brief summary of a few things has satisfied your curiosity (or perhaps I’m being presumptuous).

Tidbits:

Once again, a Term 4 Post-Butcher Carnage Report:

Cows: 2

Pigs: 4

Cured bacon: ~100 lbs

Smoked hams: 8 (~20 lbs each)

Record cow slaughter time: 3.5 hours from shot to quarters

# of times we scared the dairy boys by putting a pig head in front of the dairy barn: 3

Knife cuts to the front half of my left index finger: 5 (I’m getting better!)

Knife cuts to both hands: 10

Saw cuts to my right index finger: 3 (these bleed a lot).

Miss all of you. I hope to catch up soon!

Rhys

Diggin’, Sawin’, Fencin’, Ridin’ and other manly things ending in “i-n”

So it appears that I have survived Term 2 with sanity intact (maybe…)

General Labor digs a huge trench – My hair gets a dose of “creativity” – I learn that I will eventually die by chainsaw – We learn to ride horses

So I’ve realized that in the past post (long ago in a time of antiquity) I neglected to tell all of you what my labor position for Term 2 was. To answer the question that I know you were all clamoring for, I was on the GL (general labor) crew. GL is essentially the college’s basic workforce, under the direct supervision of the LC (student Labor Commisioner). In practice, this means that we do tons of random tasks around the college that need doing. However, oftentimes the main focus of GL is larger projects that usually take up several weeks at a time. In our case, this was THE TRENCH.

To give you some background, there is a large and very expensive set of hot water heaters that provide most of the water to the dorm and BH. Recently, our mechanic noticed that there was some leakage in the pipes that fed thermal fluid (a noxious combination of anti-freeze and water) to the heaters. Unfortunately, that meant that if this problem were to be ignored, we would essentially blow up the heaters, creating a very messy situation for everybody involved. Therefore, it fell to the brave souls of GL to unearth the two pipes, isolate the leaks, and save the college (not really, but I like to add the last part). In practice it was much more difficult that it sounds. The pipe itself stretches for about 200 ft from the back of the BH, around the root cellar, through the lawn of a faculty residence, across a rock hard stretch of dirt road, and then follows along the side of the dorm, snaking around and under various trees, bushes, and shrubbery. But we thankfully didn’t know that when we started.

All and all, this project took about a month to complete. And it was not a fun month. Our first challenge was to actually find the pipe itself, a process that itself lasted for about a day. By the time we actually found it, the area behind the BH looked something akin to a scene from the book “Holes,” with about 15 four-foot deep slots dug into the ground.

Now that we had actually found the thing, all that was left to do was follow it to the dorm. Oh, I forgot to mention that the propane pipe that feeds the entire dorm and kitchen also follows the same line as the pipe we were trying to unearth. This led to us becoming intimately acquainted with said gasoline. And by intimately acquainted, I mean that we severed it twice with well placed pickaxe strokes. This resulted in two visits from a rather grumpy employee from the propane company in Bishop and some pissed off cooks.

The worst part about the whole deal was crossing the road. After years of travel by heavy machinery, it had become something akin to rock and it took us about two weeks to cross (despite the fact that it was about 30 ft wide). But, eventually, after several burst sprinkler lines (much to the chagrin of the grounds keeper) and the aforementioned propane fiascos, we finally completed THE TRENCH. We then got back to other GL tasks like mutilating trees for firewood, learning how to use a chainsaw along the way.
Along with that useful bit of practical knowledge, I was informed that the chainsaw, if used to much, would eventually develop a consciousness along with a desire for revenge, and kill me. Bottom line, chainsaws are awesome, but also incredibly scary.

On the media front, we have a freelance journalist from Sweden who will be arriving on campus sometime in November. After finding out that we have a Swedish student studying here (our own Felix Froms), the journalist, Po (pronounced Poo), decided that he wanted to write a story about the college with a focus on Felix. It will most likely be printed in Scandanavia’s largest newspaper, or the Swedish equivalent of the New Yorker. Felix is quite excited for this opportunity. As a diehard intellectual and connoisseur of all things philosophical, he actually left Sweden because of his detestation for its educational system. (He was informed on his first day of law school that students should be taught to be “search engines, not thinkers”). Now he is quite excited to denounce Swedish educational policy through its biggest media outlets. Or that’s what he says at least.

Also, his name is actually Bo Dylan Felix Froms (Everybody just calls him Felix), and the Student Body, when voting on the isolation breach, came close to making it a requirement that the article be titled Po on Bo (which is even funnier when you pronounce it correctly as Poo on Boo…We’re so mature aren’t we).

Finally, since this post has been so long in coming, I’ll include a little bit of Term 3 news. After a ten-day break during which I split my time between LA and Montana, I arrived back on campus on last Tuesday. Surprisingly, I was actually excited to get back to school (a concept totally alien to me before Deep Springs). Also, since we passed a motion late in Term 2 that suspended the Drug and Alcohol policy over break, there was a certain amount of debauchery that occurred on the last night. I took some pictures of the aftermath in the dorm in order to prove that I actually go to a real college. It looked vaguely reminiscent of a frat house.

Also, my labor position for the next two terms is butcher. Along with my Canadian friend Daniel (who a lot of you met at my going away party), I’ll be slaughtering 15 sheep, 3 pigs, and a cow over the period of the next seven weeks. So far, we’ve been dealing with the cow that was slaughtered before we left for break, but next week, we’ll be slaughtering 4 lambs. It’s a lot of bloody, tiring, but very interesting work. Also, it’s the first labor position I’ve had that involves learning a skill, which is nice when compared to washing dishes or digging ditches for weeks at a time.

