Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  But now he decided Sophie could not abide Rumi. Instead, he said, “It’s okay, Sophie. I’m harmless.”

  ~

  To know the serene professor, to understand his calm brilliance, sincerity, and compassion, is to delve briefly into his early life as a first generation American from Maine — stories not widely known in the autumn of 2013.

  Growing up in small town Maine, Stefan Friemanis was taught, as were most middle class kids of his time, to be maximally productive. “Loafing gets you nowhere,” his dad would shout back over his shoulder as he and Stefan hauled firewood. “Get your ēzelis (his Gluteus maximus) going.” If you were sixteen and college-bound in America in 1997, you were supposed to eagerly fill your space and time with evidence of a work ethic, cross-cutting brilliance, stellar athleticism, and indefatigable community spirit, measurable in brag lines for college applications. Stefan had little to claim of this sort but neither had he Ivy League ambitions.

  At South Bow High School, teachers wondered about the self-assured, innately tranquil kid, dreaming instead of doing, coming at homework assignments obtusely, circling things like a buzzard. “I think Stefan is smart and creative,” Benjamin Boulet, his junior English teacher (one of Stefan’s favorites), told his parents one evening at a parent-teacher conference. “But I just don’t get him. He could be a dynamite journalist. Although I have tried, I can’t get him interested in the SBHS Bugle.” His parents nodded, holding back their broken English. They were un-comfortable in the stuffy classroom. Mr. Boulet was twenty-five years their junior with a degree from Colby, a pink bow tie, and what seemed to them a condescending manner.

  Stefan’s dad was an auto mechanic with a hopelessly cluttered work bench and a basement full of inventions. His mother, a reticent woman with boundless affection for her only child, cleaned other people's houses. At home, she engaged her considerable domestic acumen to stretch the family budget. She cooked pea soup and other hearty one-pot meals robust enough to sustain her family in lean weeks. She stretched a Sunday roast through the week. She baked her own bread, collected eggs stooping low in the chicken coop, milked the family goat. She and Stefan’s father reared him in the warmth of an old-world household. They were delighted and mystified in equal measure as their son matured into a tall amiable boy adept in the brassy American culture in ways they would never fully understand or achieve.

  Despite Stefan’s alleged lethargy, he managed to keep his grades up while spending “more time in the Maine woods than Thoreau ever had” (his line, uttered in class that very fall). At school kids were drawn to him, the lanky, good-humored boy they called Lama (as in teacher of the Dharma; not llama, the Andean animal). He was the guy with exotic parents with a mysterious past. He palled around with a half-dozen like-minded boys, a band of “outdoorsmen” who made jokes about cheerleaders and athletes with feigned envy. At the South Bow Union Hall, they played pool, illegally drank watery draft beer, and planned elaborate adventures in the mountains and fishing trips to the coves around Penobscot Bay. Midway through his senior year Stefan was admitted to the regional state university and four years later graduated cum laude. He went straight to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and persevered to a PhD.

  His doctoral research, inspired and greatly influenced by Kate Nickleby, was about the resilience of mountain peoples in Kenya. His degree was awarded forty years after anti-Vietnam war protestors bombed the building of his department, killing one researcher and injuring three others. Stefan knew of that history. He embraced the pacifism of his dad whose own father had been cannon fodder for the Russians in the early 1940s. His dad called the Russians jãšanãs sãtans, fucking devils. He often quoted the proverb, If you give the middle finger to the devil, he will take the whole hand. Though his dad knew little about American wars, he knew about war and he hated the weapons of war. When speaking of war, he resorted to curses his son could not translate. Stefan came by his pacifism and his fear of arms honestly.

  After Wisconsin, he returned to East Africa to work for Teach Across the Planet (TAP), an NGO that delivered university courses to students in remote parts of Kenya. His base station and living quarters was a converted delivery truck. He drove from secondary school to secondary school, where he taught aside local staff. He told his students at Gilligan about his role as a circuit rider in Kenya: about his courteous, poorly paid, ever exuberant Kenyan colleagues; the words and cadence of their Bantu tongues; dusty roads and frangipani fragrance; his Kinyati students, so guileless, so eager for what he could give; dazzling night skies; savanna grasslands stretching timelessly; mountaintops shrouded by evergreen forests.

