JANUARY 14, 2023 – Memory: I’m fascinated by the details it holds amidst a vast ocean of time, images, encounters and impressions. Take for example, the exact words of Mr. Cavanaugh in social studies class my freshman year of high school: “If you analyze people, you lose them.”
More details: He wore a tweed jacket and occupied a Windsor armchair, periodically re-packing and re-lighting his pipe. Behind him was a snowy backdrop visible through a large, multi-paned window. Mr. Cavanaugh was new to the school that second semester, and from the first encounter, we judgmental preppies found him much more liberal, accessible and understanding than the rest of the buttoned-down faculty. Who knows how the tiny school, tucked away in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, found him or how he stumbled across us. Somehow he and his wife, who was equally amiable, relaxed and open to wide-ranging conversation, landed in Craftsbury Common (pop. 150) that January, 1969.
I don’t remember the context for Mr. Cavanaugh’s theory about analyzing people. His assertion was a generalization, but his point was that over-analysis of people with whom you’re close risks corrosion of affinity.
My reaction to his statement was two-fold. First, I wasn’t sure I agreed with it. To understand people better, some analysis was required, I figured, and often lots of it was necessary to see behind a façade or to interpret what was being said. Second, Mr. Cavanaugh’s statement and his encouragement of debate about it (not to mention the pipe; several of our instructors puffed away on cigarettes during class) revealed that he was quite a different “master,” as our teachers were called, from his rule-bound colleagues. He stretched our narrow little minds into a broader range of inquiry. Moreover, the discussion gave us an understanding that the world was filled with nuance, differing vantage points and a forest of facts perceived and interpreted a million different ways.
As a logical extension of Mr. Cavanaugh’s broad perspective, he was open to hearing and discussing opposing ideas. We never heard him say, “You’re wrong’; only, “Have you considered [such and such]?” His refreshing approach to our education set him apart from the task-masters who savored handing out demerits for the slightest infraction of school rules.
I don’t know what happened to Mr. Cavanaugh, who was probably barely 30, if that, at the time. The following June I left the school for keeps, transferring to quite a different institution a world away, where Mr. Cavanaugh and his wife would’ve found more like-minded faculty. Ironically, the bastion of tradition where he landed that January eventually morphed into a college dedicated to environmental studies, where today everyone has “farm and garden” duties and “organic” is de rigueur. None of the current promotional photos shows young men wearing ties and blazers and snapping to attention when a “master” enters the classroom. (As a harbinger of the environmental focus of the future “Sterling College,” however, participation in a grueling, winter Outward Bound expedition at “Sterling School” was compulsory.)
What I remember most vividly about Sterling, however, is the extraordinary beauty of our surroundings—right down to individual trees and majestic vistas, including a signature view of Mt. Mansfield, highest mountain in Vermont. In the final analysis, nature’s wonders, not the words of a man, made the biggest impression.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