Our next break is winter break. That means I’ll be seeing some of you soon!

Rhys


Tidbits

I recently gave one of my classmates “full creative license” with my hair.

I was duct-taped to a wall (voluntarily of course).

When I got back to LA, it was an interesting realization to understand how nice it was to not give a shit about what I looked like.

My roommate keeps some guns on campus, so we’ve taken to going shooting. He brought a .45 handgun back after break, and we have become the glass bottle’s worst enemy.

It’s much harder to write a little about events that happened a while ago than to write a lot about events that happened recently.

The brain named itself.              think about it…

Once More Unto the Breach

UPDATE: Ladies of the class of (maybe) 2013, ready your applications! Yesterday, the board of trustees of Deep Springs College voted to begin planning for a transition to a co-education institution. Ho-ly shit. Once this has really sunk in to my psyche, I’ll write more about it (most likely in the next post), but right now, I don’t know what to think. So ya’ll have to use your imaginations. Sorry bout that.

Welcome to Term 2

I attend real classes - The oracle speaks – We sauna with strange alumni -
The GL truck flies the pirate flag – I get elected – (this post takes me a while to write, so there are a lot of “updates”).

Wow, what a change. I’m finally a Deep Springer. No more touchy-feely Summer Seminar classes and 40 page reading assignments. This is the real deal. Term two has been quite the change.

The first upheaval was the arrival of the other half of the student body. During term one, half of the second year class was on their term off, but as break wound down, more and more students trickled back into the valley. They are all incredibly interesting people, but I simple can’t seem to get over the fact that the campus seems more crowded. The smoking porch is always crammed with several people procrastinating on the latest paper, cigarette and pipe smoke hanging like a cloud over the chairs and couches. This also means I have a roommate now. Ben Shaver, from Upland, CA, a veteran of five years in the Marine Corps as an Arabic linguist and an avid climber. So far, our living situation has worked out great. We’ve been trying to get out climbing as much as possible (including once to a previously unexplored area with some amazing two pitch granite towers), and he always has crazy stories about working covert ops with SEAL teams or wiretapping politicians in Iraq. Needless to say, it’s been fun.

On the class side of things, I’m being my normal indecisive self. So far, I’ve been attending four classes, “Liberalism and its Discontents” a survey of liberal political philosophy starting with Hobbes, “Infectious Diseases” a course covering the spread and preventative measures of many famous infectious diseases, “Art and Politics in 20th Century China,” dealing with, well, art and politics in 20th century China, and finally Auto Technology. If you need a car fixed, I might be able to make it slightly better (or probably worse) by the end of term. However, the add/drop period for classes is coming up, so I need to drop at least one, possibly two courses by the end of the week (you need to specifically apply to the curriculum committee in order to take more than three full credit courses). This is for good reason, considering that my current reading load is ~300 pages a week, with several essays thrown into the mix.

UPDATE: I’m taking Liberalism, infectious diseases, and autotech. On a side note, I calculated that if I were on ApCom (applications committee) during Terms 4-5, I would be doing approximately 3 days worth (72 hours) of work (committee, labor, class) during each 7-day week. Ouch…

Speaking of committees, OracleCom has spoken. (If you haven’t already been able to tell, every organized group tacks on the suffix “com”). Every fall, the chairs of each of the committees (ApCom, RCom, ComCom, and CurCom) convene to divvy up the first years into each committee. I’ll spoil the surprise for you and say that I was assigned to ComCom, but that’s not the most interesting part. Everything here has a kind of mystique to it, and this process was not to disappoint.

At the end of the first SB meeting of this term, as our edutainment, we were told that we would be heading down to the old horse barn on the lower ranch. This barn is essentially your quintessential barn, old, wooden, and with a huge loft in the roof, accessible only by a rickety ladder. Once we arrived, we all filed inside and followed the SB president up the ladder to the loft. Inside we found a strange sight. A single chair, situated amongst piles of hay and old pipes, a bright spotlight trained on the seat. Otherwise the room was completely black. We all stood there, uneasily staring at it until an ethereal voice called out, “will a first year please come forward.” One of my classmates came forward and sat down. He waited for several seconds, before the same voice called out “ApCom.” As you could probably guess, this process continued until the entire first year class had been sorted. It really did have an oracle-ish, sorting hat type vibe to it.

So Communication Committee (ComCom for short) is in charge of maintaining the college’s relationship with the outside world. In short, we write the seasonal newsletters (the one you girls were ogling in hopes of finding some attractive guys), and the annual report. We also field media requests. This last one has been the most interesting part so far. This year already, we’ve received several requests, and with the switch to co-ed impending, we’re bound to get much more. Of the two requests we’ve had so far, one has been sane, the other insane. The sane one was from a French program (L’effet Papillon, cheesy name I know) that wanted to do a short segment on the educational program here. Apparently, the French have a mild obsession with the school. Our hunch is that it has something to do with the cowboys. The insane one is awesome. We recently received a letter from the producer of such classic reality TV as Judge Judy, High School Confidential, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. His production company wants to make a reality TV show about Deep Springs. Apparently, the school would be “fertile subject matter for a series or a special.” While this is entirely ridiculous and would never actually happen, my theory is that we should let them film a pilot, then prevent them from airing it so the SB can actually have an episode of a reality TV show about Deep Springs.

Basically, we’re all going to be international reality television stars out here. Who knew?

