The concert hall is empty, though just a few moments earlier, the room had been filled with every first-year assigned to Brainerd Commons, along with Brainerd staff and the Common Reading Group facilitators. That’s why I’m here, to facilitate one of the groups. I have to admit that I volunteered to be a facilitator because I saw it as an opportunity to force me to read a book that I’ve been intending to read since it was published a few years ago. (Oscar Wao has been on the bookshelf in my den since its release, tucked between a couple of other important books I haven’t found time to read yet). But as the rest of Brainerd Commons decamps for other nooks around the building  and my group somewhat nervously settles in on the stage for our discussion, I chuckle to myself. Fool, my inner voice scolds me. You and your selfish impulses. What do you know about facilitating a reading group?

The students arrayed around me have come from Switzerland and Seattle, Memphis and Montana, the Bronx and Long Island, and they are looking at me expectantly, as though I should know what I’m doing. And we start to talk . . . about the protagonist, Oscar de Leon; about the reliability of the narrator, Yunior; about the disjointed narrative; about the use of footnotes and our collective ignorance of Dominican history and popular culture references that some of us understand and others absolutely do not.

Ninety minutes have passed, and it’s time for our discussion to end, over before it really began. But it hasn’t ended at all. As we walk out into a warm evening (“I just want it to snow!” says the Seattle-ite), the students continue to talk about Oscar Wao as they make their way toward Proctor and points beyond. One of the more animated kids is one who admitted an hour earlier that he wouldn’t have picked up this book if it hadn’t been assigned and that he would still place it in the category of a book he had to read, as opposed to a book he’d read for fun.

A few weeks later, I’m sitting in the McCullough Social Space, listening to Shirley Collado, dean and chief diversity officer of the College, quiz Díaz, himself, talk-show-style on the stage of the cavernous space. It’s an exclusive event—only first-years and Commons faculty and staff have been invited to this discussion (Díaz’s evening talk at Mead Chapel is open to the public). The venue was chosen to accommodate 600-odd people, and while the room isn’t filled to capacity, there is a very good turnout, especially on a warm and sunny autumn afternoon.

Collado is asking Díaz questions that emerged from the group discussions, and he doesn’t disappoint, speaking to the first-years as honestly and wisely and authentically as anyone could possibly hope for. He addresses his struggles as a writer: “Sometimes you’re in a situation where you are really good at something that you happen to find really, really hard to do.” He explains why individuals should be confused when reading Oscar Wao: “Nobody understands life. That’s the way life is. It’s absolutely normal, when reading, for you not to know something. A community is required to achieve understanding.” And he talks about why, when doing research, he prefers to observe rather than to ask questions: “By the very nature of your question, you are skewing the answer.”

But it’s toward the end of the discussion that Díaz says something that, to me, brings this entire experience into its proper context. “I wrote this book from the memory of being a reader. This Common reading? It’s how books should be read. We are all present in one space, together, at the same time. In this world, we have to fight hard to find that. And this is the muscle that we will survive on.”

Douglass was 48 years old when he died. He had been an ensign in the 12th Regiment of the Vermont Militia headquartered at Bennington. (Ensigns were commissioned officers who carried the colors.) We know that Douglass served in Captain John Stillwell’s company for 16 days in the fall of 1781, that he traveled 40 miles, and was paid four pounds, one shilling, and four pence for his service. Whether Douglass served at other times during the Revolution and what his company did, where they went, and whether they ever encountered the British is not known. All that remains is his payroll card from the war and his grave site—the grave on the Middlebury College golf course.

Why is there such an incomplete picture of William Douglass? He died before the first U.S. census in 1790. He didn’t live long enough to document his service for a Revolutionary War pension. His death predates the existence of the first churches in Cornwall and Middlebury where early records were kept. There were no newspapers in the region at the time. And fires in 1800 and 1814 destroyed most of the Revolutionary War documents in the custody of the War Department.

“Fire and floods, mold and neglect,” says Amy Morsman, associate professor of history at Middlebury. “These are not good for historians. Primary source materials like original records are the building blocks of history. They are your absolute smoking gun in terms of historical research.”

