Of course one of the reasons I try to make my way up to Hanover whenever I’m in the area is to see old friends. But I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t admit to indulging in a little nostalgia, walking the back paths I’d first trod more than half a lifetime ago, climbing the Baker steps, or settling into one of the overstuffed comfy chairs upstairs to read in Sanborn (alas, tea isn’t until 4:00, and I have to be on my way before then).

But, for purely egotistical reasons, I can never resist making my way down to the big room downstairs in Robinson (or “Robo” as it’s called on campus) to see if my plaque is still there. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t deserve the plaque – that’s an honor reserved for those who have left a lasting mark (sometimes physically!) on Dartmouth’s fabled Cabin and Trail club – but the story behind it somehow feels representative of some larger pattern in life.

So, indulge me a few minutes here?

I should step back and explain a bit more about about C&T plaques, and even before that, about C&T, so that you understand the gravity of the punchline at the end of this long-winded story.

Dartmouth Cabin and Trail are, for lack of a more eloquent term, outdoor badasses. In the spare time left over from their usual crushing undergraduate course load, they maintain about 50 miles of the Appalachian Trail, clearing trees, and rebuilding washouts, constructing whole log cabins from the ground up and moving mountains when necessary. I’m only exaggerating a little on that last one.

In their time off from that, they compete in timber sports meets, climbing trees, throwing axes and doing lots of other things that would give their mothers palpitations.

[pics nabbed shamelessly from Dartmouth Outing Club Timber Team Instagram account]

If you are a particularly hard core member of C&T and do something particularly noteworthy (good or bad), you may find your deed immortalized by a plaque or trophy in Robo. No, not some little plastic and chrome thing purchased down at Ace Trophy and Award. These are… well, let me just show you.

You get the idea? C&T just rolls the way it rolls.

Anyhow.

As an undergrad I tried to participate in C&T. They were as supportive and welcoming of my flailing efforts, but honestly, I just couldn’t keep up. Still, many of my classmates (and former dorm-mates) were deeply involved in the group, so I stayed in the general orbit and was grateful for the invitations to drop in on the less hardcore and more social gatherings when they came.

Fast forward a couple of decades to the winter of 1992, when I was doing my best to wind up my Ph.D. dissertation in Seattle and find a job. As are many doctoral candidates, I was so full of myself that I applied for faculty positions to all the top schools – MIT, Harvard, Princeton – you name it. And of course I applied to my alma mater – I would have loved for Dartmouth to take me back as a professor.

For reasons that were far beyond my comprehension then (i.e., my dissertation was a mishmash of loosely connected ideas that bore no trace of a consistent research direction), nobody even wanted to invite me out for an interview.

Not to be put off, I made some implausible excuse to invite myself out to Dartmouth (Hey, I’m going to be in the neighborhood…) and asked if I might just give a talk to the CS Department while I was there. I didn’t really understand how things worked, and figured that maybe if I gave a reeeeeeally good talk, they might reconsider.

Short story there is that, in retrospect, I didn’t give a “reeeeeeally good talk.” I’m not sure it was even an adequate one. Key indicator: one of my former advisors fell asleep in the front row.

Well.

Coming off of that exhausting and mortifying experience, I decided I needed a walk out on the trail through the woods by Occam Pond to clear my head. It was dusk, and I remember the sky a clear darkening blue sky, with a few uneven inches of old snow on the ground. The air was crisp and healing.

I don’t actually recall how far around the loop I was when out of nowhere, a stake truck piled high with snow and freshmen pulled up across the path. The folks in back were singing “La Marseille” at the top of their lungs like it was some sort of anthem, and jumped off to start shoveling snow.

I’d seen stranger things, but what puzzled me was that they were shoveling it off the truck and onto the road. Which seemed a little odd.  I watched their industrious efforts for a couple of minutes before asking, in my best Uh-what’s-up-Doc voice:

“So, um, whatcha doing?”

“We’re trying to cover this section of road with snow.”

“Yeah, I see.”

[long pause]

“Wanna help?”

Who was I to say no?

After we finished that truckload, I climbed onto the back of the truck with them, and off we went. It was only after the second or third load that it occurred to me to ask why we were seeking snow from points unknown to cover the backstreets of Hanover. I had figured it was some sort of prank, but hey, I’ve always been a joiner.

Anyhow, it was great fun.

But the next evening, I wandered over to the C&T chili feed at the Rock and was perching on the back of a couch when I overheard a couple of freshmen talking. One was describing their ordeal preparing for the Citizen’s Classic cross country ski race the previous night. You see, there’d been pathetic snowfall, and the only way the course was going to be skiable was if a bunch of them spent the night trucking snow in from hell and back to make berms for the skiers to use when crossing the roads.

And as the young women explained, “We’d been going for hours and were burnt out and ready to give up when this stranger stepped out of the woods. He said in a booming voice: ‘I’m Pablo – give me a shovel and let me help!’ And he started singing and rallied us and gave us the strength to go on and finish the job. It was amaaaaaazing.”

Now, I knew – and now you know – that wasn’t how it went down. And maybe she knew that wasn’t how it really went down. But it sounded like a great story, and there was no way I was going to kill the seed of such a beautiful legend by injecting a little unwelcome reality. After all, devotion can be mythic in more than one way, can’t it?

I faded back a little and made my way back to the kitchen to reload my bowl and contemplate the way the distinctions between fact and legend have always blurred as the chariot of time draws us further and further beyond the original events. No, I wasn’t going to mess with this one.

—

It was a few years later, I don’t recall when, that I got email from my old classmate (and C&T badass and now professorial badass) Dave Kotz. He dropped me a line with a picture saying, “Have you seen this?” I hadn’t. No idea who’d created it, but there it was: legend fully chiseled into fact on a bit of routed and hand-tooled pine. Including a…wishful tooled rendering of me, back when I actually had hair. A man and his shovel.

“Pablo – for mythical devotion. The stuff legends are made of.”

It’s an honor that, as I’ve explained, I don’t really deserve. But then, “legend” doesn’t just mean someone of great fame or notoriety; the OED also defines it as “a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.” I can’t argue with that. Besides, who am I to mess with the stuff such tales are made of?