I graduated from Morgan fifty years ago. I recently found a photograph taken of my entire graduating class in caps and gowns on bleachers in the football stadium. As I remember, there were about three hundred and fifty of us. Find me. I can't even find myself. It makes me remember what it was like crossing the quad during class changes. Whoa! Negroes! 360 degrees of Negroes! Total surround. Two thousand students. Various hues. All Negro! But not me. I was the only one like me. I'm trying to remember what I was feeling at the time, what I was thinking, or whether I was just rushing to class like everyone else?
Wait a minute! Wait a minute! There's another memory fighting for space. It does have bearing. I think. Not sure. I'm gonna go with it.
A good forty years ago I was somewhere in the desert surrounding the Superstition Wilderness in Apache Junction, Arizona. What it is today is not what it was then.. I remember Main Street in Apache Junction as maybe four, wooden, sand blasted, decrepit shops, one of them a custom shoemaker who made me a set of moccasins. Now, it's a destination. Superstition Mountain, a rugged fortress of rock pillars and twisted canyons, repository of myths and demons, loomed in the background. It wasn't a national monument then, so anybody who could withstand the rigors of the trek and the remorseless sun could go in there. Mostly nobody did, and those who did were mostly prospectors looking for the fabled Lost Dutchman Gold Mine: an eponymous site rumored to be on the burial grounds of the local Apache Thunder God Himself. Which is how I wound up in Apache Junction myself. I'd been hired to write a movie, so I went to see what treasures I could find.
The desert does strange things to people when they spend their daily lives under that sun. It cooks their brains, turning all those dendrites and ganglia into a gelatinous mush you need to eat with a spoon, like Jello or brains. Folks will rave at the drop of a hat -- true believers -- often exasperating but never boring. "Me? A desert rat? Damn tootin'!" -- "Proud to be, by Jesus, yessir!" -- after which you'll hear for sure some fervent monologue, part myth, part opinion. Mostly the myths were "true stories" of death and disaster in the Supe. Prospectors snuck up on and mysteriously beheaded, mysteriously disappeared. Had they gotten too close to the Thunder God's lair? Had some claim jumper bushwhacked and murdered them? Had they gone mad and died of thirst? Had they been sucked up by extra-terrestrials? Very dramatic stuff. If a man didn't get them what ghost or demon did? It was fraught with danger. If you weren't ready for it, you dasn't go there. Mostly, people didn't, not back then, anyway.
But I met a man who'd been in and out of the Superstition countless times. He was eighty-seven when I met him and barely able to walk from having spent a life time in the saddle. Fella could've been the Marlboro man's grandfather. Early on in the 20th century, he led the first search and rescue mission into the desert wilderness and did the same most of his life. I don't remember how I got to him or what his name was, but, we spoke before I went in, and, as we spoke, he braided a set of leather reins and barely looked up. His opinion came quick and clean. "Ain't nothin' gonna hurt you out there. That mountain does to you what you bring to it." Yes, he did, yes, he carried a pistol, a .22 loaded with snake shot being as the only thing he intended to worry about was a rattlesnake. He told me make sure to shake out your boots before you put them on in the morning. Scorpions. Nasty. He spat. So what's the moral here? Ain't nothin' gonna hurt you out there? The mountain does to you what you bring to it? What does this have to do with crossing the quad at change of class?
Bear with me while I work this out.
It was I think ten years after I graduated Morgan that I first went into the Superstition Wilderness. I went in a second time by myself, and a third time with the woman who would become my wife, but this first time I packed in on horseback with a local guide, a hard core desert dweller: prickly. If he's still alive today I'd bet he'd have that "Don't tread on me" flag tattooed over his heart. He believed in one thing only -- the existence of the Lost Dutchman gold mine -- no ghosts or goblins, no demented desert rats, no Indian curse, -- and he was working a claim to prove it. The point is: my guide brought nothing to the mountain except perhaps greed, no fear, no hesitation, just lust for gold, and I brought nothing to the mountain except my story radar (Stories being my own particular nuggets). We -- my guide and I -- came to the same place. Treasure, too, is in the eyes of the beholder.
I don't remember what I brought with me that first day on Morgan's campus. I know for sure it didn't feel anything like Custer's last stand. After the initial shock of recognition I just hurried on to class with the rest of the students. The books I was carrying -- an early English novel, "Tristram Shandy", Sarte's "Being and Nothingness", ancient history -- not a math book anywhere close, no atomic table in the vicinity -- these books were like gold nuggets to me then, like the crumbs of bread that helped Hansel and Gretel find their way back home, a path to a mother lode which, of course, I will never see in my lifetime, though I've been tracking it all along.
