Coffee

I love having coffee with instructors. Whatever adversarial relationship I have with the Educational Institution is forgotten in the café, and I can actually connect with people who in the classroom inspire me. We talk about class, missed assignments­—we interpret readings, yes, but we also talk about life. I ask for advice. How did my instructors get through school? Where does their ambivalence lie? When an instructor is honest and forthright, and when that instructor has provided me with illuminating things to study, the advice they give is believable and useful. When that advice is being given over a Mexican latte at the Wild Iris, it becomes profound.          

I recently bought a book. It’s a really small book with lined pages, a placeholder, and an elastic strap to keep it closed. It fits in my pocket. I write lists in it, because lists on paper are much less scary. In my mind, my daily tasks are amorphous and daunting, but on paper… it’s only five items. I can do that. This is a simple and boring thing, maybe, but I’m doing it because that’s what works for my instructor, and if it works for her, maybe it will work for me.  It’s funny how sometimes, even after a conversation on the fate of global society and various human rights crises, a little book is the most important subject.

It’s my understanding that many of us, especially of the present college-entering generation, have taught ourselves not to emulate anything, foolishly believing that we have this capacity. But who could blame us? Most of our role-models have come streaming through copper wires, belting lyrics about a woman’s role and how much fun drugs are. Emulation is dangerous, and I think most of us have picked up on this. But, since humans do emulate, and since we rarely have a choice over who we are emulating, my advice to anyone thinking about college is to put yourself where the best emulation will happen. Surround yourself with brilliant, fiery, and compassionate people, and ask them to share a coffee.

~Estin Vogel, 04.2012

Home

It’s a funny thing to go home for the holidays, only to come back home for college. How can this be? It depends on one’s definition of home. Mine is anywhere I can leave and know that I’ll be able to return, a place where I’m welcome, and a place that’s healthy. That’s what my apartment in Prescott feels like. Yes, the kitchen sink is clogged, but it’s still my kitchen sink. It’s the one kitchen sink in the whole world that loves me above all others.

            Prescott tends to be very comfortable. Not completing assignments on time is uncomfortable, and it gets kind of cold at night, but otherwise, it’s like a big, broken in couch. I was anxious to come back. Going home reminded me of why I came here in the first place: to surround myself with calm and stability so that I can actually study what I’m trying to learn. Before I decided to come here, I couldn’t imagine choosing a college outside of the New York metro. The truth is, in NYC I would never have gotten anything done but get myself into trouble. I came instead to a beautiful resort town surrounded by mountains and national forest in the high desert. This was, in the words of my grandmother, a wise decision. I agree.

            It’s my belief that many of the students here came for similar reasons. This is a place of focus, and the college community leaves me without want of sociality. Every morning this block, I’ve been sitting in a big circle of chairs, composed of the instructor, thirteen other students, and me. We’ve been reading Woolf and Orwell, and lesser-known writers such as Judy Blunt, John McPhee, and Ian Frazier. The class is Sense of Place: A Writing and Reading Workshop. Next week, we’ll be traveling to Agua Fria National Monument—about an hour away by van—to spend four hours writing in the open air. Our instructor was a Truman Capote Literary Trust fellow to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned his MFA. It’s brilliant to know that the man teaching my class has studied writing with some of the most promising young writers in America. The students studying with me are also no disappointment. Reading aloud pieces they’ve written during ten-minute in-class nonfiction exercises, they have astonished me with both their talent and their lived experience. I look forward to reading the work they’ll spend hours writing.

            I have no desire to go back to New England right now. Don’t get me wrong; I love my friends and family dearly, but for the next few months, I’m all Arizona.

-Estin Vogel, 01.13.2012

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

My first experience face to face with Prescott College was meeting the incoming student who graciously stopped on his way from New Mexico to Prescott to pick me up. He waited in the Flagstaff Amtrak station parking lot for six hours before I arrived. The next morning, the very student who first called me during her admissions work-study came to my apartment and brought me to the grocery store, gave me a quick tour of campus, and generally helped me feel welcome. I really needed it; it’s really no easy task to move thousands of miles from home.
It’s effortless to make friends at Prescott. I arrived Saturday night, and even before arriving home I had a new friend. The next morning, another friend. The Monday after, two more friends, and so on and on. People here are from each corner of North America, and the college is so small and so specifically focused that everyone has two things in common, guaranteed: We’re all from out of town, and we all have been thinking about the deep, important problems facing our planet and society for years before we found our niche at Prescott. It’s not difficult to start a conversation here.