A week or so ago, there was a reunion for the alumni of the 1990s. This was interesting, because the 1990s were a pretty screwy time for the college in general. The board of trustees has just voted down a co-ed decision that was highly supported by the SB and there was a considerable amount of animosity and discontent fermenting within the college. This manifested itself in some pretty strange ways. Drug use was highly prevalent (apparently there was a time when a good portion of the SB had a pretty serious heroin habit going on), and the sense or organization that pervades the institution now didn’t really exist. As a case study, one of the student labor commissioners created the labor position of “voice of the desert,” whose job would be to wander around the desert for four hours every afternoon with a notebook, attempting to hear the “voice of the desert.” I suppose he took notes on it as well? My guess is that copious amounts of hallucinogens contributed to that little bit of educational weird-ness. All in all though, this made for a pretty entertaining reunion. This was kicked off by a late night encounter on the smoking porch between some alumni and a few current students. Basically, it amounted to the alumni pulling up, blitzed on Hennessey and offering some students weed. Seeing as all this occurred at around 4 in the morning, it led to some pretty wacky conversations about breakfast cereals and the correct composition of oatmeal. It was a weird, weird night.

But, all in all, they were pretty interesting people, and not all of them were totally weird and drugged out. They had some interesting stories to tell, and it really drew a parallel between the disparities of experiences that can occur here. I sat on one of the student panels the fielded questions from alumni (called “The State of the College.” My presence on it mystified me because I really have no idea about “the state of the college”), and two of the main questions they asked were “so, what are you fighting with the trustees about?” and “what is the SB fighting about?” Both of which we had to answer with, “well…nothing really.” It was a comforting thought.

This was also a positive experience because it allowed me to discover that we actually have a sauna here. Its up by the upper reservoir and is filled with mouse feces. But it still works, and is a great way to relax, especially when you get to listen to crazy alumni talk about their experiences at the college. Also, if I come down with particularly nasty flu-like symptoms in the next couple of weeks, I’ll know that I got Hantavirus from all the mouse shit. (See, I’m already learning things about infectious diseases!).

Tidbits

Last week, I was elected to the post of Withrow Commissioner. This means that I am in charge of filling the twice-annual spot of Withrow speaker. In non-Deep Springs terminology, that means that I’m in charge of bringing noteworthy speakers to the college twice a year. I say this not to toot my own horn, but because I want your help. For the most part, my audience is comparatively wealthy kids who used to (or perhaps presently?) go to a Los Angeles private school. Therefore, if you know anybody, or know anybody who knows anybody who you think would be a cool person to have come out and speak to the SB, LET ME KNOW. Mostly, we’re focusing on academic/literary/political figures, but if you think somebody outside of those constraints could do a good job, let me know. rhys@deepsprings.edu. Danke.

The general labor truck now flies the pirate flag! Beware!

My classmate Scott Wang broke the windshield of a car with his ass (it’s a funny story)

Several gigantic rats have taken it upon themselves to build homes on my cars engine. I’ve embarked on an impressive trapping campaign, but every time I kill one, another one comes along and starts using the insulation to build its damn nest. If any of you have suggestions for rodent annihilation, please inform. My car thanks you.

Much love,

Rhys

Dispatches from 1-2 Break

Recently, I came across a phenomenon that pointed to why I began writing this blog to begin with, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to reflect on that for a bit. 

Over the past week or so, while perusing my Facebook newsfeed, I’ve been coming across more and more status updates about people going off to college, leaving everything behind, moving into dorm rooms, meeting new people, the usual stuff I suppose. 

I left home almost two months ago and am currently on my first break from college.  I said goodbye to all of my friends what seems like a lifetime ago, and while it was difficult, I’ve already adjusted to the life that I will be living for the next two years.  For contrast, the people I left behind in LA are just leaving, off to college lives that will be about as different as physically possible from what I will be doing. I don’t explain this to elevate one experience over the other, but simply to highlight the disparity between my life here, what I used to do, and presumably what I would be doing anywhere else. To my sensibilities, this was a major stumbling block to any relationships I would try to continue with friends from my previous life.  Our experiences would simply be radically different and almost irreconcilable.

To a certain extent, this was addressed even before this idea for a blog even entered into my head.  At my senior exhibition, my dear friend Emilie Pass asked me how I would keep in touch with my friends once I left for college.  Simply by nature of being at Deep Springs, there are some stumbling blocks to that (iffy internet, no video-chatting, no cell service etc). This blog is the best answer I’ve been able to come up with.  My experiences here have been so different than anything else I’ve ever done in my life, so all encompassing weird, intriguing, ego-destroying, beautiful, and random that whenever somebody asks “how’s Deep Springs been?” I don’t rightfully know how to give them an appropriate answer.  I guess what it boils down to, is that this blog is an attempt to answer that very banal question, and by proxy to satisfy Emilie’s concern.  I know it might be less personal than an IM conversation or a phone call, but honestly, I would feel awkward attempting to type paragraph upon paragraph into iChat, fruitlessly trying to explain experiences that take me hours to poorly describe in these posts.  I say poorly because comparing my writing here to the actual vibrancy and visceral-ness of the real deal, my explanations can’t help but fall short.  They don’t seem to capture the true emotion of the situation, but rather its simple, exterior characteristics. But it’s all I can do, and hopefully it does a decent job of bridging this possibly imaginary gap that I’ve set up between my previous life the present. I thank all of you who have encouraged me to continue writing.  It’s been a fun, if slightly frustrating process.  

