In that magnificent film, “Dead Poets Society,” Robin Williams climbs up on his desk to show his prep school boys how adjustment in elevation can give you a change, often times improving in your outlook on life.
Robin Williams wasn’t the first teacher to get up to where eagles fly. School boys in Gill beat him to it.
We had a group of Saturday boys whose weekend hikes ended only after they had climbed several pine trees to take a look about the world.
They regularly got their teacher out early to hike with them to where pine trees grow straight and tall.
The teacher hiked with Bobby Greenleaf, Robert Eddy, Ronald Arial, Lee Christian, fine boys all.
From trees at the north end of Bernardston to Greenfield at the south, there is probably not a pine whose upper story does not bear the imprint of hands and feet pressing for hand and toe holds. The boys’ mothers are probably still at work washing pitch out of their boys’ jeans.
South, the boys looked past Northampton’s coal-smoking chimney, beyond the Quabbin’s shores, past the Holyoke range, east to west where Amherst’s Phi Beta Kapa fraternity men used to hike.
From time to time, one of those massive lumbering bombers took to the sky above Westover Air Base, hanging as though suspended by wires. Only the world under them seemed to be in motion.
German submarines were sinking allied ships by the tons in the early course of World War I. Radar was still on the “drawing boards” when the United States made the belated decision to take up arms against Germany, becoming allied with England and France. That alliance made it an all-out effort to stop Germany.
At Amherst College several members of the fraternity Phi Game Delta joined in France to drive ambulances in the land war. My father was one of the junior Amherst boys to sign up. Of all his many experiences that offer as “stories,” two stand out.
He was returning once in his ambulance from a “front” hospital station when he entered a section of highway that was under German cannon fire. The only place he found to take cover was an oil drum on the side of the road, better than nothing. He spent dark hours curled up in a ball waiting for the shelling to end. He survived, but his make-shift shelter was badly dented.
On board transports they kept an eye out for German submarines with men on look-out in “crows nests,” seated in steel chairs mounted on the tops of ships’ masts. Volunteers had no idea what tough duty that was: to climb the mast, yawing wildly left and right as their ship rolled.
Hardened in the course of this duty, “crows” nest look-outs from Amherst suffered little sea-sickness after a time in this assignment.
So, you ask, how does this desk-walking and tree-climbing translate into making common sense of grammar?
It was once an inevitability that a few weeks after school’s start in the fall at Turners Falls High School, our English teacher would call us in to say she could tell the Gill boys right off the bat — they knew pronouns from conjunctions, took to parsing sentences like ducks to water. They wrote like grammatical naturalists: born to it.
Easy, tell her. Get up with Robin Williams on his desk. Look around you. You’ll see!