Without primary sources, a historian has little option but to dig deeper. “Pursuing the past, running down loose ends, taking paths that turn out to be dead ends and then turning around and digging some more—this is what makes history interesting for students,” Morsman says. “When they have to go out and do that research themselves, when they have to go up to a real person and ask questions, and it’s not all at the point-and-click of a mouse, that’s when they realize that they can be the person to unlock a mystery.”

Douglass was one of the first settlers of Cornwall, Vermont, and yet his place in history is obscure. And except for the fact that his tombstone lies alongside the 11th tee on the golf course, he could have been forgotten.

The town clerk spins around in her chair and says, “It’s missing. Vital Records Book Number One for the Town of Cornwall is gone and has been since the early 1960s when some researcher borrowed it”—or so the story goes—“and never brought it back.” With that lament, another lead into the life and death of William Douglass has vanished. The book recorded the births, deaths, marriages, and town reports of Cornwall, from 1763 to 1855.

From secondary sources written in the 19th century, we learn that Douglass was from the town of Cornwall, Connecticut, where both of his parents were teachers. He arrived in Vermont in 1774, along with a handful of others from Litchfield County who staked their claim to land along the western bank of Otter Creek. Like most of the region’s pioneers, they endured life in the rugged river valley until the British retook control of Fort Ticonderoga in 1777, and it was no longer safe to stay.

Douglass was preparing for the return of his wife and daughter when he met his demise in 1783. He is not on the roster of veterans recognized by either the Sons or Daughters of the American Revolution. And while there is a plaque in Cornwall that honors 78 Revolutionary War veterans from the region, his name is not among them. There is no building or creek or hill that bears his name. So unless you hit an errant tee shot, you would never see his grave site or know a thing about him. You could call him Vermont’s forgotten patriot.

“In researching William Douglass, you have to look for every piece of documentary evidence out there, like journals, diaries, letters, speeches, sermons, wills, deeds, and genealogies,” says William Hart, associate professor of American history at Middlebury.

“And sometimes, when the vital records are missing, we have to rely upon the works of early historians, since we don’t work in isolation. We are always building on the findings of the credible historians who have gone before us. And,” Hart says pausing, “you always have his grave site.” It always comes back to the grave site. Originally a marker of wood or rock, it was replaced with a marble tombstone, probably by his son James around 1810, that reads:

Mr. William Douglas, born June 22, 1735, was killed instantly by the fall of a tree, December 19, 1783.

Here life and all its pleasures end,
Here mourners wander, read and weep;
Soon each succeeds his fallen friend,
And in the same cold bed must sleep.

“That sure is dark,” Hart offers. “And the icon carved on top”—a ribbon tied into a bow cascading down into chains—“is a mystery. In the 18th century we tend to see death masks that are dark and frowning. Later, into the 19th century, God was thought to be more benevolent. A more hopeful outlook was on the rise, and we see willow trees sprouting out of urns, a symbol of rebirth. But that verse about sleeping in the cold earth . . . that’s pretty bleak, isn’t it?”

Hart studies Native Americans, African Americans, and working-class colonials—he terms much of the work he does as “giving voice to the voiceless.”

“I am often asked, how much is knowable about these people? If they didn’t leave any written records, how will we ever know their stories? That’s when I say it’s too important to tell their stories so we have to adopt a different kind of methodology to do so, one that is more multidisciplinary, and we piece the story together that way.

“We borrow tools used by scholars in other disciplines,” Hart adds. “For example, we use material culture from anthropology and archaeology, textual analysis from literary studies, quantitative and statistical analysis from economics, maps from geography. Most historians today would say we must look beyond the written record.”

Or as Amy Morsman would advise, dig deeper. That’s why Paul Carnahan, librarian for the Vermont Historical Society, is on the phone. “It looks like your William Douglass may have also served in the French and Indian War in 1759.” Really? “Yes, and he was the company clerk, too.” That makes sense; we know Douglass could read and write. “You might want to come over here and take a look at these records.”

Piece by piece a more complete picture of William Douglass is taking shape. It’s as if the sound of that tree falling in the forest is getting louder all the time.

