Younger Days: Leaving Home
Newton to Santa Cruz
In high school in suburban Massachusetts, I had little idea of where I wanted to go to college. My guidance counselor was blasé. When I met with him about applying to college, contrary to his job title he provided me no guidance whatsoever. To be fair, we had a student body of 3,000 for grades 10 through 12 and each guidance counselor had a caseload of 500.
Mostly, I relied on the paperback tomes in my school library with alphabetically ordered and uniformly structured college descriptions, devoid of pictures and any sense of the student experience. I spent hours willing myself to focus on the multitude of choices, nicking down pages, making lists, and wondering what would suit me best. I tried to imagine the campuses, what it felt like to walk to class and sit in lecture.
My travails were doubtless exacerbated by several factors, not least of which was that I was two years younger than my classmates. I had skipped from 7th to 9th grade, and then, still academically unchallenged and supremely frustrated by the immaturity of my peers, jumped to 10th grade halfway through the year, right after winter break. It was a relief to be out of middle school and finally challenged academically. The students were certainly more mature, but also significantly older and more advanced socially than I was.
In addition, my parents were going through an extremely acrimonious divorce that included custody battles over my then six-year old brother. They had little bandwidth to weigh in on college deliberations. We did go on a handful of campus visits together, to Princeton, Yale, and UMass. The tours were nearly identical and went by in a tedious blur. I recall only the architectural differences. The guides regaled us with academic statistics and abundant information on the dorms, cafeterias, sports events, and student social life.
I had some romantic notions of the Ivy League, enhanced by winter holidays ambling around the silent snowy grounds of Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire and eating clam chowder in one or another of the classic old New England style restaurants. Our family cross-country skied frequently on a small mountain nearby. In summer and fall, we would stop over in Hanover en route to some holiday destination further afield and admire the Orozco murals at Dartmouth, shop at the food co-op, remark on the beauty of the surrounding forest and mountains, and swat at mosquitoes. I was also familiar with Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was fun, hip, and exciting. We frequented the cafes, restaurants, and bookstores, visited the many wonderful Harvard museums, attended folk music performances, and marveled at the age of Harvard’s ivy-clad brick buildings. As a visiting professor, my father could get us into the Harvard faculty club where, on occasion, we enjoyed a fancy meal.
My father discouraged me from applying to Harvard, asserting, based on his experience, that they put little effort into the quality of undergraduate education. He urged me to go to U.C. Berkeley, the school he had attended in the 1950’s, in a community he had deeply loved, the town where I had been born and spent the first two years of my life (See: Childhood: 1960’s Berkeley Baby).
I was not averse to leaving the East Coast, it was just that other locales were unknowns. My father and I often talked about how out-of-step and foreign we felt in Newton, how our values and lifestyle seemed distinctly different from those of our neighbors (see Childhood: Fish Out of Water). Our close family life was in tatters: our beloved house, now occupied by my mother and little brother Michael, was half emptied of belongings and in total disarray. My older brother David and I were living in rented quarters across town with my father; David and I were barely speaking with my mother. Perhaps, I reflected, I should apply to a University of California after all. I read the descriptions of the campuses and, intimidated by the size of U.C. Berkeley, added U.C. Santa Cruz to my list (5,000 students in 1976). They had a strong program in my area of interest (Anthropology) and a nonconformist creative bent.
I typed my applications and mailed them off to Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and UCSC. My statement of purpose now reads as remarkably naïve and cliché ridden (perhaps due to the times and to being 15 years old when I wrote the essay). Princeton and Yale rejected me; Dartmouth put me on their wait list, and UCSC sent me an acceptance with a deadline for confirmation that preceded a definitive answer from Dartmouth. I agonized over a decision, my vision of traversing the Dartmouth campus and being studiously ensconced in the library fading. With some trepidation, I accepted UCSC’s offer and enrolled. I was one of only 3 in my graduating class of 900 to depart the east coast for college.
My father drew a map of the San Francisco Bay Area on a sheet of legal yellow-lined paper. The drawing was no more than a long undulating line indicating the coast, interrupted by two bays. Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Berkeley, and San Francisco were marked, along with the names and phone numbers of two family friends I could contact if I needed help or company.
My father arranged for a colleague’s mother (Sara Holmes Boutelle*) to fetch me from the San Jose airport, put me up for a night in Santa Cruz, and deposit me at UCSC. I was travelling with a small suitcase and the large metal trunk I had taken to summer camp. Exiting the airport I was struck by the warm dry air and how much sky was visible. Towering redwoods lined the highway, silhouetted by a sunset that was far more glamorous than those back East. We wound our way up through the densely forested Santa Cruz Mountains and snaked our way back down. I felt very far from home. Mrs. Boutelle was kind and quiet. She lived in a small bungalow on a suburban street of similar homes near the ocean. I could smell the sea air coming through the windows. I marveled at the plywood doors, the thin walls. The house seemed like a matchbox.
