Drowning in Bitter Creek

When the Eagles released “Desperado” in 1973 the record resonated deeply with misplaced ambition to become a famous outlaw. While priorities changed dramatically over the years, much of that album still hits home, especially the title cut. Unlike the Dalton gang the Eagles loosely chronicled, real life cowboy outlaws who wound up trussed and displayed after they were all shot dead, I picked the Queen of Hearts and not the Queen of Diamonds. I think this choice saved my life. You’ll need to listen to the album carefully for a more complete understanding. The many messages are sung far better than I can ever say in words, and I don’t want to wreck the powerful sentiment in translation.

What’s all this have to do with Cambridge? The answer for me is the song “Bitter Creek” and the warning it gives about wading too deep into it. I was once totally submerged, and had some understandable reasons.

 

In a clear case of high irony, I’m currently making plans to attend my first all-class reunion where I may well meet up with a few people that in my early days I absolutely hated, and this corrosive hatred served only one purpose, as it always does, and that’s to injure the hater a whole lot more than the hated.

To be quite blunt, I don’t think anyone could have hated our alma mater much more than I did as an 18-year-old. Some of my experiences in high school led to a full understanding of the profoundly disturbed motives leading angry kids to shoot up schools. Had I been capable of deliberately taking another human life, I might have done the same thing. I hated CCS. I hated Cambridge. I may have hated you. I was a complete idiot, but I guess that’s already been established.

For what it’s worth, my problems weren’t largely with peers. I had deep hatred for some adults in authority roles I encountered as a kid, quite a few of them teachers. What follows is the event that I let corrode my soul until I finally grew wise enough to expel the tumor.

I was in an unsupervised classroom. I don’t recall if the teacher slipped out for a moment or if it was an experiment of the time called “senior study hall,” a privilege allowing seniors to occupy a room without adult supervision, one of a number of social experiments by what I’d call today a fairly progressive principal, Ed Murphy.

Anyway, as we sat in the room a faculty member walked past the doorway and someone in the room called out a two-word salute. No, it wasn’t Merry Christmas or Happy Birthday. It was instead the most infamous one we knew. Just saying one of the two words accidentally was good for a week in detention. Directly addressing a faculty member with it unthinkable, and I never witnessed this at CCS, but as a teacher/administrator in urban schools I heard it more times, directly and indirectly, than I can remember. But in those days in Cambridge, both kids and adults universally viewed the call a most damnable sin. I was accused as the perpetrator, but completely innocent.

It must be explained that such an action truly was just the sort of blatant disregard for authority and totally egregious behavior I was well known for; it’s just that in this case I simply wasn’t responsible.

Of course, upon hearing the warm greeting, the faculty member turned around and charged angrily into the classroom he’d just walked by. The teacher looked at me; I was laughing loudly, and the teacher said, “OK, Brown, you’re going to the office.” I protested but followed the man out into the hall where we continued our cordial exchange.

“OK, if you didn’t say it, who did?” the teacher asked when we were alone in the deserted hallway. Right then I knew the game; he hoped I’d confess or give up the true transgressor. Had he known me better, he wouldn’t have tried this as I was as likely to name the person responsible as I was to graduate as valedictorian. It was completely contrary to the outlaw code of ethics of which I was a firm advocate. Consequently, I just continued to plead innocence and refused to fink on a classmate.

“Well, I saw you say it,” the teacher then said, a complete lie, and absolutely impossible as the shout was made just after he passed the doorway, no one in the room being so stupid as to make this sort of epithet face-to-face. In calm retrospect many years later, I know this should have been my defense. I could have asked Mr. Murphy to question others in the class as to where the teacher was when the shout rang out and would have had much corroboration from far more believable students that it was impossible for the teacher to have seen anyone in the room at the time of the curse. But I was too angry to make this defense and just adopted a defiant posture while I continued to deny the charges against me.

Not a single adult believed me, most especially my parents, and this was largely my fault too, but I could not see this at the time. In compete truth, I told more lies as a high school student than I did factual accounts and actually preferred fiction and fantasy to reality. Circumstantial evidence was completely against me, especially with a faculty member claiming to be an eyewitness. I think it’s highly probable the teacher really thought I did curse him and felt justified in manufacturing a lie to bring justice.

Because of the situation just explained, I was suspended for three days and faced a lot worse when I got home.

When I came back from suspension, I had a brief exchange in private with my accuser. I don’t remember exactly what I told him, but do remember I said this wasn’t over and also expected he’d try to get me kicked out of school again for the threat, but this time he did the right thing and simply ignored the words of an emotionally troubled teenager.

Now for the good parts.

The first came many years later when home with my wife and son on vacation. We’d gone down to Eagleville to swim and had just walked over to the upper bank of the Battenkill on the 313 side when who did I see but my old buddy. He saw me too and I could easily see fear wash over his face.