So enough of my wishy-washy sentimentality…

Welcome to this week’s? Several week’s? Month’s? Indeterminate period of time’s? blog

We scare a busload of rednecks – I want to be a cowboy – A cat defecates on my bed – I remember how expensive real life is – We loiter in parking lots

Once again I find myself apologizing for not posting in a while.  Its been harder than I thought to keep this going regularly, so I think you might have to be content with slightly inconsistent updates (maybe once every two weeks?).  I’ve found it becomes harder to come up with interesting writing when less interesting things are happening, but ya know, that makes sense I supposed.  So this post will be a sort of amalgamation of the past couple of weeks.

We were all recently treated to a demonstration of how really small and insular a community we are here.  Before break started, I was minding my business attempting to get work done in the main building when one of my classmates, Keenan, approached me saying, “you should probably come outside and check this out.”  What I found was a broken down tour bus.  Now this was a legit tour bus, a Greyhound-looking thing, carrying about 60 kids and their chaperones from a 4H club in Reno, NV.  Apparently on their way back from a function in Lake Tahoe, their engine failed, and seeing the school in the distance, they coasted over.

Now, as you can imagine, the sudden infusion of 60+ rednecks (pardon my judgment) from Reno, effectively tripling the size of a school based on a principle of isolation, was a bit of a shock to the SB.  One second we were minding our own business, and next, we were being invaded! They certainly made themselves right at home.  About 20 minutes after they arrived, they initiated a soccer game on the circle and were happily settling into the rocking chairs on the porch of the main building.  It was as if they were returning home, and all myself and the rest of the SB could do was sit there and quietly sulk from the smoking porch. 

I take that back though, we certainly did our best to make them feel at home.  And by at home, I mean we tried to make them think that we were totally insane.

This took several forms. 

Firstly, a friend and I decided it would be fun to start a swordfight on the roof of the dorm.  So after climbing up high enough to get a good vantage point on the soccer field, we began skirmishing with some swords made for LARPcom (see several posts ago).  If I remember correctly, we got pretty into it, complete with medieval curses and lots of fake dying.  It was pretty exciting, especially with the prospect of falling off a roof (although that would’ve really completed the dramatic effect).

We also decided it would be entertaining to show up to dinner in costume.  There is remarkable feature of Deep Springs known as the Bonepile.  The Bonepile is essentially a lost and found on steroids, where every discarded piece of clothing from previous SBs goes.  It takes up an entire room and has some pretty interesting articles of clothing.  Needless to say, we had a field day. I personally went for the full-on Spiderman suit, while others wore anything from denim dresses to complete winter gear.  It made for an interesting meal, and I got a lot of compliments.  (“Hey Spiderman!” was an original favorite). 

A cat just pooped on my bed (and yes, I wrote that before cleaning it up).

Before break started, our whole class took a trip to Cow Camp.  During the summer time when temperatures at lower elevations increase, most ranches drive their cattle herds to higher locales where water is more plentiful and plant life is more available. Since Deep Springs is in fact a working ranch with a herd of ~300 cattle, we do the same thing.  In fact, one of the labor positions available to students here is “student cowboy.”  During the summertime, this consists of driving the cattle up to the aforementioned cow camp, where the cowboys spend the entire summer watching over the herd, mending fences and generally being rugged.

Now cow camp is just that.  A camp.  It is located high up in the White Mountains (about a 2 hour drive over rough dirt roads from the college itself) and consists of two shacks, one for cooking and one for sleeping. It’s some of the sparsest living conditions I’ve ever seen.

However, I must admit that there is something unquestionably badass about cowboys. I don’t care if they’re actually middle-class suburbanites posing as cowboys for a few months before going off to Yale and UChicago while keeping copies of the New Yorker in the outhouse, there is a mystique that I cant quite put my finger on.  As soon as they rode up to us on their horses, rocking beards, tattered chaps and huge hats, something transported me back to when I was 6 when I wanted nothing more than to be a cowboy. 

That’s not even to say I would want the position, it’s an incredibly difficult job, especially during the summer, when you’re left with one other person with no contact with the outside world for three months. But I don’t even have to think about things like this until next year. Phew.

So for the past week or so we have been on break. Break here is confusing, especially when staying on campus, because you go from being constantly stressed out and busy to having nothing to do.  The first couple of days, I just sort of sat around and did nothing. Eventually though, activities began to fill the void.  Strangely, Half Life 2 has spread like an epidemic amongst the SB.  It started on one person’s computer, and about three days later, you could always count on wandering into the rumpus room at two in the morning and seeing at least one person glued to their computer screen with an obligatory audience of about four people watching raptly from behind. I’ve also been trying to get a head start on some of the next term’s reading.  But mostly, break has consisted of sleeping late, wandering aimlessly, a bit of climbing and one day off campus.  I also bought Age of Mythology, which has been an awesome timesuck, although I plan to uninstall it once break ends on Tuesday. 

Also, seeing as I’m one of the only people here with a car, I’ve been the designated driver for break. Recently though, about 10 of us decided to drive to Bishop to see what was going on at night.  Our conclusion: Nothing happens in Bishop at night. We did get to spend some time loitering in a Vons parking lot, racing each other in shopping carts, and eating real ice cream for the first time in 2 months. Yay!

These trips into town (especially my day off during which I went fishing and camping for a night) allowed me to understand how damn expensive the outside world is. I went from keeping my wallet in a drawer in my desk and not having used cash/debit or credit cards for almost two months, to spending about $100 simply to drive for a couple of hours, and eat breakfast and lunch. It was an awfully confusing experience.

