The week that UWC released its decisions, I went home each day to wait for the mailman. He tended to come during my lunchtime, and as soon as the lunch bell rang I dashed out to my car and drove the couple of miles home. If he hadn’t shown up by the time I arrived, Granny, my mother, and I drove around the neighborhood just to see if we could spot the mail truck. As soon as it arrived, I rushed out to the mailbox to check if there was a letter with the UWC logo.
The letter finally came. It was in a thin envelope, but I was too naïve about admissions processes to know that a thin envelope usually means bad news. I ran into the house and walked to the corner where I had been typing on my laptop just a few minutes before. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I tore the letter open. I felt nauseous after reading the first paragraph.
“I got in,” I turned and told my mother. She and Granny erupted into happy hoots and hollers. “Wee boy!” Granny shouted, clapping her hands. They both had their concerns about this new life path I was choosing, but they weren’t going to let their concerns spoil a perfectly fine celebration. Later that evening we sat on the front porch talking about all of the possibilities that lay before me.
There was never any question that I would go. Two free years at an incredible, unique boarding school? College scholarships after that? You couldn’t turn down that kind of opportunity. I couldn’t turn down that kind of opportunity.
Still, as the summer began, my last summer at home, I almost wished I had never seen that brightly colored United World College brochure. I hadn’t realized how much home mattered to me until I was faced with leaving it. New Mexico suddenly felt very far away. I knew there were mountains there. But I also knew they wouldn’t be my mountains.
UWC was different than I expected. I had been outside of the United States only once, when my parents and I visited my father’s sister in California and walked across the United States–Mexico border to spend a few hours in Tijuana. I expected everyone at UWC to show up in strange-looking clothes and listen to strange-sounding music. I pictured boys in flowing robes and girls in elaborate headpieces. Most kids showed up in jeans and listened to American pop music.
A girl from Pakistan met our car when we pulled up to campus. We parked and followed her into the dorm. “This way,” she said as she beckoned us. She pointed out important landmarks as she went. “This is where your residential adviser lives. Those are condoms on the door. People do have sex here.” My somewhat conservative parents looked alarmed. I think, in that moment, they considered loading me into the car and taking me back to Kentucky.
Instead, they unloaded the fully packed minivan we had driven more than twenty hours from Kentucky. My mother was worried about leaving me so far from home, and to ease her own mind, she had hauled everything I could possibly need across the country. She brought me two umbrellas, even though I reminded her several times that I was moving to a desert.
That first night in the dorm I cried. My roommate, a quiet girl from Eastern Europe, had gone to bed early. She was jet-lagged, and we had struggled to make conversation. Her English was stilted, and I didn’t know what questions to ask her. I had never heard of her country until a few hours before. I didn’t want to show my ignorance. I think she was irritated that she had an American roommate. The American government was unpopular at UWC because of its involvement in the Middle East. Plus, my classmates told me time and again, “Americans have no culture.” That was news to me.
The first few days on campus were a blur of new people. I couldn’t pronounce many of my classmates’ names, so I avoided directly addressing people. Instead I would look right at them and speak a little too loudly, hoping to attract their attention.
It was the first time I’d been around so much diversity. Owsley County is more than 98 percent white, 0.5 percent black, and 1.4 percent Latinx. Madison County, where Berea is located, is almost as homogeneous, at nearly 92 percent white. Most people I knew growing up were white and identified as Christian. I didn’t have a lot of experience with people who didn’t look like me.
My parents had always taught me to value diversity—including racial diversity. My mom bought me both black and white dolls when I was a child, and we were a host family for an international college student from Nepal for a couple of years. But most of what I knew about race was abstract, about the idea of respecting differences rather than how to actually do it.
I don’t often talk about how racially homogeneous the places I spent my childhood are because I think it perpetuates an inaccurate stereotype about Appalachia: the idea that it’s full of nothing but white people. I know that’s not true. There are people of color in the mountains too. In Lynch, a small former coal outpost, the majority of the town’s residents are black. Black coal miners have historically made up between 20 and 50 percent of the workforce in some parts of this region. Frank X Walker, a black writer from rural Kentucky, started the Affrilachian Poets to showcase diverse artistic voices in the mountains. My childhood in Appalachia didn’t include many experiences with racial diversity, and I was worse off for it. But not all places in Appalachia suffer from that deficit.
* * *
—
In those first days at UWC, I was becoming aware of how ignorant I was about the larger world. A few weeks after I arrived, a boy in the neighboring dorm asked, in front of a group, if I could point to Iraq on a map. “Of course I can,” I lied. He went to his room to get a map to make me prove it, and I found an excuse to scamper away. The next week, I went to a girl from an East Asian country to ask for help with my math homework. She informed me, with an annoyed look on her face, that she was “more of an arts type” before unceremoniously ushering me out of her room.
