Voice Over
by Roderick ClarkFrom the top of Donald’s Rock you can see forever. It stands a few miles from Mt. Vernon, Wisconsin, towering a hundred feet or more above the fields into blue Midwestern skies. At the bottom, I recall, are picnic tables. A small brass plaque standing in the little park at the foot of the rock tells you of its geologic origin, but I forget whether it was carved over eons by water out of the valley or whether it was an ice-tumbled stone borne here by the glaciers many years ago. And the plaque says something too about the state politician for which the rock and park are named, and I know there is local and state history of value in that—but I never cared much about the place where the rock anchors to the earth. The truth is upstairs.
From the summit you can see the green disk of the horizon, flat and rolling land, rich fields, wooded hilltops. A stream or a small river winds through it, cooling the distance. Far below, the roads stretch out like gray threads, the cars like colored insects racing to deliver people to work, school and the chores of the day. But on the top of Donald’s Rock, floating high above the rest of the world, none of that really matters, because this is the aerie—a place where with luck, on the right day, with the sun shining and a breeze fanning your hair—you can escape the world.
I remember that I came here with friends numerous times in my junior and senior years of high school—in the early summer and fall of ’65 and ’66. I e-mailed my best high school chum, Tom, recently, and asked him what he remembered about Donald’s Rock. What he remembered best was that he had taken girls there—perhaps anticipating that the shape of the rock, rising out of the flat land, would inspire romance. The girls I went with to Donald’s Rock are a blur to me. I recall enjoying their company, but it is the male companions I remember.
The visit I recollect best took place in June of ’66, when I was on the brink (just barely) of graduating from West High School in Madison, Wisconsin. Tom and I were only a few weeks away from matriculation, but the nearness of freedom from that building (which to this day looks more like a prison than an institution of learning) was unbearable. Incredibly, at that time, 2000 or so students were actually locked indoors at lunch (presumably to enhance the property values of the nearby residential neighborhood), and this heightened the feeling of being “in stir.” The gate to the future was about to open—but still we sat confined behind it, eager to escape.
Tom and I shared the first class in the morning, Senior English—and the subject that June was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales— which could have been wonderful. But instead, that morning we knew we were headed for another one of those interminable hours in which our teacher, pursing her lips as she perched on the desk, her heels swinging slightly in frustration at our slowness, would suspend weighty questions above our heads like daggers of Damocles. Tom or I might venture an opinion, but most of the class bore the stunned expression of lampreys, floating electrified in a lock between the mouth of a river and an inland sea. It was something I had seen while on vacation in Door County as a child. They pass this charge through the lock just strong enough to stun all the fish—so that men with nets can cull out the undesirable fish (lampreys and the like) and then let the rest drift glassy-eyed down to the great expanse of Lake Michigan. Something similar happened in those first hour English classes. From the moment the first question was launched into the air above our heads, a strange paralysis would begin to infect the room. After a minute or two the students would get glassy-eyed, and as the clock ticked slowly toward the bell, the
atmosphere of the room would become a pool of transparent jelly in which all thought or feeling was softly suffocated.
The classroom was on the first floor in the northwest wing of the building. That morning when we arrived in class, just before the bell, the outside windows had been opened to cool the ground floor, and magical scents wafted in from neighborhood gardens. The liquor of spring, which had long since pierced to the root of all green things, was now percolating up the flower stems, perfuming the air with recreational potential. Birds sang and squirrels scolded us from the green realm of liberty.
As the horror of the hour and day ahead sunk in, and Tom and I waited for the teacher to arrive, one of us—I forget which— made the obvious suggestion. As the other students watched, bug-eyed, gills quivering in horror, we climbed out the window and fled across the lawn. “You can’t do that!” someone called after us. And then fainter, like an echo from a departed dungeon— “They can’t do that!”
We found a car (I can’t remember if it was Tom’s, or if we hotwired a friend’s) and cruised west on University Avenue to a PDQ where a clerk honored our fake IDs and sold us two six-packs of malt liquor and a box of Crook’s rum-soaked cigars (“dipped in wine”). Then we headed south on 18/151, out through the fields and farms that had not yet become suburbs— and headed for Donald’s Rock. Tom remembered that our friend David had heard of our escape (no doubt a school legend by third period) and guessing where we were heading, had driven out to join us. By 10am or so, all three of us had precariously climbed Donald’s Rock and sat panting on the summit— watching hawks soar above the land below. (Climbing up was always a little scary when we were sober, but the descent, lubricated by a few cans of beer, was always a breeze.)
That may have been the first occasion on which I heard the line from David’s poem “In my dreams three policemen walk in pairs, policing the sidewalks of my mind.” At the time I thought it was unutterably cool—a perfect description of adolescent suburban angst. David was brilliant, and had already been asked to read his poetry at several colleges at the age of seventeen. In those days, if you were good at poetry, or theater—which Tom and I were also involved in—you were under
social pressure to balance it with something macho, like track, hoop skills, motorcycle ownership, something to show you weren’t a wimp. Nevertheless poetry, especially
really cool poetry shouted at the edge of a cliff with a beer in one hand and a cigar in the other, had a definite appeal. So, as I recall, we spent a good chunk of the day up there, leaping over chasms while trying not to spill precious alcoholic beverages, pissing over cliffs, blowing smoke at each other and telling stupid jokes about teachers, parents. We talked about snooty classmates who took church too seriously or who wrote dumb essays with titles like “Freedom is an Eagle.” Talked about whether marijuana should be legalized and whether a president, any president, should have the right to send us off to war...
Of the friends who visited Donald’s Rock with me or hung out with me in the 60s, many are now dead. Including my friend Jack (dead of an aneurysm) who used to lecture me on things like St. Augustine, Freud and what he called the first step to enlightenment: “a resolution of paradoxes.” Including my dear twin brother Steve, artist, fisherman and raconteur, who died suddenly and unexpectedly on July 12th of 2001—creating a void in my life I am still struggling to fill. I think that if I could have Steve back for an hour—say on the porch up north overlooking the river, and place a bottle of Kakabeka Falls Cream Lager in his hand, one of the things I would ask him about would be what he remembered of Donald’s Rock.
I have lost touch with David, who, following a brush with the law, became an excellent drug counselor. Tom, with whom I am still in regular contact, became a distinguished literary editor on the west coast and a famous translator of Latin American literature. One price of being a survivor is that you must carry the memory of the people who shared the same stream of space and time with you, and then drifted on. Of course there are always things and people you want to forget, but hanging out on Donald’s Rock with your friends was like being on top of the world. And that is the kind of bright stuff you want to pack and carry with you.
Many years from now, when I get to the next world, or perhaps when I am in transit, drifting with the rest toward gates pearly or dark, I would like to coordinate a sort of “out of class” reunion. I know just the spot to hold it. It’s a place where you can smoke cheap cigars and shout poetry over foaming cans into the face of the wind. I know it’s against the rules, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? All the scoundrels will join us there. If you provide the wheels, I’ll jump for the beer. The secret is timing, because Donald’s Rock is waiting and you may not get a chance to go there again. So at just the perfect moment, you make sure and give the signal. Then we’ll climb out the window and race for freedom.