Photo: Me in Eugene

By my sophomore year at Northwest Christian College, I'd adjusted to the workload, but not the weather. It was never a deluge. It was a fine mist, what we mid-westerners called a light rain, but the month of October it rained over twenty inches. Yes, you heard me right; a twenty-inch mist. Now that took some doing; it never stopped. Let me set the climate for you. : Today it will be rainy with a certainty of rain tomorrow, and a possibility of a dry summer, by the time you go home in June. If you wanted snow you headed up into the volcanic range named the Cascades, and if you wanted ocean you headed west. Oregon is filled with beauty, and for the settlers who traveled west along the Oregon Trail, they called the Willamette Valley, the Garden of Eden, or paradise. The greens of the valley are deep almost bluish greens, and climate is temperate year round. If not for the constant rain it would be enjoyable year round for a northern latitude. In the winter months it seldom got below freezing and rarely snowed, and there was the added benefit of having nearly no thunderstorms, or a threat of tornadoes year round, at least not like I grew up with in Missouri. There, in the spring or fall, it is tornado sirens going off several times in a day as a line of severe storms passes over—if a bolt of lightning strikes in the valley it was headline news, "Tell your Friends in the Midwest, we have Thunderstorms, Too."

Just because it rained, life didn't stop, it couldn't afford to; so you dressed for it; umbrella, slicker, and you name it to stay dry. I walked a city block from my dorm to the campus via an alley. It was grab your umbrella, don your slicker, throw on your backpack, and it was off to college. I learned to eat fast. By the time I got through the line at the cafeteria, usually, I had ten minutes or less to eat before heading to the next class. Unlike high school, the professors didn't care if you showed up or not, except one or two of them. They had your tuition money, whether you could show up or not, as long as you passed the tests and the occasional pop quiz. There was a "but" to this; they never based their exams on the textbooks, but they tested on the lectures. One professor said, "Personally, I can't see how you could possibly pass my course, and not attend my lectures. Note taking was at a feverish pace. The trouble with note taking in a long hand is you're too busy writing to look up or to hear the next few sentences. The professors had a way around that. They'd pause by moving from monologue to dialog, and engage the class in discussion.

We had social events in the evenings, and chapel every morning, but these events were mandatory; so every morning we crowded into chapel, but no attendance was taken, so it was just a given you're going to be there; we had singing groups, great singers, and we had worship and it set the mood for the day. The social events were in lieu of parties, and they were fun, sociable, and often entertaining for all. This was a conservative Christian College, but for some students it was not conservative enough. NCC had to walk the line for many denominations, from Mennonite to Baptist, from Episcopalian to Methodist.

I was one hundred percent dedicated to the Christian path, after my near death experience, and would be for decades. I wanted this. It was not forced on me, it was not expected of me, and I owed no one to be a Christian person and to help others, but I was as naïve as a country hick could be, and there were other things I would learn in college. There is a saying in the country..." You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy," but that is false. For the country kid in me, life was black and white, this or that; there were no neutral hues on anything, socially. I would soon adjust and the country boy was washed away into oblivion. You can never go home.

I discovered I was not shy, but I wasn't gregarious either. I didn't ask a lot of questions in class, but when I did I made sure they were good ones. I hated that one person who seemed to appear in each class, and viewed his sole purpose in college as, "Hmm, how can I dominate the professor's time, today?" These people argued with them at every turn; and it was though they thought they were the only person there, and it wasted my time, and money. I didn't come two thousand miles to listen to those students' opinions, or block the professor at every turn. I guess, though, that is the problem you run into in such a vast variety of different denominations, however, the professors should know when they are being "baited" into an argument, and should know how to shut it down if it goes too long. This year would be a smooth one, I didn't need to work to stay. Mom and Dad would send me a twenty dollar check each month, and back then that was enough for me. Occasionally, I left campus to explore. Eugene is a flat city at the south end of the great Willamette Valley. South of it were small mountains, to the west were the coastal range mountains, and to the east was the Cascades, and on a rare clear day you could see the Three Sisters, the volcanoes "Faith, Hope, and Love." They were named by the settlers who headed west on the Oregon Trail, because they knew that once you cross the pass they were entering paradise, the Willamette Valley.

NCC had the brightest of the brightest, we would sit in groups in the cafeteria, and chat about different subjects, from philosophy to religion. It was a ripe environment for budding minds, and I knew I would never find that social scene again, not even in graduate school, as there it was more a get your stuff done and go home. Here we were living together, and not for just one year, but four. When I left for home I was in an intellectual desert, I was alone, with no one to stimulate my brain. I found a few groups, but they were rare and didn't last long. Not till the internet was I able to find like-minded brains, brilliant souls from all over the world. I had stimulating conversations with people. It may seem like I'm challenging you, but I'm not, I want you to challenge me, to stimulate my brain to push it beyond its limits. I want to know as much as I can while I'm here on this globe, and unlike that naïve artist who wanted to learn it on his own, I need you! I know very little, and what I think I know is less than nothing in the scheme of things..

https://youtu.be/lLtqIQJGYew