We were all feeling out of place at the beginning. My roommate cried one night because she was tired of having to speak English all the time. One of my Scandinavian friends called home three times in one day to ask his dad to send him his favorite foods. A student in a neighboring dorm blasted African music at all hours because he wanted to be surrounded by the sounds of his home.
Over time, we formed relationships to create an ad hoc family. We had state-mates (who were from the same state), country-mates (who were from the same country), wall-mates (who shared a wall in the dorms), language-mates (who shared the same language), and on and on. We were all far from home. We formed community however and wherever we could.
Once a month, we had “community meetings,” where the administration, the staff, and the entire student body came together to discuss the issues that were affecting the school. When we talked of our concerns about our community, you could see differences in how we thought, how we made decisions, what we valued. At one meeting, someone from the administration gave us a lecture about drinking on campus. Many of the European students were old enough to buy alcohol in their home countries, and they would sometimes sneak a bottle of vodka or gin into their suitcases to bring back to campus after the holidays. At the end of the administration’s lecture, the two French students on campus stood up. “This is so stupid!” they exclaimed. “Why can we not have a glass of wine in the evenings?” They proceeded to argue at length in support of not just allowing students to drink on campus, but also of providing them with an on-campus pub to do so. No matter how many times the administration explained that American law simply would not allow it, the French students remained unconvinced. At one point, one of them stormed outside to have a cigarette.
I missed my family and friends terribly. Almost everything reminded me of them. The smell of cookies baking in the dining hall made me think of my mother; meeting a student with the same name as my best friend made me catch my breath. We weren’t allowed to have cellphones on campus, so I would wait in line in the evenings to use the one phone in my dorm. It was in a closet with a clear door that people could see through, and I tried to keep my emotions in check when other people were nearby. My mother mailed me what seemed like a lifetime sup
ply of calling cards. One time when I called home, she told me that she couldn’t talk; she had invited several of my friends over for homemade pizza, and it was time to eat. I wondered if it was too late to go back to Berea. I understood why my mother had cried every night of her first semester at college.
There weren’t many students like me on campus. There were about twenty Americans in my year, but most of them came from other parts of the country. Many of them had dual citizenships and had lived or traveled abroad. There was one girl from West Virginia in the year above me, but she was quiet and studied a lot. She told me she was going to go back to West Virginia for college the next year because she missed home. I think the fact that she was homesick herself made her less able to see my loneliness.
Back then, most of my wardrobe consisted of faded bell-bottom jeans and bright T-shirts. I wore thick liquid eyeliner and blow-dried my hair to give it volume. I felt garish and showy sometimes compared to my international classmates, who wore stylish scarves and minimal makeup. It had never occurred to me that scarves served any purpose other than keeping your neck warm in the wintertime. Part of me wanted to dress more like them, but part of me wasn’t sure how to. I felt a tension about the whole thing: On the one hand I was striving to be as Kentucky as I could because we were supposed to represent our cultures; on the other I was trying to tone down my Kentuckiness to fit in to this new environment.
It was also difficult adjusting to the rigorous academic standards. Since many U.S. colleges do not offer financial aid for international students, the UWC’s promise of college scholarships was the best shot some of my classmates had to afford an American college education. This led to a fierce competition for slots in many countries. Some African countries selected students based solely on their performance on national-level tests, and my classmates had received the single highest scores on their country’s examinations. Other places selected students based on their family’s position in the government. The prince of Greece had graduated from UWC the year before I arrived there. The princess of Belgium enrolled in 2018.
On my first day of science class, the teacher began the lesson by saying, “So we all remember this from our previous schooling, yes?” He quickly scrawled some scientific terms on the board. Everyone else nodded and looked bored, so I did too. But I wrote in my notes, Figure out what mitosis is.
My classmates seemed to know more than me, to be better prepared than me. This was especially embarrassing because I, unlike the vast majority of my peers, was attending school in my home country. We were being taught in my native language. I felt that somehow this should give me an advantage. I was ashamed of my mediocre grades my first semester.
Eventually, though, I settled in. I made friends with a boy from Norway, a girl from Massachusetts, a boy from Venezuela. I learned to play Oasis songs on my guitar, and we stayed up after curfew singing in my dorm room. I had never had to make new friends before, and I was relieved to find that I could do it. The girl from West Virginia and I organized a Southern dinner and made fried chicken. There weren’t a lot of students from the South, so we got creative with the guest list. The European kid whose dad had worked in Alabama for a year got an invitation. So did the boy who grew up in the Virginia part of the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
I joined the wilderness training program on campus, which trained students to lead backcountry trips in the New Mexico mountains. I wasn’t great at the whole wilderness thing. I accidentally set the campus lawn on fire when we were learning to use the cookstoves. I got lost for an hour during the map navigation class and waited on a rock for someone to find me. I sat down in a snowbank during the one and only winter camping trip I went on. A girl from Lebanon and I decided we were so cold and miserable that we just couldn’t snowshoe any farther. Our Dutch friend snorted at us and pulled us to our feet. “Warm-weather people,” he muttered to himself, half amused, half irritated.