  In the middle of his third year with TAP, the program director revealed that funding for the project was tenuous. A big foundation in Seattle threatened to pull the plug. Five months later the project was shuttered, and Stefan and the director were suddenly without jobs. Worse, his students’ progression toward their degrees had been senselessly severed: another of many disasters, he later said, brought to them by so-called sustainable development. In the rear-view mirror, the only thing sustainable about the project, he realized, was heartbreak. And (another of his classroom insights), “sustainable heartbreak is as fallacious a construction as sustainable development”. The startling clarity of his memories of those abandoned students, whenever he recalled them, ripped open wounds in his own tender heart.

  The professor had a hard time leaving Kenya. When his visa expired, he wandered across the border to Tanzania and Mozambique accompanied by Gathoni Njema, a former student and companion with absolutely no means of her own. Gathoni returned Stefan’s generosity to his delight: her mocha skin stretched over a lithesome body was ever at his side, her smile and good humor shone like sunrises over the Indian Ocean, and her caresses at sundown redeemed his investment many times over. They traveled on country buses and minibuses called matatus and chapas. They laughed and lived simply in flip flops, tank tops, and shorts. They drank pineapple juice by day, beer by night. They moved southward at an unhurried pace. When they got to Maputo, Stefan’s money almost gone, they parted, making promises, he admitted, that neither could keep. Gathoni flew to Nairobi to join the throngs seeking employment. Stefan returned to Maine with no hint of what would come next.

  His parents rejoiced. His mother coddled him as if her little boy had been abducted, then unexpectedly released. He reveled in her home cooking and pampering. He got back into shape jogging Maine country roads. He fished often with his dad and his old pals. After a few months of re-entry and a raft of job rejections, he scored a teaching position. It was August 2013.

  Traveling to southern Ohio by Greyhound, sometimes the only white person on the bus, Stefan brooded over Kate Nickleby’s final email to him, the one she wrote just before she died. For the hundredth time, he wondered why she had never hinted her ill health. Surely, she was not suicidal. It was a heart attack pure and simple, just as the coroner concluded. But how could he explain what else was in that email?

  Putting aside these imponderables, he watched Pennsylvania and Ohio whoosh by and realized his heart was soaring too — the thought of joining an academic community where he might inspire and prepare this rising generation of innocent millennials. They needed him to figure out how to be, what to do, how to navigate the world of wounds. He reread a passage in the preface of Kate Nickleby’s seminal book:

  The journey away from the tragedy that is this battered, oil-engulfed world cannot happen until the foundation we’ve built since the eighteenth-century crumbles. Beyond that time of collapse, the future will be in the hands of your children and grandchildren. It will demand profound change in the way they think about themselves and what will be left of the natural world on which their lives will depend. Those tasked with preparing young minds to make this transition have inherited a mission so important that I cannot imagine a pathway to a brighter future that does not pass through them.

  The certitude of collapse and the emergence of a new order were clear to the studen
ts in Kate’s circle and to countless other scientists and writers whom the media, in labeling them doomsday prophets, dismissed. Stefan and his classmates believed otherwise. Inspired by their late mentor, they left their studies like so many Jesuits departing seminary, not as soldiers of God, but as a cadre of scholar-teachers driven to prepare a generation that would be faced with navigating their way through an unprecedented and rocky transition. Upon their success rode the very survival of at least fragments of the natural world Stefan so loved.

  3

  On the lovely Gilligan campus, once cynically referred to as Swarthmore on the Shawnee, arrived a newly appointed professor with a passion and a mission, a crafty knack for inducing critical thinking and dialogue, a strategic thinker willing to advise pitifully amateur rebels — a bunch of ordinary middle class students and some internationals in love with this man, his smarts, his good looks, his wry humor, his whatever; a boss who distrusted this self-assured upstart; a testy battle bubbling just beneath the surface over, of all things, fuels to heat and cool the place. And me, Hannah McGibbon, in the thick of it.

