David Faldet

Climbing New Mountaintops

by DAVID FALDET, Professor of English

I’m giving the opening reflection this morning because come May I’m retiring. It’s my first and last chance for this. As I think about retirement, I know I am going to miss the way talking daily with 18-22-year-olds has kept me young. For example, a morning in January 1999 found me in Ireland climbing Knocknarea, a steep and commanding prominence overlooking Sligo to the east and in the opposite direction the waters around Great Seal Bank on the western coast of Ireland. The destination to which my students and I were headed was a 5,000-year-old stone burial cairn at its crest, known as the resting place of Queen Maeve, one of the legendary figures celebrated in the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

My policy has always been “leave no one behind.” On this rugged climb that meant staying close to my student Kim, who struggled and panted up the hill, often needing to stop and rest, sometimes choking back tears, while more athletic students sped to the breathtaking view at the summit. Though it was touch and go, we made it, Kim and I, both relishing her accomplishment. That night at dinner in Sligo, snow was falling in the street outside as I joined a group of the students at a pizza café. Between bites, Kim put down her slice, looked up at me, and said, “By the way, David, what do we do if you die?” Since study abroad in those days was a seat-of-the pants operation, with little contingency planning and no second in command, I’ll have to admit, the question took me completely off guard. It should not have. I was hired by the English Department in 1989, by thenchair Dennis Jones, a man who had been my American Novel class professor when I was a student here. I remember vividly the drive back to the La Crosse airport at the end of my job interview, where, though Dennis came from Texas and I from northern Iowa, we compared our family histories, recognizing many startling similarities. A little over a year later, at the end of the first year of my contract, I wished Dennis all the best in the stairway of Main as he left to lead a walking tour of Norway with his wife Beth. On that trip, as their group arrived at a resting point in the climb from a valley, and picked some blueberries, before beginning an even steeper ascent to a glacier, Dennis turned to Beth and two friends and said: “Isn’t this just beautiful? Aren’t we so blessed?” Five minutes later Dennis was dead from a massive heart attack.

Dennis’s death shook me, and has marked me with grief, almost as profoundly as the death of my own father. How did it mark me? Well, in part it meant that in the now over 30 years since I lost Dennis I have tried to bring some of his easy-going generosity and good humor to life in the faculty. I missed that in him, and I didn’t want to lose it. I wanted to help keep that part of Luther life intact. But I also modeled myself on something else in Dennis. He began Luther schooled in American classics like Faulkner and Hawthorne. By the time I knew him, he was teaching African American and Caribbean literature because he knew that students needed and demanded them, and the times demanded them. For myself, I’ve gone from being a Victorianist to teaching Irish, Native American, and Postcolonial literature and the whole range of what the Paideia program has thrown at me, trying to change as Dennis did. As for that café table in Sligo, while the snow continued to fall outside, after a moment of open-mouthed silence from me and nervous laughter from the students I said, “Kim, if I drop dead, call Luther. And until help gets here, I’d like Ross and Robin (two senior students) to be in charge.” Today we face challenges in higher education and at Luther. We need to hang on to and strengthen what we value while at the same time changing for a new generation of students, a new generation of faculty, and a sometimes unrecognizable world. Loss can make us stronger. And challenge does make us stronger. Kim, in the end, was ecstatic because she made it up Knocknarea,when she didn’t believe she could.

Ross and Robin, thank goodness, didn’t have to take over my J-term. They are now a high school teacher and a nurse. Me—once Dennis Jones’s student— I’m now a retiring colleague eulogizing his memory. Luther College—once an all-boys prep school and pre-seminary institution for a Norwegian-speaking community new to this continent—we move forward today holding on to and strengthening what matters, but inevitably giving it necessary rejuvenation, always challenging our students, giving them the strength needed to climb the new mountaintops that we—all of us— face. Thank you.

David Faldet