Poetic License by Gretchen Cherington

Author:Gretchen Cherington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

With Alex’s graduation from Penn on the horizon and the summer following freshman year to fill, he and I talked about my joining him in New Hampshire, where he intended to live on his family’s farm, assuming he could get out of the draft. The draft hung over all of us like a doomsday we knew would come. If you were male and not in college, you were fair game. Everyone hoped for a high number, or they tried to get out of it entirely. Alex was prepared to move to Canada if he had to. I wasn’t sure I’d follow. Eventually, he got out with a medical deferment. With that behind him, Alex prepared for his graduation from Penn, and his move to New Hampshire. His roommate Mitch and a couple with a three-year-old daughter would join him. The couple was looking for a way out of the city, and Mitch needed a place to finish his senior thesis, a study of early twentieth-century communes. A farm in New Hampshire seemed the perfect place for all of them.

Three months before I would leave Seattle for my summer in New Hampshire, a small band of the Weather Underground, a radical group of US college students, accidentally blew up a three-story brick townhouse at 18 West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village while preparing nail bombs intended to disrupt a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix. I knew about the Weathermen. Their declaration of war against the US government had already led to acts of violence. Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold were killed in the accident. Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson escaped from the rubble and went underground, where they’d stay for over a decade. They had commandeered the brownstone, owned by Wilkerson’s father, while he was out of the country. Cathy’s mother, who’d been at Smith College with Mom, owned a house across town from Alex’s farm with her second husband. Alex had been summer friends with Cathy’s younger sister. When I got to New Hampshire and visited our local post office, Wilkerson’s face was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

In July, we started noticing a click when we made phone calls. Mitch quickly surmised the FBI was tapping our phone, which made a sort of illogical sense, since Alex knew the Wilkersons. A bunch of hippies living on a farm near Cathy’s mother might be of interest to them. Cathy did not contact us, but it was stirring to think about a girl, six years older but not unlike me, from a progressive East Coast family who’d gone to Abbot Academy and been admitted to Swarthmore College. We shared certain beliefs—opposition to our government’s war in Vietnam; injustice in how we treated the poor and people of color—and were both committed to changing the institutions we thought were holding our country back, only in entirely different ways. I could no more have imagined myself joining the Weathermen than I could joining the Army, even if I’d been able to, back then.

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