As academic and wilderness orientations coursed on, and as the semester began to accelerate, I was immersed in a coherent community. The administration has been consistently responsive and helpful, and the faculty and instructors I’ve studied with have been available, knowledgeable, passionate, and flexible. The relevance and currency of my History of Gender and Sexuality course with Kaitlin Noss was stunning. My perspectives have changed, and I feel a depth of understanding that I was unable even to imagine before.

Now, as I prepare to fly home between semesters, I know with a moral certainty that I have made the best educational decision I could have. The geographic diversity of my new friendships have given me a sense of belonging even in parts of the United States I’ve never been; I feel more connected to the vastness of America than ever before. I’ll be going home to my family and old friends with a stronger identity, and lots of exciting new things to discuss.

The end of the semester is bittersweet for me, as I imagine it is for many of us students. Over the last couple of months, Prescott has become my home, and I’m comfortable here now. But, it will be truly excellent to have a break and to see my family again. Three friends and I will be taking a 2700-mile road trip back to Prescott in January, and this has to be the raspberry garnish on my Bûche de Noël.

-Estin Vogel, 12.15.11

Cumbersome Beauty

Three weeks are irrelevant. The time I spent on orientation took on a context greater than the month of September. It felt oddly like a lifetime, as if, during the time, I grew from infant to old man, and at the end flew up toward the sun. Suddenly, there was pavement. Traffic mumbled down the road. I was back, and it was difficult suddenly to comprehend what I had just done. Now, a week after returning to greater humanity, I feel prepared to explain my experience of Prescott College Wilderness Orientation.

We began in Prescott. All the orientation students sat in a big circle and were told to close their eyes. An inspiring speech was given as, unbeknownst to us, all of the orientation instructors and course directors changed into, in some cases horrifically undersized, cutoff denim shorts. Using flame shaped pieces of paper with our names and a cryptic code (CB2 in my case), we found our “destinies,” our orientation groups. These people we’d be learning the intimate secrets and gastric patterns of for the next twenty-one days.

The following day, we piled into Prescott College vans, one for each group, and were shuttled up a mountain on a very bumpy road. We built a trail all together in the morning, ate lunch in our groups afterward, and were off to a YMCA summer camp not too far from Prescott. Here, at Chauncey Ranch, we spent two nights. This is where we started to get to know each other. Our first hike was here. We had our first written reflection here and coordinated our own group rules. We sorted the food we’d purchased together back in Prescott and assigned group gear to each other. Our packs, at this point, were frightfully cumbersome.

On a fateful morning we loaded our packs into the bed of a pickup and climbed the stairs of the charter bus that was to take us to our temporary home in the wilderness. Except it was the wrong bus. “Stump’s group? You’re on the other bus.” This event really set the tone for our journey: hilarious and less-than-tragic missteps. Despite the miles of extra hiking and food made inedible with Dr. Bronner’s, the comic relief was like a friendly poltergeist that never left us.

Our first night we slept on a gorgeous red sandstone boulder at the edge of West Clear Creek, in the canyon so named. We jumped off into the deep, clear water and were like celebrating nymphs. Everyone smiled. It was good. On this first night, I had a long talk with the exquisitely big sister-like Iris Cushing, Shane Stump’s counterpart facilitating our journey. I was a bit overwhelmed and didn’t think I could sleep outside; I’d never slept in anything less substantial than a tent in my life. With a gentle voice and reassuring hand on my back, I was absolved of my fears and spent the night staring up into the brilliant star-filled sky the likes of which I rarely, if ever, had seen before.

The skies above our journey were equal in proportion to the rocks, water, and forest we hiked through. The skies were at times full of radiant, intense sunlight, crystal blue skies without a single cloud. They were malevolent grey curtains offering downpours and lightening prisons. They were intense sunrise and sunset, full of colors like autumn leaves and sherbet. They were the open universe, with shooting stars, constellations, and the great Milky Way looming at the furthest reaches of human vision.

Along our journey, we ate sweet sour canyon grapes. We climbed down waterfalls with ropes around waist. We drank water from puddles. We ate the greatest honeydew ever beset mankind. Sometimes we walked down national forest roads while the cows stared at us and followed, intrigued. Other times I wished I had a machete to make my way through such thick vegetation I had never imagined grew in the dry Southwest. We negotiated around cacti. We climbed 1600 feet in one day. Through much difficulty, and much doubt, we made it to our destination. However, when you’re hiking in a large horseshoe shaped path, not really traveling, just backpacking, there really is no destination. I think orientation, by its very circuitousness, exemplifies well the ethos of Prescott College: education is a journey.

-Estin Vogel, 09.29.2011