A Cellarful of Nose

Burke, a "townie" in Wooster, Ohio who reintroduced himself to me by reminding me I had regularly bought pot from him a third of a century earlier. (What I remembered on my own was that I had lost my virginity in an apartment he rented on Spink Street.) Burke was smooth, rational, and articulate, and despite the hallucinogens, deeply grounded in reality. He was always there to remind people what was real and what was just odd.

Julia Osborne Tryk, always arch and ostensibly unsentimental but having perhaps the biggest heart of them all.

Her joke of the day was how she reached back into her family tree for a name for her newborn daughter, and stumbled upon one she loved, Nicola – but then realized her daughter would be named Nicola Tryk – "nickel a trick." She named her Marcelie instead.

(Her other joke was from her eulogy for her adopted brother, who found out as an adult that he was really of Scandinavian extraction, and made great hay with the fact to all his friends. Her line: "I knew my brother before he was Swedish." It was a typical Julia line – scathing, loving, and true.)

These are just a few of the key members. In all, there were perhaps 40 young people who spent time on the hill, and whose lives were altered, however minorly, by the fellowship and experimental spirit of the place. What I remember about them is how smart they were, and also how spiritual – but not in an obvious, "let's bow our heads and pray" way; rather, in an unspoken sense that everyone shared that our reason for being on the hill was fundamentally a serious one, to find ourselves in a proper perspective to nature and creation. We were students of life, and without being doctrinaire about this or that religion or idea, we were everyone of us open to the lurking possibilities of 26