Denise, 2007
When I was a junior in high school, in 1959, I got a 99 in the standardized test for biology. I was very pleased with myself and toyed with the idea of becoming a scientist. Nuclear Physics sounded good, although most of what I knew of it came from science fiction movies and the stories of Robert Heinlein. My teacher, also impressed with my 99 percent, and in that age of Sputnik, constrained to push more kids into the sciences, got me a scholarship for a summer National Science Foundation program for high school students. There was no nuclear physics class, but there was biology and geology. I decided that biology would involve dissecting, which was too gross, so I opted for geology, although I had only the foggiest notion what it was.
The program was held at Hunter College in midsummer and we reported there on a sweltering day. The building was not air-conditioned and my main memory of classes is of sweating furiously and watching drowsily as the afternoon sun poured in the high windows. I found the weighing and measuring and analyzing of rocks to be less interesting than Forbidden Planet – a lot less interesting. We were given a rock- collecting kit involving a small hammer-like tool for chipping rocks and a case to carry our chips in. We went on field trips to see the local Bronx Gneiss and Manhattan Schist. These two names are the only concrete information I retained from the entire experience, and I liked to casually drop them into conversations when strolling around New York.
We also were sent for a week on a field trip into Western Pennsylvania. I was thrilled to be going there because my father’s family had come from the Scranton area and I felt I was visiting a sort of homeland. I was born to my parents late in their lives and raised alone, and carried a deep abiding yearning for family. Most of my parents’ relatives had died or moved far away and seemed like mythological creatures to me.
We traveled to Pennsylvania on a chartered bus. There were about fifteen of us, including a boy, whose name might have been Mike, who I had a huge crush on, but who liked the skinny girl who always wore a medal on a gold chain around her neck. For years after that I was convinced that necklaces were the key to attracting boys and always wore some kind of medal on a gold chain on my neck.
We went to a mushroom farm and walked through the dank caves; and we went to a coal mine and rode the super fast, plunging, ear-popping elevator down into the dark underground. The coal miners looking like sooty ghosts stared at us as we passed through the claustrophobia-inducing tunnels. We also stopped at a farm in the country, with a broad, white-painted, front-porched farmhouse, the likes of which you wouldn’t see in the Bronx. A woman who our professor introduced as “the lady who does my laundry” made us lunch. It is a measure of my naiveté that I did not realize for some time that it was his wife. We stopped at a quarry in the mountains to swim. The water was black and ice cold and appeared bottomless.
At the old fashioned inn in which we stayed overnight, I discovered that I had an allergy to feathers and in an act of stupid high school vandalism, pushed the feather pillow out of the second story window, losing a window screen in the process. I suspect the professor would not be invited to bring any more geology classes there.
Between pining over Mike, not understanding anything about the rock business, and suffering from severe allergy attacks, you might think that it was not a particularly good trip for me. You would be wrong. I, who had hardly ever been out of the Bronx, was enchanted and inspired by my travels and wrote feverishly in a journal the whole time. I described the blue mountains hovering over the road, the sunny Pennsylvania farm fields, and the adventure of traveling with strangers. I told about the mine and the mushroom farm and wrote passionately about feeling the spirits of my long lost Scranton family hovering close to me in their home state. By the end of the trip, I knew my calling was not to the lab but to the typewriter. I came home a writer.