The first time I ever saw Rut, it was on the long entrance drive to the private school where I had just started working. I was driving a typical teacher car, a compact station wagon, and he was heading directly towards me on a skateboard. I was going about 15 miles an hour; he was traveling about 20. Instead of giving me a panicked look, as one would expect from someone who was about to die on the hood of a Ford, he smiled, waved, and then ran off the road and into a drainage ditch.
Great, my first day at a new school and I just killed someone. I hadn’t even gotten the keys to my office yet.
It turned out that he was okay. Rut looked at me from the ditch, smiled from under a grossly askew helmet and, indicating the skateboard, said, “I’ve always wanted to try that.”
As I was to discover, he was used to falling, as he owned a variety of sporting equipment that, from time to time, ensured it. I also discovered that Rut was a bit of an anomaly in the school community, and not just for his frequent tests of gravity. A private secondary school is, after all, a place organized for and dependent upon the pursuits of youth, but Rut was not a youth. He was, at the time I almost killed him, 65 years old.
He was a Korean War veteran who had been a motorcycle dispatch rider, ski instructor, rock climber, had hiked the Appalachian Trail in its entirety, worked a variety of jobs, and, while a graduate student at Boston University, had lived across the hall from Martin Luther King, Jr., to whom he would refer, and not ironically, as “my buddy, Marty”. He had built his own cabin in Maine, even felling the trees, and built a boat to complement it. Now in his seventh decade, he was a history teacher and “outdoor skills” coach at our second-rate prep school.
I learned of his history in five minute installments, chatting from our adjacent classroom doors during the daily change in classes. One day, Rut told me that he had bought a mountain bike and was looking forward to trying it out later in the afternoon. “I’ve always wanted to try that,” he said. The next day he was on crutches, telling me of the deceptively steep trail that he’d discovered. Later that year, at a faculty meeting, he arrived sporting a new cast on his arm. We exchanged looks and he just said, “Inline skates”. He’d always wanted to try that, too, you see. Because of events like these, behind his back some the students and twenty-something faculty called him Rut the Nut.
I could see why. According to the hobbled world view of the students and younger faculty, Rut was too old for skateboards and mountain bikes, too old to be a teacher [he was at least twenty years older than any of the other faculty members], and would talk about things that were, well, just plain old. After all, as a young faculty member once asked me, who is this “Marty” guy?
Despite the pretense of uniqueness and originality, ably reinforced by the professional marketing community, teenagers are remarkably uniform in their tastes, style, and world view. Like artists, they think of themselves as edgy and progressive and, like too many artists, seal themselves off in an attitudinal bubble that ensures that they will be anything but.
Which was why, of course, Rut did new things. As there will always be those who seek the safe cocoon of homogeneity, their counterparts will be challenging any notion that limits human activity and endeavor by prejudices about age, culture, gender, ideology, and spirituality. I recognized that kind of defiance immediately as it was and is a strong part of surfing, an activity that, in those days, was beginning to reclaim my attention and activity. It was pleasant to spend hours in the company of surfers after weeks on end with clergy and private school teachers and students.
This recognition was ratified one morning when, for reasons that are clouded now by time and distance, I had used a surfboard to teach a lesson to my philosophy class. After carrying a Hanson board, bright in the colors and pattern of the flag of Finland, across the campus quad from my classroom to the administration building, I found Rut in my office eager to talk of surfing, surfboards, and what one has to do to get started in the sport.
“You know, I was stationed in Hawaii when I was in the Army and used to watch those local boys on those enormous boards out on those waves. Man, it looked like fun. We wanted to do it, too, but we weren’t allowed to mix with the locals in those days. This doesn’t look as heavy as those boards did, though. You know, I’ve always wanted to try that.”
Before I could explain that surfboards were no longer made out of koa wood, Rut grabbed the Hanson, ran outside and placed it between two picnic tables by the dining hall. He then sprung, with considerable vigor, onto the board and began to mimic the motions of a surfer on a wave. At first, I was worried that he would snap the board in two; then I was worried that he’d fall and have another visit with his close friends at the local emergency room. But after a minute of surf pantomime, he nodded, brought the board back to the office, placed it carefully against a bookcase, and asked, “Where can I buy one?”
As the closest surf shop was clean on the other side of the state, I suggested that he try to order one through the sports equipment provider who was contracted to the school. To this day, I wish I had been privy to his conversation with the salesman. It arrived shortly before graduation. Rut showed it to me while loading up his car the day after the last day of the school year and told me he was going to try it out on the particularly bone crushing waves on Cape Cod. I more or less expected that this meant I would see him modeling some form of orthopedic gear upon our return in September but, as I knew from my own experience, with some things you just have to get out there and do it. I don’t think that process ever had to be explained to Rut.
I saw him next at the new term’s opening faculty meeting, nearly a year to the day I had almost killed him. Rut sat next to me and, while our new headmaster droned on about the difference between culture and character or something like that, I heard the familiar tales of a neophyte’s first surfboard summer. He could have been 12 and it wouldn’t have sounded much different.
“It was momentous. I just spent all day at the beach. I felt like Hemingway in Spain.” He paused to explain to one of the twenty-something English teachers who Hemingway was. “Nothing but sun and water. Some shellfish, maybe.” He leaned forward and said conspiratorially, “A little rum.” He responded to one of our many faculty health scolds with, “At my age, you don’t worry about skin cancer. By the time you get it, you won’t live long enough to die from it,” and employed all of the appropriate terminology of surf life such as “pearled”, “puka”, and “stoked”. Yeah, he was stoked alright.
That year, our classrooms weren’t next to one another and, owing to a promotion that meant I had to spend more time with administrators and less with faculty, I didn’t have a chance to speak with Rut on a daily basis. Sometimes, whole weeks would go by when I would only see him across the quad, or nod to him across the dining hall. One day, in the midst of a particularly miserable winter, when all of us were spending too much time indoors, he came to my office. At first, I thought it was just to visit, but he seemed to have something specific on his mind.
“Do you still have a church somewhere?”
“No, I just sub for other clergy on Sundays.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.”
“Why? You looking for one?”
“Went a couple of times when I was a kid. Before the war. Indoors in a dark place never attracted me.”
“Well, some of them have electricity now.”
“But I was thinking that I’m not getting any younger and I should expand my horizons some. You know a good place?”
“My wife’s church. Not far from here.” I gave him the location.
“Yeah, I know it. The pretty one with the glass. Okay. Sunday mornings, right?”
“Usually. You can go on Wednesday mornings, too.”
“No. I want the Sunday experience. Might as well do it right. Organ music, right?”
Boarding schools maintain brutal schedules for their faculties, with only Sunday mornings free of scheduled activities. That, coupled with the late 20th/early 21st century need for the college-educated to affect worldliness and intellegence by disdaining religious practice, meant that church attendance was as rare and worthy of comment as was a 65-year-old on a skateboard.
I knew that Rut was joining in worship for the same reason that he skated, biked, and surfed: To push the limits placed on us, not by time or age or undeniable natural force, but by the conventional thinking that the mediocre use as a complacent cage.
So, with the same defiance that marked his physical endeavors, Rut found his church, attended regularly and, one evening, even saw to the organization of a parish’s pancake dinner. When other faculty would comment on his devotion, he would shrug, smile, and explain his burgeoning spirituality by saying, “I’ve always wanted to try that.”
[Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011]