Tidbits:

A chicken with its head cut off does in fact run around like a chicken with its head cut off

Menu for end of term dinner:

Summer squash carpaccio
French onion soup
Gnocchi with beet-cream sauce and pine nuts
Meatballs with hibiscus sauce
Peach cake with rhubarb ice cream

Mmmmm…tasty

In the Gossip Girl books, Nate Archibald goes to Deep Springs.  How did I not know that?

I recently learned the story behind the WWII era pickup truck in the machine shop (prominently featured in Japanese GQ’s recent Deep Springs photo shoot!):

The former Japanese internment camp Manzanar is located about a two-hour drive from campus in the Owens Valley.  Apparently, when the camp shut down in the 1940s, the military left it entirely abandoned and a Deep Springs class took it upon themselves to relieve the government of some of its derelict material.  One night, they drove to Manzanar, stole said truck, and filled the bed up with as many useful items as they could find and took it back to school. Unfortunately, today, all that’s left of this midnight run is the truck, and two soup ladles with USMC engraved on their handles.

Good luck at college everybody! Miss ya’ll

Rhys

Soccer: The Most Dangerous Game

No seriously.  Over the years, the students in charge of first aid have compiled weekly accident reports showing that besides working in the kitchen, playing soccer is the most dangerous thing to do at Deep Springs.  Yes, that means soccer is more dangerous than castrating bulls, driving tractors, or riding horses.  On that note, somebody recently brought up a study statistically proving that riding a horse is more dangerous than doing ecstasy.  Take from that what you will. 

Welcome to this weeks edition of ze blog

Papers are handed in – we scare European tourists – courses are selected – I freestyle for first time – The true origin of my name is revealed – and much more


Hello everybody,

It’s been a good week here, if not slightly more stressful than others.  I mostly attribute that to the fact that we handed in our first papers of summer seminar on Sunday.  This, in and of itself, should not have been a particularly stressful activity had it not been for the fact that I was informed, a day before the due date, that the format that I had been writing essays in for the past 6 years wasn’t appropriate for this style of writing. 

Whoops. 

This led to me spending my Saturday in a quintessentially Rhys-like state of panic as I attempted to learn how to write an analytical essay again. That wasn’t a lot of fun to say the least.  But it eventually got handed in on time.  Whether or not it was a good essay is totally beyond me though.  I guess we’ll see in a few days, but I’m cutting myself some slack considering it’s the first essay of college.  Nobody does well on that right?…right.

On a totally disparate note, there are a surprising amount of European tourists who show up on campus.  They are either lost (which mystifies me considering there is literally one road that goes for ~100 miles without any turns) or are out of gas (which makes a bit more sense, considering there is one road that runs for ~100 miles).  Some of the second years have recounted hilarious stories of strange travelers or scared tourists thinking that the school was some kind of cult.  I don’t think they’re entirely to blame for their misconceptions.  I’ve personally realized that it is one of the greatest avenues for comic relief, and we’ve all gotten wrapped up in theorizing about different ways of messing with people who show up.  My favorite idea began with, “you know that movie Deliverance…?”  The rest of it involved a lot of rocking chairs, banjos and creepy signs.

Following up on the idea of committees that I touched on in last post, a longtime favorite committee is RapCom.  RapCom, as you may be able to tell, is where a bunch of white guys get together and attempt to freestyle.  And by freestyle, I mean freestyle in a way that only Deep Springers can.  Needless to say, it involves a lot of classical Greek references along with allusions to great works of fiction (There’s some good ol’ fashioned trash talking as well).  However, the craziest thing is that I actually attended one of their meetings.  The conclusion: I’m incredibly white.  The rapping life is not for me.  And I have the same amount of flow as molasses (awesome metaphor right?).  I’d go for about 10 seconds, then I’d just freeze up, get really embarrassed and start repeating the same word over and over again. Although hopefully I’ll work on my style a bit more and by they time summer roles around, I’ll be a rapping machine!

Ya…nope

On an interesting note, we decided what courses we will be taking for the upcoming semester.  The process for choosing was very neat, and was the first real experience I’ve had with the “self governance” aspect of the school.  The process was pretty simple.  The classes were organized by professor. To begin with, as each group was brought up, there was an informal straw-poll to gauge general interest for each class.  Then, there was a period of “advocacies” and “dis-advocacies,” where anybody was allowed to speak on behalf or against a specific class on the basis of its merits or lack thereof.  The criteria were not only what classes interested you, but also what classes you thought would benefit the community or mission of Deep Springs as a whole.  Because of this, there was an interesting aspect of selflessness to the decision making process, where people would advocate for a class not because they were personally interested in it, but because they saw it as a valuable addition to the canon of courses or it would help out the college in general.  Finally after this section, there was a final vote.  This became quite unnerving as us first years quickly realized that we had a real say in what we would actually be taught for the next 3 months.  There was a notable example when a classmate of mine cast the deciding vote for a contentious class and immediately yelled “oh my god!” after realizing that his opinion actually carried enough weight to shift the tides.  Overall it was a very cool experience and I’m looking forward to experiencing more of the self governance side of SB life.

