If on a Summer’s Day a Traveler*

Forty years ago this summer I was hitchhiking south through West Virginia when I realized my route would, or could, take me close to Woodberry Forest, my prep school alma mater just outside of Orange, Virginia.  I had a couple of friends who were teaching there and thought it might be fun to drop in and say hello.

I had left home from North Carolina in early June, heading west on a trip that would bring me through San Diego to Mt. Whitney, up the eastern edge of the Sierras to Yosemite, over to San Francisco and then north through Oregon to Idaho and to Glacier National Park in Montana. 

But by late July, the road was getting a little lonely, and the start of a new school year was closing in, so I decided to head for home.   Highway 2 in Montana led out of the Park, east towards the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and then down into Iowa and the major Interstates.  A few days and a few dozen rides later I found myself in familiar territory, south of Culpepper on Route 15.

I hopped out at what was then Woodberry’s lesser used western entrance, shouldered my pack and headed towards the school, through the woods, along the fields, up the hill by the gym, past the hallway where six years before I had entered as a black-tied “new boy”, and around the front to Walker Building reception. 

After two months of sleeping in a tent and making small talk with strangers, it was a relief to be back in a familiar place.  It wasn’t home exactly, but in a way it was.  Somewhere down the hall, I knew there was a picture of me with the rest of my entering class. I had a history here.

As it happened, this was the summer the school was embarking on a renovation of the Walker Building (the main administrative structure and the heart of the campus).  Part of the plan was to add an elevator off the lobby, to the left of the entrance to the dining room. I went and talked to the company managing the project, and I landed a job.  Day laborer.  I don’t remember what it paid, but it didn’t matter. It gave me a reason to stick around.

There was just one problem – I didn’t have a place to live. That was solved in a way I couldn’t have expected — the school’s then headmaster, Emmett Wright, offered to let me stay in the basement of his house.  There was a bedroom, a bathroom, and a separate entrance that faced the mountains. It was agreed that I would stay there, rent free, and pay for my meals in the cafeteria.  An excellent offer.

I started work the next day. The foreman on the project, my boss, was a man in his mid-50s who early on announced that except for a brief stint in the army, he’d never been away from Louisa County a night in in his life.  Like Stonewall Jackson, he liked to chew on lemons.  And he liked things done right.  

Richard Barnhardt, an alumnus and school administrator, was there then (as now) and, as I recall, had an oversight role in the project. The foreman referred to him in an exaggerated Louisa County drawl: Baaarnhaart.  As in Baarnhaaart says we should do this, or Baaarnhaaart says we should do that. 

My first task was pretty elemental: break up a concrete slab that sat where the elevator shaft was supposed to go.  It was in an alcove out back behind the Walker Building, maybe 10’ x 15’ and about six inches thick. I was handed a pickaxe and a sledgehammer and told to go at it.  The problem was the concrete was too thick to be broken just by hitting it with the sledgehammer. You had to dig the dirt out from underneath the edge, and then chip it off a few inches at a time.  So, a lot of work. 

I started swinging away.  Half an hour in, my hands started to blister.  An hour or so later, the blisters popped and started to bleed. I took my shirt off, wrapped it around my hands, and kept on going. Around lunchtime, my boss re-appeared.  My hands were raw, and there was blood all over my shirt.  He almost, but not quite, seemed to feel sorry for me.  He took a bite of his lemon. I’m sure he thought I was just another soft college kid, but this wasn’t the first time I’d picked up a sledgehammer.

Now, four decades later when I think of Woodberry, I think first of the fields, of the basketball court and its huge windows with the afternoon sun pouring in over the mountains, of the old bridge over the Rapidan River, the bend in the road, and the first sight of the Walker Building coming up the hill.  I think of the teachers who made a difference in my life.

I think of that foreman, of Baaarnnhaaardt. And as to that summer when I straggled in tired and dirty, three thousand miles of highway behind me, I think of what Robert Frost wrote in Death of a Hired Man: in the end, home is a place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in. 

* Apologies to Italo Calvino.