By Larry Shillock, Ph.D., Professor of English
Teaching English at Wilson has been a professional privilege. For 28 years, its academic calendar has determined where I am and what I do. Now, with retirement pending, I face our spring rituals — Student Research Day, the Academic Awards Ceremony, Commencement, Alumnae Weekend — for the last time.
I imagine the summer ahead less like a circle that will close when fall classes begin than as a line streaming away. Without a first day of classes to anticipate, that “day of days” as I think of it, I must fall back on nonacademic rituals for adventure and sustenance.
Each summer since Professor Lisa Woolley and I moved to Chambersburg, we have left campus for our cabin near Yellowstone. We drive west confident that days outdoors will soon eclipse days indoors and, echoing Thoreau, intend to play and live deliberately. Mid-June finds us hiking the drainages of Montana’s Paradise Valley, the creeks in full spate. The runoff crests once true summer begins, before the Independence Day crush of Winnebagos foretells that this season has too brief a lease on our lives.
The best ritual of summer often occurs as our departure nears. Anticipating Faculty Day, I grow restive, at once excited to greet peers and saddened that our time in nature is ending. My solution is a last-day ritual spent hiking alone, fly rod in hand. Invariably, I go to Yellowstone’s northeast corner, where prehistoric rivers of ice crushed peaks into gravel and left lonely glacial erratica behind.
Slough Creek rises outside of the park and crosses three meadows before enlarging the Yellowstone River. Its second meadow is almost six miles from its namesake campground and, for many, inaccessible in the summer heat. Five years ago, I arrived at the trailhead at sunrise, eager to climb a mountain’s shoulder and go back in time. Pure Yellowstone cutthroats inhabit the creek where, over millennia, the species evolved to match the streambed. Invisible at rest, the trout fin slowly to the surface where caddisflies, midges, and mayflies abound.
Like Wordsworth revisiting Tintern Abbey, I have been away for too long. Today, gusting wind makes casting difficult, and so I stand above eddies whose foam holds Heptagenia mayflies. A fly made of deer hair and dubbing brings cutthroat from the depths. Held gently, they sport olive-brown sides and orange slashes beneath pale jaws. Heavy, dark spots congregate by their tails. Few outdoor pursuits equal catching ancestral trout in their ancestral homes.
The afternoon waning, I climb the bank, eyeing the Absoraka-Beartooth Wilderness to the north and imagining the drive east. Without a sound, a grizzly lopes from a copse of lodgepole, its fur a mix of brown and silver-grey. Large bears show little concern or fear. This one searches the upstream shallows. With thirty yards separating us, I lean so that my head alone rests above the bank.
The bear turns and faces downstream. The wind behind it is no help in determining why its range has changed. Then the bear stands and tilts its nose. Light leaches from a ritual day when an animal twice my weight snorts and swings its head. The valley grasses and stream recede as I appraise the risk.
A professor of Romantic poetry, I teach students that a boundless sublime underscores the beauty of nature. Miles from the trailhead, I hear that insight reverberate. Each time the bear shows its back, I move. When it climbs the far bank, I slip into the water and crabwalk down current. An errant splash causes it to rise and snort before it fords again. Grizzlies evolved to run down prey on the plains, and so the knee-deep water separating us would be no impediment, should it charge. Patience and guile are my best virtues; the fish smell on my hands and arms, worst vices. Seeking my scent, the bear crosses the stream three times in all before I slip beyond its ken and hike out. Thus, a summer ritual ends breathlessly.
My simple claim that Wilson days were spent teaching and summer days spent living or, correlatively, that time for a professor is circular and time in retirement linear collapses.
While the beauty of Slough Creek commands its setting, the encounter with a muscular bear owes much to the poetry I have taught and loved. In that isolated corner of Yellowstone, my deliberations in those moments of terror and threat hailed from Thoreau and Wordsworth.
Yes, when I retire, my favorite academic ritual — the day classes begin — will be enacted by others. But Wilson will accompany me, as it does its graduates, away from campus rituals and into lives where a day’s exploration can resonate like the lines of a singular poem.
