“Here’s a secret,” Greg Estell ’85 told students during a Chapel Talk in early October. “This campus is not the real world.”
I hear this often; have even said it myself. You’ll also hear it from professors who take their students to conferences or direct them to internships so they’ll get an experience of how science or scholarship is done in “the real world,” away from the challenging but
sheltered environment of the classroom and lab.
Greg urged students to connect with alumni to experience that real world. You’ll read about some of those internships and immersions in these pages.
Yet Greg also said, “The mark you make in the world doesn’t have to be some fancy title or high-profile job. It can be as simple yet incredibly important as being a good friend, husband, son, or father. You’ll make the biggest difference doing that kind of work, I can assure you.”
I was reminded of how my conservationist grandfather once described designated wilderness areas as “protected lands that allow nature to be what it was meant to be without man’s tendency to consume it.” In the “unreal world” of the Wabash campus, students learn that work matters, but a man is much more than his job. They are nurtured but challenged to find and practice real work that will
sustain mind, body, and spirit for the rest of their lives.
In July we lost a skilled practitioner and teacher of that work in Professor Emeritus of English Tom Campbell. Tom had many gifts, teaching topics as diverse as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Noam Chomsky’s linguistics, science fiction, and liturgical drama. But I was most influenced by his teaching of the personal essay, a course he pioneered before the term “creative nonfiction” existed. The class attracted a different sort of student—storytellers more than aspiring authors. And Tom, especially during his later years, seemed concerned with their becoming not just writers, but rememberers. He had great patience with the student struggling with word choice or syntax, not so much for those who didn’t make an honest effort to recall the details of their own relatively few years of life.
During his last year of teaching, Tom wrote alongside his students in that essay class. A student turned in a personal essay describing an event from his high school days in vague terms void of detail. Tom asked him to redo it.
“I can’t remember any more,” the student protested.
Tom would have none of it.
“I just wrote 20 pages about a summer camp I attended almost 50 years ago,” he told the young man. “Surely you can remember a little more about something that happened a few years ago. Try harder!”
For Tom, recollection—and expressing and articulating that memory—was an essential part of what makes us human. “Pay attention,” he’d say. “Write it down. You’re going to want to remember this someday.”
Here’s a story: I had planned to work with Tom last spring to publish that summer camp essay of his in Wabash Magazine. Titled “Sky-land” after the name of the camp, it is packed with vivid memories of the Colorado of his youth.
It is lively: The grand culmination of one hike was a half-mile slide down an abandoned coal chute, the trees whizzing past, your butt growing hot, coal dust kicking up, everyone screaming, landing in a heap at the bottom.
It is funny: A sort of bestial revenge would be achieved when some naïve kid would trap a skunk and, god help him, try to release it…There is no smell in the world like skunk; I understand that wearing it is even more confounding.
There are beautiful lines: Faces have left me, but hands and hearts
remain.
And like all Tom’s writing, it is honest and avoids easy or sentimental answers. I was looking forward to working on it with him and learning more.
Our planned collaboration seemed suddenly insignificant when
I heard first that Tom was battling cancer, and then that a stroke, pneumonia, and infection had put his life in precarious balance.
Still, I mentioned the essay to Tom’s wife, Rose, and she asked for “anything that might bring joy and recognition.” She read portions aloud to Tom by his bedside, with his children in the room. Rose said that when she spoke the word, “Skyland,” Tom’s eyes opened, and he listened as she read:
But, oh my, the nights: starlit and quiet. The Milky Way was a real path slicing across the sky among millions of stars…I lay in my sleeping bag and counted the falling stars, pieces of eternity breaking off and dropping, descending, disintegrating into vapor, the sky so bright it hurt my eyes and I had to close them, finally drifting into sleep.
Did Tom imagine the words he dutifully wrote alongside his students might return to him and his family in his final days? Even he might not have called the conjuring of memory done in his sheltered, nurturing Wabash classroom “real work.”
But how much more real can life get, or work more true?
Tom’s students carry on that work. Like James Hamstra ’00, who wrote: “Dr. Campbell once told us in class that he wrote a sonnet to his wife each year. He inspired me to do the same. I proposed to my wife with a sonnet and have written her one every year for our anniversary.”
That’s legacy: Real work in the real world.
Thanks for reading.
Steve Charles | Editor
charless@wabash.edu
Read “Skyland” in this issue’s
A Man’s Life.