Last weekend I attended my Homecoming at William and
Mary. Homecoming has been part of
my Fall Break almost every year since I graduated, and this year was the big
Fifth Year Reunion. I missed the
official Fifth Year Reunion activities because my friends and I created our own
reunion activities, and they were open to all classes, not just the stellar
Class of 2006. Most of the
activities involved walking around and eating and some improv comedy as my soul
will always me a member of the College’s Improvisational Theatre. It’s a time to catch up with close
friends, maybe see people that have completely dropped off the face of the
earth, and create new relationships thought unimaginable as an undergraduate.
As a seasonal employee, I usually don’t work for most of the
months of October and November.
Having that chunk of time without any responsibilities allows me to get
back to Virginia for Homecoming. I
love Homecoming, as the Northern Rockies can be lonely place on the alumni
front (that is changing as CB and RP now live in
Montana), so Homecoming is not only a time to see friends, but also an
opportunity to recharge my batteries on a culture that’s nonexistent in my
corner of the Intermountain West.
We had two cars driving back from brunch on Sunday. At a stoplight, CH, in the car in
front of us, starts waving at us in the car behind. AS waves back.
I wave at CH. Light
turns green. We all continue
waving as we’re driving down the road.
BK and MW, the other passengers, stick their hands out waving. Two cars, five hands waving. We drove the four miles back to the
house parade waving and giggling like idiots the whole time. We received more double takes than
return waves. I miss the effort
that goes into fairly frivolous things like the crazy
adventure/Capture-the-Flag/Live-Action-Role-Playing/scavenger-hunt/outdoor-theater
productions from Random People Camping Trips and now a livelihood for two
friends as The AVAdventure. There
is a commitment to silliness that I don’t find to be as strong with my social
circles here in the West. I’m not
saying I don’t love my friends out here; they’re just different. I’m different. I’ve always felt trapped between two
worlds in the West. On the East
Coast, I feel like some woodsman emerging into a modern world. In the mountains, I feel like a stodgy
academic. Of course my social
circles would be different in both places.
The Commitment to Silliness community is something I miss,
but it’s too early in the narrative to refer to them that way. On the Friday of Homecoming, I was
taking in the campus, quietly, by myself.
I had carpooled down with AS who had official business to attend to,
while I just wandered. At one
point, I even wandered into Swem Library and worked on transcribing some notes
from my Wilderness First Responder class.
Yeah, who goes to the Library to do some work during Homecoming? Not just any Homecoming either, but
Fifth Year Reunion Homecoming. The
solo wandering got me thinking about community. The sense of community I shared at William and Mary is
unlike any other community. I
couldn’t walk more than a hundred yards without seeing someone I knew, and here
I was, back on campus, surrounded by total strangers. I hope they know my sense of community on campus, but in
their own context, amongst their own friends, but my community has all
graduated, all eight classes I had spent at least one year with on campus. Community is the people! hit me while I sat alone on the UC Terrace, a campus
location WW and I had ruled with a benevolent iron fist when we should
have been working on our thesisses (thesisi?). Community is the people. The community isn’t the place, it’s the people. Community is the way those individual
people make you feel, and the way you feel just being amongst those people as a
group. The College of William and
Mary in Virginia was just the original location our community inhabited. The campus I stood on in 2011 is still
home to a vibrant community of young and the young at heart, but that
geographic space is a husk my community left after graduation. Homecoming is not coming home to this
place, but it’s coming home to these people. Homecoming is returning to that collective spark we created
years ago. We have taken that glow
with us every place we have been since then. Not to say that my friends from college have no commitment
to serious things or that my Intermountain West friends have no silliness, but
that’s what I miss, and return to, is the community Commitment to Silliness.
But what about love of place and how that fits into
community? took me aback. Love of Place is a concept I have been
spreading through my work as an Instructor with the Yellowstone Association
Institute. How Love of Place is necessary
to saving and preserving not just wilderness and green spaces, but communities
and historic places. But earlier I
was smacked with how community is just the people. Community is
a group of people with a commonality tethering them together. In many communities, that tether is a
place. My William and Mary
community is tethered to that campus.
What amazing work to be a part of the Office of Admissions as that group
is hand-picking members of wonderful new communities every year. My Yellowstone community is tethered to
Yellowstone National Park. Love of
Place can be included in creating community. Community is how a group of people makes you feel, how you
feel amongst those people, the connection between people. All of that can be applied to a place;
how a place makes you feel, how you feel in a place, your connection with a
place. Community and to commune
have the same root. To commune is
to be in intimate communication or rapport and that can be absolutely true of
place. The passion to protect a
place emerges from including places into our sense of community. Enlarging “the boundaries of the
community to the soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the
land,” is what Aldo Leopold referred to as the Land Ethic. When a place attains the same position
of people, we fight to protect them.
Transferring that into the political arena, we start to give places and
environments and ecosystems the same rights as people. If a corporation can have the same
rights as a person, then why not an ecosystem?
The true beauty of community is transcendence of the
tether. Most of my William and
Mary community is no longer on campus.
My Yellowstone community hops all over the world like a bunch of Mexican
jumping beans (that feels racist, but the beans are seed pods with a moth larva
inside and the jumping is the larva trying to get the pod into the shade,
they’re found in Mexico).
The ability of a community to transcend the tether is directly related
to the strength of the community.
All communities should get to the point where they can transcend the
tether, so the community is no longer tied to a place, but to each other
independent of anything else.
