* The Nash Rambler by Dave Briggs

The Nash Rambler

by David Briggs HHS ‘64

Live Poets Society Dinner Meeting / Mr. Whaley’s Appreciation Night
May 7, 2011 / Hotel Coolidge / White River Junction, Vermont

My high school English teacher was a guy named Delevan E. Whaley, Jr. What a cool name. His wife and colleagues called him “Ned”. We called him Mr. Whaley. Respect for authority and teachers had not been challenged so much then as in the years since. Behind his back we called him “Whaley” but never anything less respectful than that.

We came to know him as a skier. He had taken the initiative to start a ski club and after that an official ski team. In the course of a year or two the team was even approved to award us varsity “Letters” for competing. Our region was rich in ski history being close to Dartmouth College and so many related pioneers of the sport. The first ski tow in America was established in the neighboring town of Woodstock, Vermont in the 1930’s. Hard to believe it now in the year 2011, but that had been only 30 years earlier. To us kids it seemed like ancient history. Even World War II ending less than 20 years earlier was “history” for us because we just weren’t around for it. One thing, as competitive skiers, we did know however was our coach, Mr. Whaley, had been in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division; the ski troops. Off that he got us surplus trekking skis made for combat. We used them for cross country but had to trim them down in the shop to make them narrow. The advantage they gave us due to the extra weight in training was typically lost in competition, however, because we were too strong for the dainty thin competition skis made only from wood in a time before high tech plastics. It was a cause to celebrate if we could actually complete a race without snapping off the tips.

Mr. Whaley’s car in the winters of 1963 and 64 was a little green Nash Rambler. Into that car we would pile with our skis on the roof and off we would go to ski areas for recreational skiing or to a ski meet. How many people could that have been? Faded memory suggests that the whole ski club along with Coach Whaley was on board but of course that would have been impossible. It probably was true that one of us rode shotgun next to Mr. Whaley with two or three of us in the back seat – probably three in a time when high school students didn’t typically enjoy the luxury of their own cars.

I don’t ever recall helping to pay for gas even at 26 cents a gallon. His generosity on a teacher’s salary not to mention the willingness to spend so many off-duty hours taking students out to do such meaningful things as skiing and competing reminds us of how many teachers make a difference on a broad front. And that doesn’t even get close to the concept of liability which has corroded if not eclipsed possibilities for student-teacher interaction today. We were able to live with less fear then. But I digress; or… maybe not.

In thinking consciously of the impact of those times on my life, both then and right on down to the present, it strikes me that the “vehicle” for tracking the significance of it all is the vehicle itself. It didn’t take too much time thinking in that perspective to realize how that unlikely little green “bucket of bolts” actually serves as a metaphor for the meaning in life.

Let me explain.

A sort of pop psychiatrist named M. Scott Peck, MD wrote a book in 1978 he named it after the Robert Frost poem “The Road Less Traveled”. About ten years later, in a tough patch of my own personal growth, I came to read the book and discovered Peck’s model for a healthier outlook on life. His construct utilizes three words: Discipline. Love and Grace.

In that order. Discipline – Love – Grace. It starts with something very tangible, even measurable, and works its way to the less and less explainable and the unmeasurable.

So Discipline –
The easy, open sense of humor brought to us by Mr. Whaley was seen by my undisciplined mind as a pathway to exploitation. I think the tough thing for him as the teacher must have been that we actually came up with some clever things once in a while. And being so very human he would allow himself to laugh and enjoy that with us. My ratio of clever to annoying was sadly out of balance and sooner or later something had to give. On one such fatal day we were stacked into the Rambler on our way to a race at Kimball Union Academy. “KUA” was a prep school about fifteen miles distant and tucked away in the woods around the remote village of Meriden, New Hampshire. The most direct way was along a route called “True’s Brook Road” which coincidentally led past a favorite swimming hole in the summer. As we turned onto the road we no doubt laughed and joked and poured out an endless stream of nonsense. Nothing particularly vicious but on this occasion it predictably morphed into something now lost to memory and finally caused the circuit breaker in Whaley’s head to trip. Now mind you – this man did NOT have a short fuse. The loads of reckless comments he endured prior to “losing it”, it should be affirmed, had to have been enormous given his capacity to laugh and enjoy all of what he did with us. I say this to impress just how stupid I must have been in that instance. The Nash came to a halt. By this time we were probably just about as far into the woods on this profoundly, lonely dirt road as you could get without going out the other side. Mr. Whaley turned to me in the back seat and said, “Get Out”. I did so. My skis were taken off the rack, my poles removed from the rear storage space, and off sped the Rambler to the ski meet.