He came to the plate limping.

More than 20 years later, as a major league manager, it is still how he is remembered. And it is still the first thing Corey Reich ’08 thinks of when they meet in another baseball stadium.

“You ruined my childhood,” Corey says.

No doubt, there is a glimmer in Corey’s eyes when he speaks this. There often is. And maybe because that glimmer now accompanies slower speech, an often-serene demeanor, and wide smile, it makes you feel as if you are in on any joke he tells. It’s part of the warmth and humor his face conveys almost effortlessly, which seems to disarm any potentially uncomfortable encounter.

Gibson, of course, doesn’t miss a beat.

“You must be from Oakland,” he says.

Piedmont, actually; though for all intents and purposes you could consider it Oakland. It is a small Northern California enclave, bordered by Oakland on all sides, and only a 20-or-so-minute ride to the Oakland Coliseum. Piedmont is a tight-knit community of about ten thousand mostly affluent residents, where Corey lived with his family before Middlebury, where he lives with them now after, and where he serves as the assistant coach for the local high school tennis team on which he once played.

Sports have always been a big part of Corey’s life. He is 25 years old, with dark curly hair, broad shoulders, and a generally athletic build that once saw him ski racing every winter, playing competitive tennis in high school, and being able to grab the rim of a 10-foot basketball hoop. He moved with ease. Which makes it all the more strange to him that he can remember the last time he actually ran. It was at Middlebury, after an intramural softball game, his friends dogging him, saying that he had gotten slower. So he challenged them to a sprint across a parking lot. He still beat some of them, but he wasn’t running as well as he used to.

Now, he has trouble walking. His muscles are weak. He uses a cane sometimes, a wheelchair on other occasions, and knows a day will come when he will be entirely dependent on the chair. His speech is slurred, and his hands are curled so that he cannot write and needs help cutting his food. When he does walk, he moves slowly, unsteadily, holding on to things. Sometimes he falls.

“We need a beam cut and rigged out of the way.”

Two firemen help me drag the torch hose around the line of cops in the bucket brigade. There are maybe 100 policemen. The line snakes around the crane into the jungle. In every hand there is a bucket of ash being passed down the line until it reaches any opening in the street. At the end, in front of the payloader, is an evenly spread pile of the ash. “Body parts.”

“What?”

“Looking for body parts,” one of the firemen blurts out as he drags the torch. The dogs sniff through the pile without stopping. Someone gives the nod, and the payloader scrapes the ash into its bucket.

I climb up a beaten path in the ash and over a set of mangled beams. There is another battalion chief with a “10” on his helmet standing on a set of beams that are pinned on top of one another. He sizes me up and then looks at the ironworker insignia on my hard hat. “What local union you out of?”

“424, New Haven,” I tell him.

“Where should we cut it?” he asks. We climb in the ash pockets around the iron beams.

“These are the exterior structural columns. They shouldn’t be that bad,” I say. “They’re a lot lighter than the interior columns. Maybe only about three tons a piece.” I show him the stress points on the beams. He marks the spot so the cut beam will not collapse the pile. “Oh, before you start, there may be a car on the bottom of the pile, so get the hell out of the way if it catches.”

A golden flame shoots from the tip of the torch. I adjust the gas until the flame becomes five blue cones. Testing the torch, I hit the trigger, and it becomes a liquid knife. The four-inch-thick iron slowly heats, and when it becomes orange liquid, I hit the trigger. Molten iron shoots out. I lurch back, but my hand stays steady. As I work the torch, the iron beam starts to tear open. In the mix of the blowing ash and smoke, I catch the sparkle of the chief’s golden badge. He is watching my every move. He has maybe seven men around him. All of them are watching me. The torch jerks, and the molten iron blows back in my face. A splatter of iron becomes embedded in my neck, and a puff of burnt skin enters the respirator. It smells no different than the ash. The torch stops cutting, and I try to dig the iron out of my neck. The crowd of men, now maybe 15, steps toward me, until I regain control of the torch. Liquid iron starts to blow through the beam again.