So…we will be taking:

Community and individualism: Liberalism and its discontents
Hegel and the politics of recognition
Mathematical modeling of populations
The history and future of infectious diseases
Plato seminar: soul, soma, mythos, logos
Literature seminar: women imagined, sex and family
Accelerated calculus 1 + independent studies
Philosophy and the rhetoric of science: The optics of Rene Descartes and the Opticks of Isaac Newton
Intro to auto mechanics

On a lighter note, I finally got to fulfill one of my childhood fantasies.  Since Deep Springs is incredibly isolated, they actually have two fire trucks in case a fire broke out somewhere on campus.  It’s a requirement that all first years get oriented to the basics of the fire system (fire hydrants, hoses etc), so I actually got to man a fire house and spray it all over the main circle.  It was awesome!  I also go to ride on the back of the truck we drove it down the highway.  I’m sure we confused the hell out of some passing motorists.

Confusing drivers along highway 108 seems to be another common theme throughout my short time here.  It’s a tradition that after SB meetings, people propose “edutainment,” which can cover a lot of ground between book readings and “boojies,” (the colloquial term for the insane stress-relieving dances that happen on the weekends).  This particular weeks edutainment consisted of driving out to the highway, laying out on the asphalt and looking at the stars.  Besides being an incredibly moving and relaxing experience, it was a great way to scare the crap out of some drivers along the road.  I’m guessing it was fairly confusing for them to be cruising along a stretch of (presumably) deserted highway at 11 at night, only to see a group of 10 random guys illuminated by their headlights on the side of the road.  I got to use my best creeper stare (I hope most of you know what that looks like).

Tidbits

A bunch of “intellectual” atheists/skeptics attending bible study with evangelical Christians can produce some awkward silences

I need to learn how to pump gas so I can interact with the aforementioned attractive and lost European tourists

People send Deep Springs the funniest mail.  (ie a woman from the 90s requesting that the school promise admission to her two boys (both in 4th grade) when they turned 17.  She assured the school that they were both “already promising students.”  phew).

Applications Committee has already received an application from a student in Ankara Turkey (cool right?)

It’s a bit of a tradition for the second years to give incoming first years nicknames that go on their mailboxes.  The way that the second years created the names was by playing a game of free-association.  This meant that all of last year’s classes sat down at a table, started with the persons name and simply began throwing out random names/ideas/concepts until somebody said stop.  The name that they ended on was the person’s nickname.  Mine went something like this:

Rhys Dubin: Thomas Mathew, doobie, Reeses Pieces, ET, doodie, doobie brothers duwhop brothers, blues brothers, mission from god, crusade, children’s letters to god, children’s letters to Santa, Mrs Claus, Rudolph, Olive, Frosty the Snowman, iced out, Ice-t, the rapper, T-Pain, house of pain, Tyler Perry, Tyler Perry presents Equus, Katy Perry, TGIF, stiff in the wind, Rebecca Black Friday, black friday, which seat should I take, autotune, all modern music, pretension, Tyler Cash Bourgeoisie, too much, you know to much, Bonaparte, Napolean Bonaparte, Napolean Dynamite, vote for Pedro, Joseph Stalin, Broseph Stalin, Broletariet, brobo cop, brown butt, brown shoes, snowshoes, snorlax

I am snorlax

ALSO, I ALMOST FORGOT. If anybody would like to come visit over the Term 1-2 break (August 19-29th) please let me know ASAP.  It’d be great to see some of you before you head off to college!  This is an especially good time to visit considering its beautiful and summery here.  Not to mention that this is probably the only time when a majority of the SB will be on campus during a break.  Let me know.  I’d love to see you!!

See ya soonish,

Rhys

Week Two-ish

Hello all,

I’d like to start off by saying that this post will most likely not be as exciting as the previous one.  Things have certainly started to calm down a bit, and I’m happy about that.  I don’t think I could really deal with waking up at 4am and being left on mountains on a weekly basis.  But ya know, maybe I’m just not made of tough enough stuff. 

But that’s not to say that things haven’t been happening, they’ve just been happening on a more regular and relaxed level.  People are settling into routines, getting used to labor positions, work patterns, schedules etc, so I figured I’d relate a bit of that to you guys in this post (along with some more exciting bits) starting with my labor position.

I work in the boardinghouse, colloquially known as the BH. 

So…
Drumroll please…




I wash dishes. 
Well, I wash dishes and periodically wipe down tables and put food away, so I guess there is a bit more to it.  But honestly, it’s not a bad job.  The group of guys that I work with are all very cool and we use it as a time to listen to bad music (the BH is a notorious hotbed of top 40 tunes) and unwind a bit.  Additionally, since it’s generally regarded to be a pretty boring and non-prestigious job, I’ll be at the top of the list for something more interesting next term.  There’s not much else to say on that matter.

On an interesting note, CurCom (curriculum committee, the body in charge of organizing classes/teachers) released the possible course list for the first semester.  The way that this works is that each of the three long term professors offer 5 possible course suggestions, Brother Kenneth (the dean) offers 4ish and the visiting professors each offer ~3.  All these proposals are then taken before the student body to be voted on.  In the end, each long-term professor teaches 2 courses, Brother Kenneth will teach 1 and the visiting professors will teach between 1 and 2. 

For this semester, the courses offered are…

Community and individualism: Liberalism and its discontents
On the Human Condition: Hannah Arendt and her interlocutors
Hegel and the politics of recognition
Democracy as a way of life
Mathematical modeling of populations
The history and future of infectious diseases
Vertebrates of Deep Springs Valley
Flora of Deep Springs Valley
Human genetics
Plato seminar: soul, soma, mythos, logos
Short fiction seminar: telling the truth slant
Poetics seminar: oblivion and remembrance, comprehension and elaboration
Literature seminar: women imagined, sex and family
Accelerated calculus 1
Calculus 1 independent study
An introduction to calculus
Rhetoric now and then, then and now
American pragmatism
Philosophy and the rhetoric of science: The optics of Rene Descartes and the Opticks of Isaac newton

This list will be narrowed down to ~ 9 classes at the Friday Student Body meeting.