The words of Robert Frost, “lonely dark and deep”, occur to me as I recall the car disappearing and leaving me behind. There would be no skiing that day. Years later as I watched the movie “The Silver Streak”, starring Gene Wilder in a role where he kept getting thrown off an Amtrak train in impossibly remote areas of the far west and yelling out the words: “Son of a Bitch!”, made me laugh knowing no one in the theater could have possibly appreciated that predicament as much as me. No way.
Yes sir – discipline – tangible, objective, right out in front where you can access it. The epilogue, to the sentence of being marooned, in ski boots, 7 miles from civilization on a frozen winter’s day and banished from skiing, was what came after about 30 uncertain minutes. My rescuer was a Tip Top bread truck headed toward me in the direction of the main plant in White River Junction and home. What luck I thought but as the driver stopped to offer a ride I found myself looking right into the eyes of Ralph Coutermarsh my former little league baseball coach. I had actually been a model player for him and so
when he asked the inevitable question about what I was doing “way out here” I paid the second penalty; the penalty of being embarrassed in front of someone who, up ‘til then, had thought of me as a “good kid”.

So what about Love?
Peck’s treatment of the concept of Love endeavors to pull away from romantic and more superficial meanings of the word. His definition: “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth".

“The will to extend one’s self” …

Discipline can be one of the precursors of Love. But the commitment, i.e. the will, to spend as much time as it takes to form a ski club, coach a ski team (with virtually no budget and certainly no pay), tolerate kids in adolescence, and bring humor to all of it is truly an expression of love. Maybe spiritual growth sounds too lofty or ethereal but anyone who knows the great outdoors and the joys of skiing understands the spiritual dimension. The little green Rambler contained us on the path to spiritual growth in the form of hours of conversation in spite of all the foolishness that had to be filtered out and staved off along the way. No doubt in my view, now as then, it was all about a labor of Love. As Mr. Whaley made that investment I too have come to understand what the concept of “a labor of love” means, in more ways than one, since those times.

Grace – that’s the tough one especially in the three dimensional world of Newtonian physics. Gotta’ let go of many things in classical science to get into this one. The word Peck uses beyond “miracles” and “merely unexplainable” is “serendipity”. He talks about it a lot but it can feel quite a bit like running in sand. Logically one comes to realize you are making progress but along the way it often feels like not so much progress at all. Ultimately I conclude the universe is awesome. The Christian litany refers to “The peace that passeth all understanding”. For me that is often the most helpful when all else fails. It especially holds up when one ponders the enormity, the complexity and the apparent, sometimes so totally painful, randomness of events. Even scientists are forced to concede, as Frost reported, that there are “miles to go before I sleep”.

Grace, it’s “Amazing” and it “brings us Home” as the hymn says and so with that, here we are tonight, gathered, speaking from the heart, and honoring each other with our presence. It doesn’t need to get much better than this. And to THINK, in this case, it was cultivated in a little old green Nash Rambler with a person who dared to discipline and had the will to extend himself to nurture our growth. Go ahead… call it spiritual.

An appreciation of Dave's essay:

" That's an A+! " pronounced Mr. Whaley, after Dave Briggs read his essay composed for this occasion (with a half-century of retrospective wisdom), " A Nash Rambler" .

The essay cleverly created the image of his own youthful self, evicted for unwelcome teenage antics from Mr. Whaley' s green Nash Rambler on the way to a ski meet.

Dave used this lonely winter image of an isolated boy on a Vermont back road to suggest that the inspirational quality of teaching is "Discipline, Love, and Grace," a concept he found in contemporary thinker, M. Scott Peck.

That concept is one which Dave's essay suggests he has felt all these fifty years from that powerful lesson on a icy dirt road, as the green Nash Rambler disappeared into the horizon. It is a lesson he thanked Mr. Whaley last night, in person, for teaching him half a century ago.

NB: In addition to sharing Mr. Whaley's distinctive guffaw , I share something else with him: a green Nash Rambler which my parents owned in 1958, similar to the one pictured immediately above.

Paul Keane

(recipient of the the first Delevan E. Whaley, Jr. Award for Excellence in Teaching at Hartford High School)

With

sincere thanks

to

The Live Poets Society

from

Paul Keane