Before I start the last cut, the chief orders me to stop and take a “breather.” The respirator is plastered onto my face by the mixture of sweat, ash, and smoke, but I finally rip it off. The air on the outside is no better. I sit down on the beam and look around. I see a woman’s shoe, a flat with elastic edges. It is dirty white with floral patterns. Fearing it will burn, I push it out of the way.

In sweeping motions, the blue flame rips through the last cut. The firemen move closer to me, but I try to look at nothing but the flame. The torch passes halfway through the cut. As it continues to blow through the iron, the beam shifts and the torch jumps, throwing liquid iron up into the air. My body springs away.  The torch drops into the ash. The chief drags me violently off the beam.

Twenty to 30 firemen stare at the beam and then at me. I get right up like nothing happened and slowly pick up the torch, giving myself enough time to check that all my body parts are still attached. The beam lurches but does not collapse. I raise my hand to call the crane. The glaring temporary light through the smoke makes the crane operator a blur. My hand signals slash through the air. The operator knows exactly what I need, and he drops the crane’s hook into my hand.

The crane slightly lifts and secures the beam. I see nothing again but the blue flame ripping through the iron. As I come to the final inch, the crowd of firemen moves towards me. The flame blows through the last scale of iron, and the beam jumps. An odor races up. It is pungent and heavy. I try not to gag. I try to stand straight. I try not to cry. With a lightheadedness, I move my hand slowly. The crane revs its engine, adding diesel to the smell of the ash and the decaying flesh. Slowly the mangled beam rises from the void. The crowd jumps forward. The beam swings out of control towards them. They don’t care. They jump into the void.

The crane’s thick steel cable strains as it eases the beam out of the void. My body leans into the beam to steady it as it rises. When it is finally over my head, the chief yells out, “Stop,” and my hand slashes through the air. The crane jerks to a halt. In
metered words, the chief tells me to bring . . . it . . . down. Not knowing why, I bring the beam down to eye level and stop again. One of the men in the void hands the chief a shiny pry bar. He leverages his weight and pries a plastic slab from the dull metallic facade that was the tower’s skin. It is a crushed fire helmet, with a gold “10” still visible. He gives me the nod. With quick, firm thrusts, I signal the crane to get the beam out of there.

Around the void, the firemen make a circle. Every face is lit up—every eye on the void. In unison their helmets come off. Nothing is said.  There is silence. All the right hands touch a head, then a stomach, left shoulder, right shoulder.

The chief calls for a body bag. From the edge of the circle the bag is handed, head over head. But it is way too small for a body—it almost looks like a Glad bag. A small spade is handed down to the chief. I only look forward. I hear something slide from the neck of the bag to the bottom.

I offer my hand to the chief as he gets out of the void, but he lays the body bag with its contents on a beam and lifts himself out of the void. With his hand on my shoulders, he points me to the next beam. He picks up the body bag between his thumb and index finger and walks into the dark. As I climb over to the next beam, I notice all the cutting torches in the mountains of iron and ash around me lighting up the night.

Michael Ricci is a 1992 graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English and a union iron worker. Though reluctant to write about his experience as a first responder on 9/11, he says it was the late Ken Macrorie, a longtime Bread Loaf professor, who urged—and ultimately convinced—him to publish this work.  

It was a brief encounter in the late summer of 1969. I had been attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a few weeks away from returning to the Connecticut College for Women for my junior year. Until Bread Loaf, I had never been able to live, breathe, talk about writing 24/7, and as the conference drew to a close, I started having withdrawal pains.

And so on my last afternoon on the mountain, I came down to Middlebury’s Admissions Office. It was a lazy summer day, and the only person around was a man who introduced himself as Fred Neuberger. He asked me what he could do for me, and then listened as I told him about my two weeks at the conference, about my love of writing, about how I wanted to transfer to Middlebury. I was 19 years old, smitten with Frost country.

What I did not tell Mr. Neuberger was that I had applied to Middlebury as a senior in high school; that I had not gotten in; that it was just as well because my strict, immigrant Latino papi would not allow his daughters to go to coed schools. I didn’t tell Mr. Neuberger these things because none of them mattered anymore. I had found fertile ground for my imagination, and I was not about to let mere facts get in the way of a dream.

