Taking to the Hills

Nestled away mid’ the Empire State hills,

‘Neath the watch care of sentinel pines,

Stands the pioneer college of Western New York,

Alfred the Mother of Men.

                                                               Alfred University Anthem

November 1968.  The results started to come in late at night, the radio reporters waiting for reports from the West Coast before stating anything definite; but we had been speculating all day, and our excitement grew through the evening, as we sat in the student union.  It was hard to distinguish between what we wanted to happen and what we knew would happen when the election results were announced.  If Richard Nixon won the presidency, none of us would want to live in the United States.  We would be thrown back to the same old anxieties and fears of the McCarthy Era, and that was not so long ago, was it?

          At about ten o’clock that evening, with six of us at the corner table in the Student Union Cafeteria, with its plain red brick walls, where we usually sat to discuss politics and other important matters, there didn’t seem to be any room for doubt.  The sound of some unknown rock’n’roll band playing in the background, the kind of music none of us could stomach but had learned to live with since our requests for alternative records—we still lived in the aura of the big swing bands of the 1930s and 1940s of our parents’ generation—was hardly audible amidst all our table noise.  The very idea shut out also all the other young people in the room who were having their last snacks of the evening, making arrangements for their covert sexual liaisons, and trying desperately to borrow notes from each other for the lectures they had missed or slept through during the day.  But for us, only one thing mattered:  Tricky Dicky was going to be the new president of these here United States of America. 

          As much as we had all anticipated this turn of events, no one really wanted to accept it as true.  Since we were not the kind of students who would go out and get drunk—there was no alcohol permitted on campus, not in the Union, and only available in some private flats, if the neighbors didn’t complain—we had to excite ourselves by our talk.  This night of all nights, in the blue luminousness of that cafeteria where we always gathered to feel sorry for ourselves, we were already bouncing in our seats, yelling out our opinions, and laughing nervously as our speculations about what to do became increasingly radical.  The night air that early November was cold and the wind blew through the doors every time someone walked in or out.  The university was located in a small narrow valley in upstate New York, and the winter would soon enough roll down the mountains and blanket everything with snow.  But nothing was as cold as the shivers in our bones at that horrible thought of a Republican victory.

          So an hour later on that Tuesday evening, shortly before the cafeteria shut down for the day, someone had suggested that we defect to Canada, another that we go on a hunger strike, another that have sit-in at the administration building, until finally a collective idea struck us, that we break into the ROTC armory, take the rifles, head for the hills, and start a rebellion, just as Fidel Castro had done in Oriente Province in Cuba.  If he can do it, we can too, several voices shouted.  There were, as usual, five us sitting there, with an occasional other passing by, slapping us on the back, with encouragement as they heard our wild speculations, and then disappearing back into what was for them another unimportant day.  Mike, the pre-med student from upper Manhattan; Freddy, the hopeful lawyer-to-be, from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn; Miriam, eventually to be a State Senator from her own district in Westchester; Henry, the inscrutable boy from Poughkeepsie, who ambitions changed from hour to hour, but somehow always returning to the idea of becoming a Cantor. But whose predilections for local radio led him to become a somewhat shady property investor; and myself.  We were the regulars.  Occasional passers-by included Hannah from the Bronx, a sort of girlfriend of Mike, but too down-to-earth in her politics to take our ravings seriously; Abe, with his thick glasses and nervous stutter, who assured us he would become a brain surgeon, something we found both preposterous and possible because of his intensity, was always in a rush, never able to say more than “I like your ideas, but call me when you are ready to act”, and Becka, too beautiful to be one of us, but clever enough to like our discussions.

          Whenever Becka sat down with us, we knew there was something special she wanted to say, and even when she passed the table, slowed down, and passed a few remarks, we could not help it—we stopped our other discussions and listened to what she was suggesting.  This evening, as we were babbling away a mile a minute about Tricky Dicky’s win and our options, she pushed her head into our discussion and started to say we should all write graffiti on posters, walls, telephone poles, so people would know there was a general disgust with the way the election turned out.  Then off she went, just like that.  We looked at one another, and came to an agreement spontaneously: this was the stupidest idea we had ever heard. 

          Who could believe the entire government of the United States would shiver in its boots because in one small college in some out of the way valley in western New York State a bunch of losers said bad things about Nixon?  We laughed for a while. 

          “B-b-b-but it was b-b-b-b-Becka’s idea,” Abe said, and he was off too; pre-med students have no time to waste. 

          The rest of us were nonplussed for a moment.  Could we ignore a beautiful girl’s comments, as Abe pointed out?  Stupid it may have been, we already knew, yet we had never done that before.  Was this night of all nights more important than our mutual, understated complete infatuation with Becka? 

