The Elephant Walk

It’s late August 1981 in southern Maine and this is how the happiest period of my life ends. I am sneaking a cigarette and trying to write a letter to my recently ex-girlfriend to the light of a small utilitarian desk lamp attached to the utilitarian desk that equips this utilitarian cinderblock dorm room. It isn’t going easily. Drafts litter my floor like used Kleenexes. My door handle shakes. I know it’s my brother because after four years of boarding school I have taught him that only authority figures knock.  He opens it without waiting.

“Got a light?” he asks, holding up a pipe. Theo has never smoked a cigarette. He therefore does not carry a lighter or matches when I am around since he knows that I always do. I wave him over and light him up. He takes a long hit and hands it to me.

I shake my head. “You know I don’t smoke at Meetings. And you shouldn’t either. Donald's our brother in law for Chrissakes.”

He smirks and gives me the “all the more for me” shrug, taking my hit. “He’s not our brother in law, and Sandy is not our sister. She just lived with us for a couple years after graduating college.”  

True enough. Then a few years later she married Donald who’s the youth coordinator for the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. For the last couple years he has invited us to youth events. To the extent that I wanted to profess any religion Quakerism seemed to have the right combination of left wing politics and minimally invasive theology.  In about a week I am heading off to start college at one of the country’s most selective, and Quaker, schools. I'm a rock star, me.

“I just don’t feel right smoking during Meeting,” I say and I mean it.  In my high school years I have refrained from getting high on very few occasions when it was available. Examples are for several days before and after my father’s funeral, for 24 hours before taking standardized tests, and any Friends gatherings to which Donald invited me. 

“Donald smokes,” AJ notes. “Smokes it with us when we visit his house for Thanksgiving. Grows it in his yard.” New England in the late 1970s was a wonderful place. “Where do you think I got this shit? Anyway I went by his room to get a light and he’s not there. Funny, he usually meditates in his room before evening program.”

Here I make the tactical error of trying to ignore him by turning back to my legal pad and starting my sixteenth attempt at this letter.  AJ reacts by noticing the detritus on the floor. He’s too smart to try to pick one up. Even though it’s been years since I hit him I’m still bigger. But he’s also smart enough to know exactly what I’m doing and so he offers assistance. He takes a big hit of his joint and like a professional pothead says all of the following with out exhaling:

“Dear Trisha,” he starts as if dictating.  “Please don’t stay mad at me. We were great friends and lousy lovers but both of us needed to lose our virginities before you entered your senior year and I left mine. I think the fights we had during the period of time we were screwing were worth not having to put up with the stigma of sexual inexperience which made us feel inferior to our friends.  As horrible as we were both were, neither of us had any better options. Once you can walk again without wincing hope you can forgive me. Sincerely, Leo. PS AJ apologizes for hiding all the lube and for having an older brother who has sex like a farm animal.”

He grins at me. He has a face like Peter Lorre but with perfect Teddy Roosevelt teeth. I know he’s right and if I had the balls that is exactly the letter I should send.  I flick the cigarette out the window into the woods behind the dorm.

AJ keeps smoking. I look at my watch. “It’s 8 pm, the evening program is about to start.”

He puts the pipe on my windowsill and hands us both gum. “I’ll take the north stairs, you take the south.  That way nobody will think we like each other.” I swear I never taught him any of this stuff.  

Anderson Hall had been built in 1960s on a state budget. It was empty on the ground floor, just floor to ceiling windows and open spaces but for support columns, stairwells and bays for service elevators.  Twenty people could play floor hockey comfortably on this floor if they moved back the large hollow wooden blocks that were laid out to facilitate a sort of proto-feng shui on the part of the inhabitants.  During Yearly Meeting, we would use this cavernous space for hanging out, listening to music, talking, falling asleep. 

Tonight there were about 60 of us in this space and the facilitators or counselors or resource people or whatever other word we used for the grown ups were organizing a trust exercise called the Elephant Walk. Michael is not among them.  I can’t really remember what the purpose of the exercise was. I know they introduced it to us and explained the rules but this was a religion populated and managed by middle aged white academics who wouldn’t walk you through how to make a cheese omelette without a bit of background on French dairy farming methods in the 17th century.  So there was definitely some explanation as to how the Elephant Walk worked some joint or ligament of one’s center. I remember none of the context but I remember all of the rules and what happened next.