  For all my insecurities that fall, I brimmed with sophomoric glee as a student of Stefan Friemanis and a work-study assistant in an office a couple of doors down from him. From those vantage points, as an obsessive diarist and reluctant activist, I began keeping track of things. I began finding time to shoot the shit with Stefan. I began seeing myself with fresh eyes. I became a ludicrous version of Mata Hari, a courtesan creepily upsetting the applecart and my own sense of the future. Like a 400-horsepower bumper car, I careened through my coming of age face-to-face with terror and loss, among other things. Hence, when the time came to pulling together the frayed and musty notes from that epochal semester, now almost three decades later, I was the absolutely perfect choice, if I do say so myself. As if to ordain my role, Stefan loaned me his ageing typewriter and two oft-inked ribbons.

  ~

  On the way to class with my dear friend, Samantha Ostrom, I strolled across Gilligan University’s Centennial Quad. We probably stopped once or twice to chatter with passing girlfriends whose names, let alone personalities, I have long forgotten — paper dolls beneath dusty floorboards in the attic of my memory. It was a bright September morning in the second week of the semester. Samantha and I were quite the annoying duo. We strutted across a campus that we somehow believed owed us something. We knew all there was to know about being college chicks, a virus of the mind in those days. We assumed that passing freshmen were thinking: Wow! Those two must be seniors if not grad students. We traveled as one. We scheduled our classes together. We lived in the same sorority house. We even dressed alike. We were of roughly equal intelligence. The year before, Samantha observed, “Sweet! Our SAT’s and GPAs are almost the same!” True. Yet I absolutely felt inferior right then.

  For reasons I cannot fathom, I, a skinny, apologetic wallflower from Ashtabula, Ohio, befriended Samantha, a stunning, extroverted, robust, six-foot blonde from North Dakota, and demurred even in matters of dress and selections at the salad bar. Oh yeah, I had known the pain of invisibility in high school, trailing in the shadows of prima donnas. I was a five-four waif of a thing, flat-chested, thin-lipped, brown hair hanging limply, perpetually bearing a look somewhere between cowering embarrassment and revulsion at the thought of having to pay attention to more fully developed and popular classmates. Samantha, on the other hand, by fifteen, was as statuesque, busty, confident, and strikingly beautiful as she was that sophomore year at Gilligan.

  I realize that those male-derived traits had little to do with who we really were. Unfortunately, for a spell, they did hideously affect my own self-image. I understood that Samantha was not like those twits at Lake Erie High School. Samantha was inherently more balanced, more nuanced than those shallow Ashtabula girls. Still, I’ll have to admit I was not comfortable with the way our friendship had panned out. I wasn’t sure how it had happened or how and why I continued to let Samantha make the calls. But I also believed that I would become my own woman soon enough, whatever that meant.

  That September morning we hustled through an alley and emerged across the street from McWhorter Hall where our nine o’clock class met. Samantha was keen to arrive early and sit in the front row. She said she wanted a closer look at the young professor who had introduced himself last week and had gone through the usual first-week-of-class rituals.

  “Are you trying to hit on him?” I inquired.

  Samantha, hardly ever inscrutable, raised her right eyebrow. “No way. I just want to see whether those eyes are as blue today as they were last week. Maybe he’s wearing colored contacts.”

  “Why would you care?” My mood soured. At that time, I neither shared nor understood Samantha’s “boy craziness”. Not that our prof was a boy.

  When we got to the classroom, we saw it had been rearranged in two concentric semi-circles. We went to the foremost and sat near the center in two of those classroom desk-chairs with their ungainly piano-shaped arms. The other students stumbled in making comments about the seating and jostling for places with their friends. This was a crowd of confident undergraduates and a few grad students in a class called Natural Resources and Sustainability.

  Stefan strolled into the classroom toward the center of the two semicircles. “Today”, he said brightly as the class quieted, “today, is unlike any day before it or any day to follow. The nineteenth century writer, environmental activist, and father of our national parks, John Muir, awakened one morning in 1869 in the Sierra Nevada in California. He wrote this: I’m exhilarated to be alive in this mountain air. I feel like shouting this morning with an excess of wild animal joy!”

  He had spoken the words with a brogue of some sort.

  “How many of you are exhilarated on this day unlike any other day?” he asked and paused, turning toward an imagined companion. “Ha, not a soul stirs. No wild animal joy to be alive here, John. What shall we do?”