I knew little about Mrs. Boutelle, only that she was an art historian of some kind. All these years later, I wish I had engaged her in some substantive conversation and found out more about her life and her work. It turns out she was in the process of becoming the definitive biographer of Julia Morgan, a doyenne of the now widely admired Craftsman architectural style. I visited Mrs. Boutelle once or twice during my two years at UCSC, but remember no details of our banal conversations.
The next morning, Mrs. Boutelle and I ate breakfast before she drove me up to campus. I had never visited nor seen any photos of the campus. I was agog as we ascended succeeding levels of ancient sea cliff. The forests were full of unfamiliar trees, sculptural California oaks dotted the yellowed summer hills, and cows grazed on campus. The Monterey Bay spread out far below like a vision. The intense blue of the sky and vast sweep of ocean and horizon were in stark contrast to the tree-shrouded confines, mugginess, and frequent overcast of the East Coast. I was thrilled, the sense of possibility palpable.
The dorms, U.C. Santa Cruz
For reasons that still puzzle me, I selected Crown as my residential college. Each college adhered to some theme (Psychology, Art, Natural Sciences, Humanities, etc.). Crown had a science focus. It was set on a high knoll at the edge of the redwood forest ringing campus, a pleasant anodyne collection of modern white stucco buildings with picnic tables scattered about.
My room was just large enough to accommodate two twin beds in close enough proximity to almost permit joining hands across the divide, two small desks, and minimal closet space. I looked out the window, opened the desk drawers, and peered in the closet. I sat on the edge of my bed and wondered how I was going to navigate this completely unknown life. Not long thereafter, my roommate Sheri arrived. She looked like a porcelain doll: petite, with thick shoulder-length wavy black hair, perfectly smooth olive skin, large-almond-shaped eyes, a tiny nose, and a small heart-shaped mouth. The circumference of her legs was approximately that of my arms. Sheri spoke in a slow easy tone, stretching out her syllables in a languid Southern California drawl. She had a wonderful cascading laugh.
Thus began my roommate and housemate experiences, a journey across three continents and thirteen years that was wildly varied and full of surprises.
Circumstances resulted in Sheri and I bonding quickly. We talked late into the night about everything and anything, lying in our parallel beds, our voices becoming woozy with sleep before dropping off. We were opposites in so many ways: Sheri had spent her high school years doing a minimum of studying, partying, having lots of sex, drinking, and smoking pot. Her agenda in college seemed a continuation of high school sans parental restrictions. She came from the San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles. Her family was not intellectual and she had never travelled outside the U.S. Her mother had been born in Mexico and, the few times I met her, appeared long-suffering and hard working. Her sister was institutionalized in Camarillo with schizophrenia. Her father was an alcoholic. The only thing we had in common was that our parents were divorced.
Our friendship compensated for the dorm life that did not suit me well. Crown had legions of nerdy pocket-protector sporting young men who delighted in blasting acid rock and holding water balloon fights in the corridors late at night. The cafeteria food was ghastly. Lunches and dinners consisted of completely unidentifiable meat dishes frequently slathered in thick sauces. I rarely ate any cooked food that first year, resorting to granola, yogurt, fresh fruit, and salad. Once a month, a formal steak dinner was substituted for the usual fare at Crown. It was an event met with great excitement by the residents. Immense slabs of meat were served to the eager throngs dressed in their finest. I was repulsed, especially as I did not eat any red meat and rarely ate poultry or fish. The communal co-ed bathrooms were also wearing on me, especially the shower stalls whose flimsy curtains did not provide full privacy. I was perpetually uncomfortable.
Sheri and I spent a year together in our tiny room, exchanging intimate secrets, dating two best friends, splurging on an occasional meal out at the crêpe restaurant downtown, giving each other birthday gifts. We arranged times I should vacate the room so that she could have sex with her boyfriend. We travelled by train together to visit her family, including a stop in Camarillo to see her sister, and a day in Disneyland. And then it was over and we drifted apart almost as rapidly as we had bonded.
* Sara Holmes Boutelle embarked on a second career at age 65 after retiring as a history teacher in New York and moving to California. After a visit to Hearst Castle, she became interested in the architect Julia Morgan. Little was known about Morgan at the time, in part because she had destroyed all her blueprints before her death. Boutelle’s curiosity resulted in her success as a noted architectural historian and the person responsible for rediscovering Julia Morgan. She published a widely acclaimed biography in 1988, 12 years after visiting San Simeon. Boutelle died at age 90 in 1999 (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/29/arts/sara-boutelle-architectural-historian-90.html). Her sister, Mary Holmes, a founding member of the UCSC faculty, was a renowned art historian (first at UCLA and then for a dozen years at UCSC) and artist in her own right. She passed away in 2002 at age 91 (https://news.ucsc.edu/2002/01/47.html).