Here’s the recipe. Take a group of 60 participants. Select about ten and set them aside. You’ll use them later. Go back to the remaining fifty and have them line up, holding hands.  You now have a line of people ready to march like elephants with hands playing the role of tail and trunk.  Blindfold all of them except the leader and have the leader walk first, followed by the rest of them, into the obstacle course: blocks to climb over, arches to duck under, columns to bank around, etc. all with your ten setaparts using hand signals to guide the sighted elephant leader, who then communicates by voice to the next elephant in the line who in turn communicates to the next elephant and so on down the line. The first time you get to do it without distractions, as the facilitator called it. The second time you do the same course, only with distraction.

Here my memories start to get into real focus. I am wearing blue jeans and a checked work shirt and work boots and a red handkerchief in one pocket.  As we line up to get blindfolded by the setaparts, I am standing somewhere in the middle of the line. My right hand is my trunk, holding the left hand or tail of a boy named Joey whom I have never seen before this yearly meeting and have not spoken with before.  On my tail is Jeanie, also someone new I have not spoken with. 

Joey and Jeanie are new to me but the tormentors are not. Of the ten of them, at least three come from that specific monthly meeting –- church by another name -- that I claim as my home. I’ve known them for two years now. They’re my friends. This will be easy. I love trust exercises.

So we’re all blindfolded except for the first elephant and we start to move. As I start to move through the maze, I can hear the directions coming from ahead of me in the line. “Joey,” I say, acting authoritatively because I am older. “I’m not going to listen to any voice but yours. Just tell me what I need to do.”  Then I tell Jeanie not to listen to any voice but mine.  Joey has a calm voice. I do what he says -- move over this and under that and through the other thing and around the other other thing – and pass the same message to Jeanie.  

I try to make a map in my head to prepare for the next trip – distracted – through the maze.  It should not be hard. I’ve seen the obstacles in the room before they blindfolded me. I know the room well. The course is really only a few dozen yards long. The problem is that when you lose your sight, everything loses at least half a dimension. Space does not quite become flat but if you think about right and left, front and back lose meaning and vice versa.  Time still flows in the right direction but we usually perceive time relative to the motion of objects and so it becomes our internal clock becomes rubbery in the dark.

So, no map. At some point we finish the first walk and we are, so the facilitators tell us, back in the same spot. Before we start moving, the head facilitator reminds us that this time, the tormentors will be distracting us.  They are not allowed to hit, punch, or grab us at any point other than our hands. They are however allowed to make noise, confuse us, or otherwise encourage us to break the line or stop the walk or otherwise fail to cross the same line we successfully crossed a few minutes ago.

I’m still feeling confident and in control, here in the middle of the line with a blindfold on and only two people in the world I allow myself to trust, when we start again. Within seconds I can tell that this is going to be a different walk. 

Boomboxes, those big numbers they made in the early 80s for breakdancing and street parties, start up with a variety of music.  People tussle my hair.  I can feel something being waved at me to push air, like a blanket fluttering in the breeze. “Don’t worry,” I tell Jeanie, “just listen to what I say.” Then I whisper to Joey, “if we keep calm nothing will happen, listen to your center.” We move slowly.

Then the confusion starts to bubble. Although I try to tune everything out but Joey’s voice, I can hear younger kids in the line starting to shout “hey” and “stop that” and “that tickles.” Still I’m cool because we seem to be moving. The quicker we get to the end, the quicker we can show everyone we won.

Then the confusion gets worse. Now the line seems to stick, then lurch, then heave back sideways. I ask Jim what’s happening. He’s asking the elephant ahead of him.  People start to shout:

“Stop it!”

“That hurts!”

“Just move!”

“You’re hurting me!”

“Why?”

I don’t recognize voices. Joey is still quiet. Jeanie is asking me what’s happening.  I just want to move. I wait for Joey’s pull. It’s not coming.

A hand brushes my cheek, softly. I jerk back. If that made me jerk, what’s making people scream? What are they doing?

We move a bit and then I can hear kids crying and I feel someone waving a blanket in front of my face.

“We’re never going to get through this,” I say to Joey, “if we don’t take control.”

Joey says nothing.

I take his hand and make him grab my belt buckle. “Hold this,” I tell him. I keep my hand on his. I’ve had enough of this.