Mr. Neuberger handed me an application. I had plenty of time: the deadline was four months away.

“No, no, no,” I explained.  I didn’t want to come to Middlebury a year from now; I wanted to come now.

“Young lady,” he said in that tough-guy, mock macho style of his. “Them’s the rules.”

I was close to tears; partly heartbroken, partly ashamed. Who did I think I was putting myself forward this way?  “Okay, then I’ll just move here. I’ll get a job. At least I’ll be close to Middlebury until I can come here.”

Mr. Neuberger sighed. “How soon can you get this application back to me?”

I bolted up from my chair, as if I was about to fill in the blanks right then and there.  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” By now I was hopping up and down.

“I’m not making any promises,” he reminded me.

But he had already given me so much: he had listened. He had heard the sound of a young person connecting with her calling.

Until Bread Loaf, I hadn’t listened to it myself. Two weeks later my family was packing the car to take my older sister back to college. I had had a standoff with my papi and mami: I was not going back for my junior year. I wanted to go to Middlebury.

The phone rang. Fred Neuberger was on the line. “Young lady, do you still want to come to Middlebury?”

I screamed. Even my parents were impressed, which was why, when we finally did drive up to Vermont from Queens, and my father looked around at a campus crawling with boys, he let me stay. This school had recognized his daughter’s talent, and that meant a lot to a man who had put aside his own talents to fight a dictatorship.

When I returned to Middlebury 17 years later to teach, I would tell Mr. Neuberger this story at every occasion. Then I’d let loose with a renewed sally of thank-yous. After the fifth time, he’d just sigh and shake his head.  Enough with the thank-yous.

Not quite. Mr. Neuberger, thank you, one last time.

This year’s “common reading” was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by award-winning author Junot Díaz, a native of the Dominican Republic who was raised in New Jersey. As Dean of the College Shirley M. Collado said, “The book is a particularly rich exploration of identity from more than one lens, and illustrates the challenges and rewards inherent in building community with others who may or may not see the world similarly. These are key issues for first-years, and they are central to many of the themes we covered throughout orientation. And we were so fortunate to have Junot coming in person to speak with the students.”

Díaz visited the campus on September 27 to meet with first-year students and also to give a public reading that evening in Mead Chapel. Middlebury Magazine spoke with Díaz about having his book become a conversational catalyst for young people beginning a new chapter of their lives.

“Books, like any act of art, do not work for everyone. But when a book does work, when it engages them, when it reaches into them, it can be a source of great learning, both about the world and about the readers themselves. A book cannot prepare you for the stupendousness of the world—for meeting 600 people from 70 countries—but it can accompany you on that journey; it can provide insight and solace and discomfort; it can start debates and arguments; it can unsettle and give peace; it can be ‘a friend of your mind,’ to quote Toni Morrison, and a friend of the mind is not a bad thing to have at the start of any great journey. Hopefully my book was that friend for a few of the students.

“Poor Oscar is bullied endlessly. Ours is a society of hierarchies and competition, and in a world like that there are always going to be losers. There have to be. Oscar is the kind of kid that, no matter what the regime, seems to always end up at the bottom. It’s less about Oscar, I would argue, and more about how little we like to be reminded of difference, vulnerability, strangeness.

“Even in the face of death, though, Oscar could never be anyone but himself. He never wore any masks; even at the point of his destruction he was true to himself, and given the damage that masks do to people in this book, I would argue that’s a good thing. But hey, that’s just me.

“Oscar’s family curse, the fuku, is about the role that history has in shaping our lives, even when we don’t know the history that has its hands around our neck. It’s also a way to address that most American of all preoccupations: whether one is blessed by the universe (which Americans seem to believe is the condition of our country) or whether one is cursed by the universe (which is something that Americans fear our country might in fact be).

“In the end, this is a novel. There are no single take-away messages. A novel attempts to duplicate the complexity of the world. Politicians and religions have messages. Corporations have messages. Novels seek to confront readers with the world and with their own humanity and in that confrontation hopefully raise the kind of questions that you can spend your whole life answering.”