“I graduated high school for this?” my co-worker asked as we reached the end of another row. This question surprised me, not because I hadn’t thought of it myself—we were, after all, harvesting potatoes for minimum wage in rural Alaska—but rather because this was the first time he hadn’t used a break in the work to remark “well, that sucked” or snarl “too much fun.” For the first time, his brain, fried from 30 years of alcoholism, had produced a comment worth acknowledging. “You have no idea,” I muttered in reply as the tractor made the turn and we prepared for another pass.
Because neither my biological sciences nor my philosophy major seemed to be particularly useful in any of the five jobs I held during the summer following my graduation in 2005—cleaning fish on a commercial fishing boat; washing buckets in a processing plant; harvesting potatoes at one farm; stacking boxes of cabbage, lettuce and carrots at another; and finally being a grunt on a concrete finishing crew—I often kept my education and my academic interests to myself. But when it came out that not only had I gone to college, but also had gone to one of the best, the responses were often entertaining. “Stanford? Oh, yeah. That’s a four-year college, right?” was one of my favorites. Another was, “Ha! You went to college and you still can’t staple boxes right!” However, the most common response was, as you might be asking yourself, “Huh? [So what the hell are you doing here?]”
At Stanford I felt it important to use my summers to take leave from the academic world of intelligent, motivated and, we all must admit, extremely lucky individuals. So while most of my friends spent July and August padding their résumés with more classes or internships, I worked my way onto boats, joined a forest firefighting crew, and found other unusual ways to spend my time. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t motivated in part by a sense of adventure or the need for a vacation. (My three months in French Polynesia, working first on a luxury yacht and then with an ethnobotanist surfer, were hardly disagreeable.) But what I gained and will continue to gain from such experiences goes far beyond a few pretty photographs and a couple of wild stories.
Where but in this sort of job could a Stanford student trade stories with single mothers on welfare, or work alongside teenagers with criminal records and drug addictions so intense they can hardly function? How often do you travel with an old sailor who lives on dry bread and goulash and after 30 years on the water is perfectly content to circumnavigate the world (again) at a two-knot pace until he dies? And when, in a classroom anywhere, do you find yourself trying to explain to an old Rastaman why Palo Alto doesn’t have reggae parties in the streets? (“Just play the music, man,” he insists with a knowing nod, “the people will come.”)
I could continue in this vein for some time, discussing the almost unbelievable opportunities that come with a great education and expressing my disbelief at the way they are so often taken for granted or squandered. Or I could build a podium and try to squeeze what I have learned in life into a few simple maxims. Or perhaps I could wax philosophically about whether an opinion can be trusted if it is never tested.
But it should be enough to say that—acting on the advice of the great British philosopher Douglas Adams—I am again looking at schools, taking standardized tests, and jumping through the necessary hoops. As he says, “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
JON ELDON, ’05, is currently pouring concrete in Alaska and plotting a return to the academic life.