On Saturday, our class took a trip to the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes.  It’s an annual tradition that Deep Springs classes have been doing for as long as anybody can remember.  We left campus at around 9 at night and arrived at the dunes after several hours of bumpy driving along empty washboard roads through a remote desert landscape.

The Eureka Valley is desolate, even more desolate than Deep Springs Valley.  It’s desolate in a no water-no people-3 hour drive from anything-no paved roads sort of way.  Everything in it is incredibly massive, including the dunes, which rise to an altitude of about 700 ft above the valley floor.  They are also among the few dunes in the world that bear the title of “singing dunes,” for the fact that when sand sloughs off the surface it produces a huge booming noise, something like a jet cruising overhead.  This is generated by what I like to call “sandvalanches” that can be generated by wind, or by 20 people sliding down them at once.  

Before we arrived at the dunes, the first years were informed that it was general practice to enjoy the dunes “au natural.”  I’ll leave it at that.  But as we approached the first dune, we broke into a full sprint and began climbing up the first slope towards a ridgeline several hundred feet above.  Keep in mind it was a full moon, so everything was eerily illuminated, especially the silhouettes of people already on top. 

I know I don’t have enough eloquence as a writer to truly convey the nature of my time there.  All I can really say is that it was probably the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience.  Standing on top of these unearthly dunes in the middle of the night, looking out at a massive deserted valley, no other visible human life…it was as if we were primitive gods, testing out our new powers before getting down the business of world making.  The only reminder of any form of civilization was the watch on my left wrist.  Other than my fellow 16 classmates, the entire planet might as well have been devoid of life.   

The rest of the night was spent sliding down the faces of some of the more massive dunes.  Because the sand was so soft, you could basically swim over the top of them, so the entire group would get together and slide down headfirst on their backs.  This created the “singing” noise, so if you stuck the back of your head deep into the sand, you could feel the vibrations from the sound throughout your body.  I can’t overstate this effect.  It was so powerful that you felt your teeth literally vibrating in your head.  And if you craned your face back to look at the horizon, it produced a bizarre perspective change, where up and down became indistinguishable and the horizon seemed flipped on its side as if you were swimming over stars.  The mountains became indistinguishable cloud patterns and the desert floor became the sky.  It felt like I was underwater, and everybody around me was swimming over a surface of sand suspended above emptiness. 

This experience has stuck with my in a very visceral way, especially because I’ve yet to be able to wash all the sand out of my hair. 

On a more “real” note, I helped out with a cow slaughter yesterday.  That was very interesting. Also bloody.  But you could’ve guessed that.  I can honestly say though, it really takes an animal being dead for you to understand how big it is.  Cows are gigantic animals, and it takes a lot of work to move them around, especially when every single tractor/backhoe needs to be jumped by an increasingly grumpy ranch manager. 

Tidbits

All ranch managers are apparently required to be large, intimidating and mustachioed.  They also yell at you for driving to fast

I still can’t get used to the lightness of my pockets without a wallet or cellphone in them.

The word of the month is “ethos.”

How would you pronounce Epictetus: Epic-teetus? e-piktehtus?  Its things like this that keep me up at night
   
Every official organization here usually goes by the name ___com (ie ____Committee).  So in the spirit of embracing my inner nerd, I’m starting LARPcom.  For those of you unfamiliar with what LARPing is, it stands for Live Action Role-Playing.  In laymen’s terms, it’s a bunch of guys running around with fake swords pretending to be fantasy characters.  Since the first book we read for class was the Iliad, the scenario will be Greeks vs. Trojans.  The main building will be Troy and the dorm will be the Greek ships.  North dorm vs South dorm.  It’s going down this weekend.   Pictures to follow?

talk to ya next week,

Rhys

Week One

Hey everybody! I know it’s been a little while so I’d like to apologize for my tardiness. I’ve been spending some time trying to adjust to a slightly different (that might be putting it mildly) lifestyle here at Deep Springs, and I’ve had neither the mind nor wherewithal to write a post. Although in the future, I’ll hopefully have it together to be more regular. I wont tempt you all with a pre-scheduled posting day, but maybe that will come later…But enough with my ramblings, on to the good stuff.

Wow, what a crazy week. Scratch that, it hasn’t even been a week! It certainly feels like its been longer, and for good reason. Everybody here seems to be determined to cram as much as possible into one day, at least in this beginning period of Term 1. Because of this, I’d like to start a brief section I like to call “Why Deep Springs Orientation is Probably Different From Other Colleges’/Why its Likely To Get You Killed.” I’ll begin off with the two most significant stories in which the general theme seems to be “how did you not see this coming.”

The first night after I arrived was fairly relaxed. My family and I arrived on campus, set up my room and my parents then toured around the campus for a few hours before leaving. After all the parents had left, the student body (henceforth known as SB in Deep Springs parlance) had a brief meeting during which we shared our names, where we were from, and our favorite Pokemon. I thought the last fact was a nice touch. However, the peculiar part about all of this was that the new students were continually reminded to get some serious sleep, considering that the next day was going to be “really really busy.” I assumed that meant lots of meetings, orientations etc. But when looking at schedule for the next day, nothing appeared until lunch at 12:30. That should have been my first clue. So, around 11:30 I turned off my lights and went to sleep (not having wifi does truly miraculous things for your sleep schedule btdubs).

