24 Icarus

My first year of teaching at little Friend College was torture. Winter mornings three times a week I met English Composition at 7:40. Reunion, Iowa, at that hour is icy, dark, and cold. One morning I missed class and lay in bed too frightened and tired by my failure even to call in before 10:00, making myself sick. At our next class meeting, my students were justifiably surly and sullen when I ordered a pop theme, too insecure to confess my guilt and too defensive and proud to understand and acknowledge my shame. Composition, half my academic load, I hardly cared about. My mistress was world literature. With her I was confident, demanding, daring, and innocent, a bad combination.

In Literary Masterpieces, the senior level English course required of all graduates, I lectured for thirty minutes, read aloud from the assigned text, answered questions, class dismissed. In general I swaggered, postured, and bluffed—from a point of view I called existential—in front of forty students only two years younger than I. Only twenty-four years old I was the youngest teacher by far in a department of eight, the next youngest more than twice my age. I loved literature. I had the vigor of inexperience. I gave four tests—each a mixture of identification, short answer, and essay. Before I returned them I listed the scores on the board, highest to lowest, and assigned grades according to a bell curve. To this crude scheme I sometimes added a short paper, a formalist critique in the genre I had been taught and mastered. In the spring my best student, Wayne Kramer, died in a parachuting accident.

I loved him.

His life and death were a seed.

Ex-Catholic, an anti-war activist studying political science, Wayne was intelligent, witty, hyperverbal, articulate, keen, clever, and intent. His test answers were invariably cogent and succinct. He was literate, well-read, well-informed. He had intelligent, passionately committed, political, articulate friends. Their questions and remarks in class often took issue—with the war, with the establishment, with the curriculum, with the college, and with me. Wayne loved school—he loved studying, reading, talking, discussing, debating, interpreting, theorizing, figuring in, figuring out, proving right, proving wrong, winning the argument.

We all did.

Alert, with a quick sense of humor, ironic, liberal, caring, kind, a freethinker like myself, he liked me, respected me, admired me, and he made me his friend. He made me feel like a good teacher, like a good man, like someone important. My last words to him were a joke he heard with a laugh and a smile and a wave of his hand the night before he died. Wayne was going skydiving the next day and I was afraid for him so I was trying to play it off.

"You'll be dead tomorrow," I taunted.

Three of us spent the evening drinking beer at my home, talking about objective tests, essay tests, and grades. His friend Richard and I struggled to win our contest for Wayne's vote of approval, practicing our big words, our newly acquired academic syntax, thinking and learning. We three were each one good part of a true school. There was no need to debate the war.

We all three opposed it.

It seemed we and our circle of teachers, professors, and students were a sixteen hour a day debating society. Like the Remmes circle in Shenandoah and Larry Reed's in Ames we were practicing for an as yet unknown but better adversary, one more skillful yet, one more cunning still. We were young, smart, unsure of sides but absolutely certain of our cause and supremely confident of our intellectual powers. Wayne observed us, measuring and evaluating. Our conversation that evening had been pure argument, a test of intellect, teasingly mental. There had been no reason to raise our voices—and no one did except to laugh. Neither sex nor survival involved, it had been pure words, and we had liked it, enjoyed it, we had had fun. These were the grim days of the War in Vietnam, the draft, the days of reading, the days and years of Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News.

Everything mattered, everything mattered a lot.

It was dark on my porch, a dim weak yellow light bulb. I squinted and said goodbye.

A second time I called out my last words to Wayne.

"You'll be dead tomorrow!"

I shut the door and peered out through the sheer curtains as Wayne and his classmate Richard got in their car and drove off into the late Friday night. The next afternoon brought Richard and another close friend, Nelson, to the porch and to my door knocking with the shocking bad news.

"Wayne's dead."

I heard how he had tumbled on his second jump, tangling his gangly legs in the cords of his parachute. Falling, falling, he untangled and freed himself, but by then his second chute had opened and wound around his first. He lived two hours after he hit the ground, though he did not float down, though he did hit hard.

I didn't see it, I've only been told. But I have imagined it time after time, the forgetting to jump, instead leaping forward to flatten out and sail, legs and arms extended like wings in an x.

Like the skydivers we have all seen on TV, Wayne went over. Unlike the skydivers, he dove—head first. Thinking about that makes me so scared for him, so scared for his hurt.

I write this for Wayne, the first of my students I loved. We all loved him so much. We all loved him so much. We all loved him so much. We all loved him so very much.

Many many times I went over it and over it in my mind—again and again and again.

I was not remembering, I had not seen it.

I am falling, falling shocked, falling, realizing, horrified, falling, accelerating, untangling in un relief, falling, I am falling, shocked, falling, untangling, falling, realizing, falling, I am falling, I am panic, I am shock, I am falling untangling beautiful student, beautiful mind, beautiful soul Wayne, meeting Spring, Iowa, Earth, Death, Pain.

I am Earth, Iowa, Spring, meeting my dear falling friend Wayne.