In Tents Education

Note:  No one should take a blog too seriously, though naturally, everything I write is the Gospel truth, give or take a lie or two.  Truth, being so rare a commodity, should not be wasted, but used intelligently.  My goal is to use honesty a little more than the average preacher or member of Congress—neither of which has ever heard of the concept—and a little less than the local weatherman, who—realizing that NM only has about a dozen days annually of anything that could be considered “weather”—is correct more than half the time.

 

None of these events could have possibly happened to me, since I remember I wasn’t there at the time.  Besides, I can produce numerous witnesses to prove I was somewhere else.

 

Classes are about to start at Enema U, and the administrative squirrels over in Abattoir Hall are frantically trying to figure out how to keep students safe from Covid-19 while still collecting the maximum amount of tuition.  Since, with every passing day it becomes harder to maintain the fiction that online education works, something has to be done.  Predictably, they have appointed a large committee so secretive that even the Committee Chair doesn’t know who the other members are. 

 

So far, about all that has been done is that the university has expressed  concern with where students will be able to study, since the library will remain closed.   Exactly why the library will remain closed is another deep mystery.  You would think that if it is safe for students to attend class, the few students who actually still search through the library for books the football team has not yet colored in would be equally safe.  Trust me:  you don’t need to enforce social distancing in a university library until the week before final exams.

 

In any case, a solution has been discovered:  the university is erecting “study tents” around campus.  Yes, it is August in Southern New Mexico and those tents will be as hot as pawn shop pistols.  And yes, the wind in Southern New Mexico is strong enough to blow the nuts off a prairie dog and may send the tents to Arkansas.  And though I would be far more impressed if the Administrative squirrels turned their offices over to the students and moved themselves into the Internment Study Camps, I suppose these canvas sweat shops marginally meet the definition of places to study. 

 

Naturally, all of the new tents remind me of an old story that happened to a friend.  

 

During the Vietnam War, Bob was a college student with such an extraordinarily low draft number that had he not enrolled in College R.O.T.C., before his freshman year was over he probably would have been called up to visit Southeast Asia.  But, as an ROTC student (always pronounced rot-see) he could delay being drafted until after he graduated.  The downside was mandatory training at the summer camps, where Bob would spend several weeks annually at a remote military base being edjumacated in the proper Army way.

 

R.O.T.C. programs today are wonderful and students definitely learn and benefit from summer camps.  Fifty years ago….well, not so much.  Most of the time, Bob found himself watching obsolete training films, endlessly drilling in the sun (a little of that goes a long way), or sitting in a large tent listening to someone read a prepared lesson.    Frankly, the Army didn’t really have an established program set up to effectively handle the sudden influx of college students—which was understandable, since the Army was busy fighting a war.

 

In Bob’s case, he spent a lot of time uncrating old rifles, removing ancient hardened cosmoline, reapplying new cosmoline, and re-crating the rifles.  If you are not familiar with cosmoline, it is a brown waxy petroleum substance straight from Hell that is used to prevent rust.  It can only be easily removed with liberal applications of flammable substances that the Army will not let you use.  It takes a vast quantity of it to cover a rifle, but only about a spoonful to completely cover the human body.  I swear to God, just typing the above made me, er….Bob....remember what it smelled like.  Bob still probably has traces of the stuff under his fingernails.

Eventually, the Army decided that handling the sudden influx of somewhat suspicious-looking (their hair was at least a quarter inch too long) college students required the construction of an additional dining hall, so they decided to put up a large tent.  From some vast military storeroom, they located an ancient crate containing a bail ring tent, probably situated on top of the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant.  Last used during the Korean War, the tent came with everything needed, packed in a massive wooden crate roughly the size of a small bedroom.

 

Unless you have worked at the circus, you are probably not familiar with a bail ring tent, as they are being replaced with tents with lightweight aluminum scaffolding, plastic miracle fabrics, and inflatable frames, but in the old days, large tents were made from heavy treated canvas that was supported by massive poles longer than the average telephone pole.  The center pole (not included in the crate) was fitted with a set of pulleys at the top and put up first.  Then the bail ring was snapped around the pole, with the canvas laid out on the ground and fastened to the bail.  Using the ropes and pulleys, the bail would be lifted to the top of the pole, dragging the heavy canvas behind it.  Lifting this massive load was one of the reasons that circuses had elephants.  Bob said it was a little disconcerting to realize that it took about a hundred college students to equal one elephant.

 

Bob, as unskilled labor, found himself as one of a long line of men assigned to one of the ropes, waiting impatiently in the sun for the various sections of canvas to be joined together and then fastened to the bail ring.  With nothing much to do, Bob was not paying much attention, as he was wondering if the rations he had been given for lunch were older than he was.  The meal had come in olive drab cans and boxes that suspiciously had no dates and that Bob suspected they had been found in the same warehouse as the tent.

 

Suddenly, Bob’s daydreaming was interrupted by a sergeant with a bullhorn, who was reading instructions from an ancient manual.

 

“Ready Left!”, boomed the sergeant with the bullhorn.  “Ready Right!”  Bob, and the other students came more-or-less to attention, grasping the ropes with both hands.  No one knew precisely if they were the “Left” or the “Right” as the two groups were standing on opposite sides of the pole, but everyone knew they were in one of the groups and they were ready.

 

The bullhorn crackled and the sergeant roared the order to the waiting students, “PREPARE FOR ERECTION!”

 

Bob let go of the rope and he says what happened next ended his days in R.O.T.C.