Cut to 4 am when I was awakened by the sound of Odd Future blasting from a speaker the size of my closet (strategically positioned directly outside my door) combined with 10 people running around my room banging pots and pans while yelling “labor party!! Labor party!!”

Needless to say I was slightly confused.

After blearily throwing on my nearest clothes (shorts and sandals), I was informed that that wasn’t really going to cut it. So after sorting through my half-packed boxes of clothes, I finally managed to find a pair of jeans and work boots and hobbled out to the main circle. It was there that we were informed we’d be weeding the garlic patch. At 4 in the morning.
Welcome to Deep Springs Mr. Dubin.

We finally finished at around 8 am, and in retrospect, I can confidently say that weeds are amazing. Honestly, they’re the most evolutionarily successful organisms I’ve ever seen. And by successful I mean they’re everywhere. And by everywhere I mean fucking everywhere. But besides the obvious stumbling blocks to conventional “fun” found in the idea of weeding a quarter mile long stretch of garlic for 4 hours, I actually had a good time. It was an enjoyable way to commune with my fellow SB members in addition to allowing me to get a taste of what real Deep Springs labor might be like.

The next good story comes from that night. I was slightly surprised to hear that after spending only 4 hours in my bed so far, we would actually be spending this night out. In fact, we would be taking a drive several miles down the valley to a trailhead and hiking to the summit of a nearby mountain where we would be camping. That same day, the president of the college gave us several seminars on reading topographical maps. This is the other point where the idea of “how did I not see this coming” shows up. These seminars mostly dealt with how to read a map, but more specifically, if we were theoretically to be left on top of this one specific mountain with nothing but this map, how would we get down? I think you guys might be starting to see where this one is going.

We arrived at the trailhead in pitch darkness and began hiking. After about two hours of steady climbing, we reached a plateau below the summit of Chocolate Mountain, built a fire and had our first official SB meeting, during which we were all inducted into the Deep Springs class of 2011. However, when the meeting adjourned, the SB president stood up and addressed the first years. “I hate to tell you guys this…but you’re the only ones who’ll be spending the night up here.” The second years then proceeded to give us a packet of bacon, a carton of eggs, a skillet to make breakfast the next day, and a topo map of the region. Then they walked off into the night. We were supposed to get a satellite phone, but it got left at campus.

It was our job to find our way back to school. Keep in mind that we had driven and hiked in the complete darkness, and simply retracing our steps back to the trailhead wouldn’t have been effective, first of all because we had no idea where we were going, and also, because it would put about ten miles of road between us and the school.

Needless to say, we all survived. But the descent was certainly interesting, involving lots of jumping down dry washes and down-climbing small cliffs. It was a lot of fun.

So that was the first two days…

The rest of my time here hasn’t been nearly as harrowing or exciting, but still enjoyable. We’ve started Summer Seminar, a course called The Genealogy of the Divine, in which we look at questions of ethics, especially in relation to the changing notion of what it means/meant to be divine or godlike.

Ironically, the class format (seminars with brief lectures) is very similar to Wildwood, and it’s a source of constant entertainment to hear people exclaim, “I’ve never had a class that was even remotely similar to this one!” and then think about how awesome Wildwood is.

My roommate, a second year, is taking this term off, so I have a huge dorm all to myself. He, being the ambitious type, took it upon himself to build a homemade loft into the space, complete with rudimentary archway and staircase. It’s pretty impressive, and gives meaning to the name of the room (“The Grand Hotel Abyss”).

Everybody here is very cool and interesting and entertaining and has good taste in music. Needless to say, I fit right in (just kidding hehe).

But that’s about all I have to say for right now. I’ll be posting again as soon as possible.

Love ya’ll

Rhys

Tidbits

The maintenance man’s name is Padraic MacLeish, which I think is one of the coolest names ever

It hurts a lot to fall out of the back of a moving pickup truck

I’ve realized I only like gray cats (I miss Ashes)

My room has a sign that says, “No moon bouncers allowed.” If any of you can shed some light on the meaning of that, it would be much appreciated.

Prologue

Hello all.  Jumping onto the recent self-indulgent bandwagon of participating in semi-interesting activities and writing blogs about them, I’ve decided to create this journal of my life over the next two years as I attend Deep Springs College.  In it I hope to provide some form of insight into peculiar pieces of daily existence and the general idiosyncrasies of what, by most peoples standards, is a fairly strange place. 

I’ll start with a brief introduction to the institution itself. 

In the words of the internet, “Deep Springs is an all-male liberal arts college located on a cattle-ranch and alfalfa farm in California’s High Desert. Electrical pioneer L.L. Nunn founded the school in 1917 on the three pillars of academics, labor, and self-governance in order to help young men prepare themselves for lives of service to humanity. The school’s 26 students, along with its staff and faculty, form a close community engaged in this intense project.

Deep Springs operates on the belief that manual labor and political deliberation are integral parts of a comprehensive liberal arts education.

Each student attends for two years and receives a full scholarship valued at over $50,000 per year. Afterwards, most complete their degrees at the world’s most prestigious four year institutions.”

I arrive on campus Friday, July 1st, with classes beginning July 4th (what kind of communist anti-American shenanigans am I getting myself in to!).  My goal will be to post at least once a week, but that schedule may change as I adjust to my surroundings.

So there you have it.  Let the good times (and the gay jokes) roll.