But, as much as I hated the logistics of backpacking, I felt at home in the mountains. Although the scenery looked a bit different, the hills still rolled into the distance in familiar waves. The earth smelled the same after it rained. Bird songs sounded the same when they echoed off the mountains.
Sometimes, when I was particularly homesick, I would hike up the hill behind campus and look out at the desert below. If I turned and looked one way, all I could see was flat and sand. If I turned and looked the other, all I could see was cascading hills. When I was seated where the mountains met the desert, this place didn’t feel that different from Berea, where the Appalachians met the flatland.
Over time, I got better at studying. Part of it was just realizing that I did, in fact, have to study—I had never had to study for high school classes before. I found a comfortable chair in the library and set up shop. I would often work until curfew, scurry back to my room for bed checks, then keep working until the wee hours of the morning. I pulled my first all-nighter, using instant coffee and the homemade brownies my mother had sent me to stay awake. My grades, and my waistline, increased my second semester.
By the end of my first year on campus I was sad to leave the diverse little bubble we had created. Although I was returning the next year, the second-year students were not. I knew that they would scatter, going off to colleges and universities around the world. I also knew that I would never see most of them again. My world was becoming larger, more fluid, more filled with change.
* * *
—
The summer after my first year at UWC, I spent a lot of time with Granny in Owsley County. She was increasingly frail, and my mother and I went down to see her as often as we could. She stayed with us some as well, but she insisted more and more that she wanted to be at home: in her space, with her friends, her community, and her belongings. She still hid ice cream for me in her freezer and sneaked me money to buy things I needed for school. She listened to me play guitar and tapped her foot along to the music. She asked me if there were any cute boys in Mexico, then asked to see pictures when I told her there were. She didn’t understand how we could communicate since I still didn’t speak Spanish very well. Aunt Ruth was around that summer too, asking lots of questions about my new life and if I liked it. “I’d like to try me some of that,” she said, after I told her about a place in town with really good salsa verde.
We talked a lot about college that summer, my parents, Granny, and I. UWC had an excellent college-admissions counselor. He had insisted that we make a list of schools we planned to apply to before we went home for the summer. He talked us through specific strategies and requirements for each place on our lists. I spent the summer obsessing over admissions rates and average SAT scores.
Most of the schools I was looking at were places Granny had never heard of—small liberal arts colleges in states far away. Yet, despite their unfamiliarity, Granny listened to me explain the schools on the list with joy and attentiveness. “Ah, boy, that one sounds like a good one,” she would say after I told her about each one.
I know she was proud of me. Proud that I was planning on going to college. Proud that her grandchild was going so much further than she had been able to, than even my mother had been able to. I could see it in her eyes each time we talked about colleges. I think I also saw a bit of wistfulness.
It was hard to say goodbye to Granny at the end of the summer. I hadn’t said it out loud—none of us had—but I knew she wasn’t going to live much longer. Then again, it didn’t seem possible that Granny could die. She had been very sick for many years, and in some ways it seemed like death had decided it didn’t want to mess with this feisty little mountain woman.
The day I returned to UWC, I used an old boom box to record myself playing and singing Granny’s favorite song. It was written by Pat Humphries and called “Swimming to the Other Side.” The chorus proclaimed:
We are living ’neath the great big dipper,
We are washed by the very same rain,
We are swimming in this stream together,
Some in power and some in pain,
We can worship this ground we walk on,
Cherishing the beings that we live beside,
Loving spirits will live forever,
We’re all swimming to the other side.
“Ain’t that something?” Granny would say each time I played it. “I sure do love that song.”
* * *
—
I got back to campus a week early for wilderness training. I was a team leader that year, which meant that I would lead a group of first-year students on a three-day orientation trip into the New Mexico mountains. We had a refresher trip the week before they arrived, to brush up on our skills and reduce the likelihood of losing or maiming the incoming students. My co-leader reminded me to rehydrate the lentils properly this time, so as to avoid a repeat of the stomach issues my cooking had caused everyone on our last trip.
I remember the sense of freedom I felt on that excursion. The New Mexico mountains felt welcoming. It felt good to reconnect with friends. We sat around in a circle as the sun set and talked about our summers and our plans for the year. That night I slept outside, under the stars, and marveled at the vastness of everything.
I knew something was wrong as soon as we arrived back on campus. A friend, who had been watching for our bus to arrive, pulled me aside as soon as we unloaded. “You need to go call your family,” he said. I didn’t go to the phone booth straightaway. I unloaded the backpacking gear and took a shower. I didn’t want to hear the news I knew was coming: Granny had died. She had swum to the other side.
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