Sprindrift, Part One

This summer look for tales from the archives, posted in weekly installments. "Spindrift," takes us out of the city's wilds and into the storied north country. 

Sprindrift 

Habit. The mother of inertia!
One of the myriad, self-styled aphorisms Herman Treadwell liked to spring on his students when they repeatedly did not do their homework.

He who retires first laughs best!
A perennial favorite as we sat around the cafeteria at lunchtime in those broken little chairs with the torn vinyl seats, in what a Victorian writer would probably have termed a “desultory fashion,” trying to figure out the break-even point in our pensions. Hermie was such a pro at these calculations of imaginary accrued civil service “wealth” that he had a small cottage industry going helping people figure out their final number, his only remuneration our undying attention. It was a regular retirement posse with Hermie leading the charge and advising people on which death “option” to rope in, what figure to shoot for; it got us through the sluggish and crawling days of the spring term. He was a major proponent of what he called the hop ‘till you drop theory of beating the system.

So it’s not hard to imagine our shock when after two weeks of not seeing Hermie at his usual spot at the table and wondering if he had taken some sick days, word had it that he simply decided to pack it in early and move a hundred and twenty-five miles north! Up the thruway to the once legendary now longtime passé village of Spindrift New York, in essence, fleeing prior to reaching his target date for the maximum payout. Could this be possible? We were stunned. 

Sardonic and popular high school social studies teacher, beloved father of three grown kids and husband to Molly, lessee of a three-bedroom, rent stabilized apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who possessed the foresight to grab the place when the neighborhood was a total dilapidated, crime-ridden dump- why on earth would he, or anyone else for that matter, want to bury themselves beneath an outdated social trend in the wilds of the Catskills before collecting the meager though sufficient “final number?” He never failed to remind that such perseverance on our part would avoid the necessity of cat food. . .okay, okay, we won’t be living like Gatsby, but neither will we be partaking of the gas pipe like Willy Loman! So we had to wonder, what was he thinking? And which death option did he finally choose? We said we were dying to know. . .  .

Even the name of the place sounded a bit pretentious if not totally idiotic. Spindrift is nowhere near water. The desolate, bumpy access route you catch as you come off the highway- ten hideous miles of depressing scenery before exiting onto the side road that winds its way into the quaint town center- is lined with a couple of broken down delis, an abandoned farm stand, the remnants of a defunct Exxon station and a used car dealership with those red and blue little plastic flags waving haphazardly along the roof line; there’s also a motorcycle store on the route that can attract a fairly raunchy and tremendously overweight crowd on weekends. Every now and then on the way to the to the town you see a makeshift billboard advertising the miraculous musical reappearance for one day only! of some burned out, barely alive human relic from the early days of rock. It’s not the kind of place where you spin your dreams but it does have a fair number of drifters. 

If truth be told though, what did we really know about Hermie? Can we ever really know what goes on in another person’s thoughts?  Even in his absence however he had gotten us to think- his familiar “modus operandi.” One lunchtime, while obsessing over whether I should assign “The House of Seven Gables” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to a particularly apathetic group of juniors, without so much as glancing up from his neat and parallel rows of tiny numerals, dug ferociously into a paper napkin with a ball pen, he chimed in, ‘This is an easy one, Huck Finn of course! Are we not a nation of rugged individualists? Hawthorne was a pure fatalist.” Several teachers smirked as the bell rang and they hoisted up their messy Delaney books full of unmarked homework assignments to shuffle off to another forty-five minutes of pure stress in what we affectionately termed “the gulag.” Styrofoam cups flew lethargically into the garbage can one by one as we dragged ourselves into the crowded, noisy hallway.

Consumed with curiosity over Hermie’s spontaneous act of recklessness, I swore off inertia. He was especially fond of calling “screen time” scream time, so I stopped surfing the net and watching the news. It was incredible. After the initial withdrawal period I found myself almost magically imbued with a dose of the same pioneer spirit that he routinely outlined on the board for his American History One freshmen; I was determined to drive up to Spindrift and check it out for myself.  It finally happened on one of those idyllic, wisteria scented weekend mornings early in June, when the teaching day countdown is a heartbeat away from the bitter end and anything seems possible, images of life in the gulag giving way to visions of big sky and open road. Trees were in full leaf, wildflowers ran amok, delicate snowballs of hydrangea cozied up to uneven, sloping doorsteps.

It was lunchtime when I arrived and the streets were teeming with vibes of every strange hue and pitch. The town opened before me like a colorful origami fold, albeit one fashioned by a young, somewhat uncoordinated child who did not exactly know how to neatly line up the corners- the whole flimsy construction appeared slightly off plumb. Milling about the streets and alleyways was a kaleidoscopic assemblage of crackpots whose life’s work appeared to have been being perceived as cool although in most cases the end result fell way short of that ubiquitous term. It was the kind of place where people came to see and be seen, gawk and pose, still retro after all these years, but lively with a kind of genuine grunge; there did not appear to be a laptop, an ipad or a smart phone in sight.


Maybe Hermie had always felt a bit anonymous and undifferentiated in his previous existence, a cog in the proverbial bureaucratic machinery, a grain of sand among the endless beaches of the vast civil service world, a pixel on one of the kids’ monitors. My thoughts waxed philosophical. Could anyone find inner peace trekking each day to a gray cinderblock outerborough high school, an edifice with iron gates on the windows and fluorescent lights flickering annoyingly on the ceilings, where jarring buzzers denoted the end of a class period mid-sentence, then each day to confront much less motivate a slightly hostile group of bored teenagers? The early bird catches more than a worm, he passes this class. . . Hermie liked to warn the recidivist latecomers with this homey observation as the kids engaged in prolonged goodbyes with their friends at the doorway after the bell rang. Was it really any wonder he threw in his Delaney cards and fled to the north country?? I was determined to find out more. . . .