They’re moving around the boomboxes to disorient us. I can’t even tell if we’re really moving, or just swaying.  Another hand across my face, and apparently across Joey’s as well because I hear him gasp. Some of the kids are crying and sobbing. I’ve had more than enough of this.

They are swinging the boomboxes now, rhythmically and to within a few feet of us. I take Jeanie’s hand and have her grab my belt.  I’ve had more than enough of this 

“SHIT”

I now have two hands free and with a few seconds of listening I can gauge when the big thing is going to be nearest and I snatch my hands like a spider and grab the box and yank it and lift it and fling it far into the room and it makes a really ugly sound when it hits whatever stops it from continuing its flight and I hope that sound was the end of the tape and not a person but now the screaming really begins and someone reaches for my face and I bite and slap and they are pulling at my blindfold and goddamn it I can’t finish the exercise without the blindfold and the weeping and screaming won’t die down and suddenly I am standing there, two hands free because neither Joey nor Jeanie are holding my belt loops any more so there I am, keeping my eyes clenched shut so I don’t get called for cheating and I ask loudly

“WILL SOMEONE PLEASE PUT THIS FUCKING BLINDFOLD BACK ON ME SO WE CAN GET BACK TO THIS FUCKING EXERCISE BEFORE I HAVE TO KILL SOMEONE?”

Which of course I thought was a perfectly reasonable request but nobody does until both Jeanie and Joey come back – I know their smells now, that’s how much an animal I’ve become – and Jeanie whispers quietly

“Leo?”

“Yes?”

“Leo, it’s Jennie and Jim, can you hear me?”

“Yes. Do you see my blindfold?” In retrospect that was a dumb question.

“It’s over, Leo. You need to open your eyes.”

“Bullshit, we’re almost done. I’ve shown them.”

Jeanie leans in. “Leo, you need to trust us. You need to open your eyes.”

“Open them,” says Joey.

It’s bright. The dorm is lit with fluorescent lights and it’s now dark outside so the floor to ceiling windows act like mirrors. After whatever amount of time in a blindfold, my vision comes back like a tunnel and for a second all I can see is what is exactly in front of me. This turns out to be one of the facilitators, a six-foot-six Viking named Erik, struggling to keep a sobbing 90-pound tormentor with broken glasses and a bruised face from collapsing onto the floor. As my field of vision grew I can see 75 people crying and whimpering all over the floor. Two sisters, one a tormentor and one an elephant, are sitting next to each other with each other’s blood under their fingernails. The boomboxes are nowhere to be seen.  Everyone is giving me a very very wide berth.

Now my memory gets a bit foggy. The facilitators are letting us cry it out a bit. They try to pull us into a circle, to talk it out. They try to get us to have a group hug. I don’t know what else they try because I tell them I don’t really feel like group hugs and that stuff right now and I walk out. Nobody tries to stop me.

I storm up to Donald's room, near my own, where I fully expect him to be sitting and waiting for me to demand an answer as to what the point of that exercise was. He of course is not there. Donald generally doesn’t delegate trust exercises anywhere near this heavy to others. He’s not in the building. He’s across the quad in a meeting with all of the weighty Quakers getting fired for something that's part of his story and not this one but I won’t find that out until tomorrow when he announces his immediate retirement at 32. 

Donald keeps a pair of those noise blocking headphones that guys wear at airports to wave taxiing jets in. He uses them for meditation. I put them on and look out the window across the quad and light a cigarette. The silence is therapeutic other than the fact it leaves me alone with my thoughts, prime being that if they’d actually put my blindfold on I would have finished the fucking walk alone, and that except for the fact that the person I brained with the footlocker-sized cassette deck was probably a friend, grabbing and throwing it felt great.

I only realize that the door is opening from the change in light in the room.  I expect Donald and it’s AJ. I pull out my lighter and he pulls out his pipe.

“So you owe somebody a Sony, I hear,” he says when I pull off the muffs.

“Where did you go? I didn’t see you when it was over.”

He shrugs and lights the pipe. “Oh that?” He laughs.  “Two seconds into the second run I took off the blindfold, joined the two idiots on either side of me together, said fuck it, wished them luck and came back up here to smoke pot. Fuck that shit, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say, reaching my hand out for the pipe. “Fuck that shit...”