For about two minutes I planned to crash a good left hook into the guy’s rib cage, hopefully breaking a few ribs or at least separating cartilage from them, the act extremely painful I know from being on the other end of punches like this. Such a blow makes it hard for the opponent to breathe, also part of my plan, because I visualized closing the show with great finesse by throwing my assault victim into the deep pool under the bridge and then watching him drown.

Although I doubt I would have actually killed the man, he was very close to taking what we liked to say in Cambridge was “a trip up the hill.” It didn’t happen for several reasons. First, my wife, the Queen of Hearts earlier referenced, would not have approved. Second, I would have set a very bad example for my son. Third, and most likely the deciding factor, the man had what I took to be his kids with him, maybe grandkids, I don’t know, but little kids I viewed even in my great hate as innocent and not deserving to witness a mauling over a decade-old grudge. My wife and son didn’t need to see this either. Also, I was at a point in life where I didn’t want to go to jail (been there, done that) and knew jail was most likely the ultimate outcome; I’d just get in trouble once again, so I just ignored the guy, who left not long after we arrived, probably prompted by several very mean stares I know how to project.

But that’s still not the best part.

A year later, I taught my first CLA English class in San Antonio. CLA was short for “correlated language arts” but the faculty referred to CLA as truly meaning “can’t learn anything,” a course of study for lower level high school juniors not destined for college. In this very class the police took one of my best students out into the hall, searched his backpack, and found three loaded handguns.

My problem student was an active hoodlum way worse than I ever was in high school, a member of the East Terrace Gangsters, a Bloods subset, and very, very bad news. The kid in this incident had already told me the only reason he was in school was to deal drugs and that I’d be smart if I just left him alone. I also taught advanced journalism in the same room, a group tasked to do the yearbook and newspaper, my favorite teaching assignment where I was blessed to associate with some of the best kids in school.

When I walked into the room after monitoring the hallways between changes of class, the ETG member waved a line gauge over his head like a pirate sword. The line gauge, now antiquated and replaced by computer graphics programs, was a specialized and most expensive stainless steel ruler I didn’t want to lose. I asked the gangster to put the ruler down, got an antagonistic look for my efforts, and was then briefly distracted. When I looked back the kid just sat there without the ruler and I started instruction.

After class I noticed the ruler missing and absolutely positive the kid stole it out of spite. I intended to accuse him of theft the following day, hoping I could at least get him to pay for the expensive ruler by threatening some sort of action on my part. The kid probably had over $200 on any given day from his drug deals, and I thought I stood a good chance of squeezing twenty bucks for the ruler if I pressured him a little. I had absolutely no doubt he was responsible for the missing ruler. I just wanted justice. Sound familiar?

The only thing that stopped me from accusing the student was my memory of the incident just related. I did not see what happened to the ruler, and even though I was positive he took it, I resisted making an accusation.

Two days later I found the ruler resting on a ledge behind a support post where the kid must have put it after I told him to stop waving it around. He was completely innocent.

This still isn’t the most important part.

When I first contacted Pauline I explained I’d never been to one of the all-class reunions because it conflicted with a weekend I covered a large national motorcycle event. This was only partially true. There were several I could have attended; I was even in town for one, but didn’t go. I never carefully analyzed my thinking, but when I did I realized that subconsciously I thought it was possible I’d run into the teacher I just finished writing about, or another person I wasn’t too fond of, and just didn’t want the experience. Over 40 years later I was still stuck neck deep in Bitter Creek.

As for climbing out of caustic, emotionally polluted water, it helped a lot to have found myself in the education field. Over a long career, I made errors in the heat of the moment, because I’m human, as was the person who made a mistake with me. He was in a very difficult position, as all of my teachers were, in charge of an extremely volatile teenager who just happened to be the son of the district principal.

What really happened? It’s simple. The man was justifiably angry and in the heat of that anger walked into a classroom where a first class pain in the ass celebrated his misfortune. This made teacher even angrier. When I denied the accusation, the infuriated teacher crossed the line, and then I’d bet almost anything felt badly about it later but fearful of the possible consequences of telling the truth. I don’t know about you, but I’ve made innumerable mistakes when fear and anger clouded reason, so many I could write a book about them, and maybe that’s just what I’m doing.

The moral of the story? It’s in the Lord’s Prayer when we ask God to “forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I could recite this prayer from memory when I was four-years old, but it wasn’t until about 60 I truly understood it. I guess I should have been in the remedial prayer class in Sunday School.

As for the reunion and a 2,000-mile trip back home, I’m now trying to limit Mary to only a half-ton of luggage while we both realize our plans are subject to change overnight, but that’s life, right? And finally, this senior citizen realizes how much better life is steering clear of Bitter Creek and wading into the Battenkill in July instead. Good friends and a barbecue sound pretty good too.