  He stepped twice to the left. Back in the brogue, he responded, “Flog the bastards!”

  A ripple of cautious laughter washed across the room. Some classmates looked anxiously around undoubtedly thinking it was uncool to laugh or that it was way too early for joviality.

  I chuckled. Samantha was poker faced. She later admitted she had cringed at the bastard word (she was a PK, a pastor’s kid), and she worried that the class might turn out to be tedious, what with quotations from long dead men she’d never heard of. Then she said, “I’m willing to take a risk — cut Mr. or Dr. Friemanis or Stefan or whatever he’s called a bit of slack. He is, after all, quite hot.”

  I ignored her assessment because at the mention of the Sierras, I remember thinking about a postcard my dad sent me when I was seven. On a business trip to San Francisco, my dad went to Yosemite and sent me this beautiful postcard. I pinned the card to my wall. I can still see the picture clearly: an evergreen forest at the front, bare steep rocky cliffs rising high above it with a grand waterfall tumbling down. Blue sky. When dad got home, he said, “We’ll all go there together, honey. You’ve gotta see the Sierra Nevada. We’ve got nothing like them in Ohio.” In the wake of that memory, darker recollections rolled-through of my father’s long battle with the bottle, his quirky instability, his loss of jobs and all the other broken promises, including the “to-have-and-to-hold” one. I now sit here with my eyes tightly shut trying to picture my dad. I cannot bring up his face. Still, I surely did love that dad of mine. And I did seriously want to hike in those California mountains with him.

  Stefan went on to tell about John Muir and his dream of creating a mountain park to refresh the weary workers and city folk deprived of wilderness. That dream ultimately became Yosemite National Park, thanks largely to Muir. He then reverted to character, speaking Muir’s words from memory: “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn lea
ves.”

  A lily-white dreadlocked girl in an Indian or Arabian costume clapped. What a strange looking chick, I thought at the time. Her name was Astrid. She was Canadian and wicked smart. She soon adopted me.

  “Well, today”, Stefan said, “we’ll ask the question Muir may himself have been thinking 140 years ago. Will these mountain parks still be here to refresh us when our children and grandchildren are alive?”

  In a twist of logic, typical of Stefan’s classes, rather than discussing how to save Yosemite and such treasures, we spent the morning debating what elements in our lives could tarnish or obliterate Muir’s legacy. We paired up, made lists, then reported out to the class. Our personal lists included things like bottled water, driving everywhere, space heaters, disposable drink containers, throwaways in general, tooth floss, fast food, excess consumption of all sorts — especially by fashionistas, at least half of what Walmart sells, flat screen televisions, and digital devices. At the macro end, we included the internal combustion engine; fracking for oil and gas; petroleum-based agriculture; wetland draining; overharvesting of fish, timber, soils, and other renewable resources; loss of biodiversity; mining; military spending; large scale irrigated agriculture; GMOs; too many people in national parks like Yosemite; and more.

  He put up a slide showing Oberlin professor David Orr’s choices of what he believed we could not sustain. Orr’s list included: militarization of the planet — the greed and hatred it feeds; a world with large numbers of desperately poor people; unrestrained development of technology; continued economic, technological, and financial complexity; divisions by ideology and ethnicity; hedonism; individualism; conspicuous consumption; spiritual impoverishment and accompanying anomie, meaninglessness, and despair. This seriously destabilized my nineteen-year-old sensibility. Discussion veered in many directions, with several students I could not now name, noting the apocalyptic undertones; what would happen twenty-five years from now if we continued to overfish the oceans, waste the farmlands, devastate the rainforests, start new wars, widen the gaps between the rich and poor? I for one was unaccustomed to thinking about a time when I would be the older woman I am now. It freaked me out, especially if things turned out as gloomy as some in the class were predicting. The room was alive with clashing opinions. A stocky, menacing man with black rimmed glasses, a cream-colored western shirt, bolo tie, and wrinkled trousers stuck his head in the door. He looked like a dark version of the actor Nathan Lane. Was I the only one who noticed him? Classmates seemed oblivious. I watched the man slip silently back into the hallway.