          I don’t know how many minutes passed after Abe was gone before we could turn back to the big plans for a rebellion or a retreat to the hills or whatever else it would be that we voted to do.  It was probably Miriam who brought us back to our senses and the serious issues at hand.  She could do it because she was a girl , impervious to Becka’s charms and wiles, and, though she herself was undoubtedly female and not really ugly, she never had the same power over us and when we were excitedly talking over things she was one of the gang. 

          “There are three choices, as I see it,” Miriam said.  “There’s something attractive about each, and yet I can’t put my finger on it, but there are drawbacks in all of them.”

          “What do you mean?” Hannah asked.  She somehow was sitting with us, though no one could remember her coming to the table.  So now a third female was turning our discussions in ways none of the hysterical male voices had anticipated.  And Hannah, who we considered Mike’s girlfriend, could turn his head in a way that Becka couldn’t, though everyone would turn their heads to follow her as she walked away because of the lovely shape she had doing that, and because Miriam was, as I said, not the kind of a girl we considered as female when we were discussing serious topics.

          “Well,” answered Miriam, “put it this way,” which is the way he always began.  “We could all decide to emigrate to Canada or Mexico or someplace like that, but if we did that, Nixon would do whatever he wanted and no one would notice that we had left.”

          “Our parents might,” Freddy interposed.

          “And our teachers here, too, maybe,” added Mike.  “They take attendance, you know, and are responsible for us, in locus parenti, and want the money they get from our folks’ tuition.”

          “The second option,” Miriam explained, “is the hunger strike.  All of us.  We sew up our mouths and refuse to drink or eat anything, and we tie big signs around our necks saying we the younger generation cannot live under a crazy conservative man like Richard M. Nixon.”

          “How long do you expect us to do that?” Freddy said, and he was seconded by everyone else, including several of the more passing members of our group.  “I for one couldn’t do that for more than one day.”  A look at his belly would explain why.

          Mike then said, “My limit is one Yom Kippur per year.  I don’t starve for an idiot like Dicky Boy.”

          “See,” said Miriam, “it’s not a very practical idea with a bunch of spoiled brats like you guys.”

          “So what is left?” I asked, knowing full well the only possible answer.

          “Then it’s the third option then, and I don’t mean scribbling nasty notes in public to make the new President pee in his pants and run away,” said Miriam. She let us know that such posters and graffiti around the little rural villages in this poverty-stricken region of the state would hardly win sympathy, if understood at all.

          There it was. Only one option left.  No vote necessary.  Everyone knew now we would have to get into the armory of the ROTC, take out as many rifles as we could and all the live ammunition we could find, as well as other equipment, and hightail it into the hills to start an insurrection.  It would have to take careful planning and there would have to be, of course, a lot more of us than just the six or seven students sitting around the table that night.  Winter was coming on.  We would have to act quickly.

          Unfortunately, just as we were getting down to the nitty-gritty of strategy for our rebellion, the bell rang and we had to leave the Student Union.  What could we do?  The girls could not come home with us or we risked neighbors calling the local police who worked hand in fist with the campus cops to maintain morality in the village, and we could not go with them as the rules for women’s residences were even tougher and were enforced by house matrons whose previous employment we assumed had been as concentration camp guards.  So the boys walked back to the attic apartment Mike and Freddy shared and where we could all sit and continue our strategizing the insurrection.

          It was already eleven thirty.  The excitement we had all felt was already fighting with the yawns we passed around from one to the other.  Exclamations on the need for action began to alternate with reminders about assignments due later that week, panicky warnings about examinations coming up at the end of the month, and suggestions that we might best go to sleep and reconvene some time the next day and review the situation in the cold light of day.  Surely, we would all be better able to hatch our plot if the girls were with us, since they would be taking part as well, and maybe, too, we could talk some other people into joining us.  By midnight, Abe, Henry and myself were putting on our coats to return to our own rooms a few blocks away.

          We probably all believed that we would be ready and able the next day to work out these important plans.  However, the truth is that when Wednesday morning broke, everyone went about their usual routines—breakfast, classes, and studying in the library—and by the afternoon when we found ourselves again in the Student Union sitting around the table sipping hot chocolates or cups of tea, no one thought to mention the previous evening’s events.  Only when Miriam glided in about an hour later, when her classes were over for the day, and asked if we had written out a programme of action, did we recall the agitated state we had been in and the pressing desire to take to the hills in a state of rebellion. 

          “Well, comrades,” she said, “what is to be done?”  She loved these significant historical allusions.

          Various murmurs went round the group, the upshot of which was something to the effect: “We should probably wait until spring comes.”

          The rebellion was over.  Nixon would rule America, ruin it, and declare himself dictator for life.