It took me about a year after Weir left school to get myself sorted out at Fountain Valley. By my senior year I had fine grades, but no real intention of going to college. Instead, I had this silly notion of becoming a knight of the open road. I was thinking of getting a truck driver’s license, because there is something about driving long distances that creates a very fecund situation for me. The driving takes up just enough of my attention that it slows down the inhibitory factors creeping into my mind.
But one day I was talking to a friend back in Pinedale whose dad was on the draft board and he told me they were already salivating at the prospect that Little Lord Fauntleroy John Perry Barlow was going to somehow try to get out of the draft. They were going to classify me 1-A so fast that my head would spin, and then I’d be matriculating at the University of Saigon. That was the entire reason I decided to go to college.
I applied to five or six schools back east and took the summer to go look at them: Wesleyan, Trinity, Columbia, Yale, Brandeis, and Middlebury. I got the feel of all these places and figured that it was highly unlikely that more than one of them would want to admit me. It was also certainly possible that none of them would, which meant I would have to quickly come up with some kind of plan B.
To my stunned surprise, they all accepted me. What I didn’t know back then was that a bell rang in every college admissions office whenever they got an application from someone in Wyoming. After I got all these acceptance letters, I was stumped. I didn’t know quite what to do. So I took a big old silver coin and shuffled all the letters into two groups so I couldn’t see them. Then I flipped the coin and eliminated three of them.
Yale, Columbia, and Wesleyan were left. I thought about it a lot. The thing with Columbia was that they started getting needy and sending me all of this stuff like I was a football star. They were putting the recruitment hustle on me, and something about that felt weird and made the place less attractive.
Then I started to think about all the people I knew who had gone to Yale, which was quite a few. There was a saying: “You can always tell a Harvard man but you can’t tell him much.” Yale was even more like that, except I didn’t think these people were particularly smart. They all seemed kind of correct and dopey and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one of them. I didn’t think New Haven was all that promising, either. It appeared about ready to go into something just this side of a race war.
At the end of this somewhat weird process, Wesleyan emerged as the one. And God, I am glad that it did, because my time there had a great deal to do with who I became and made it possible for me to be successful in five or six different fields.
Before leaving Fountain Valley, I used the occasion of my graduation party to break into the headquarters of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command. Had we all been drinking that night? Oh my God, yes. During my last semester at Fountain Valley, 25 percent of my class got themselves kicked out of school for drinking. Not beer. Distilled spirits like vodka and gin were far more highly favored because they always came on strong.
The party itself was on a ranch that belonged to the family of one of our students, situated right at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. It wasn’t a particularly long walk from there to NORAD, but without having intended to do so, we somehow managed to circumvent all the guard posts. The front door itself was unguarded, and so we walked right into the headquarters.
Eventually, someone noticed us and called the guys with the chrome-plated helmets and sky-blue uniforms. These special MPs hustled us the hell out of there as quickly as they could, but they didn’t actually punish us. I think they just didn’t want anyone to know that a bunch of drunk high school kids had walked right into NORAD.
The larger point here is that until I was forty years old, I assumed that at some point during my lifetime, somebody would let a nuclear missile fly and then they would all launch and the world as we knew it would go up in smoke in a mushroom-shaped cloud. Because of NORAD, a high percentage of those ICBMs would have been headed right to where I was going to school. So it certainly looked to me like there was a good chance that we all might die long before we got old.
As a kid, when I had to go to school part-time in Cheyenne because the state legislature was there, we did frequent duck-and-cover drills. Many of the first major ICBMs, the really big ones that they still use to put stuff in space, were based at the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base right outside Cheyenne, which made it another prime target for nuclear destruction. I’ll never forget being in a room on the fifth floor of the Plains Hotel in Cheyenne when I heard a commotion. I looked out the window and coming down the street was an Atlas missile. It was fucking huge, almost as long as the block itself. I can’t describe how I felt about that. A part of me was still the excited twelve-year-old who had been a member of the science-fiction book club. On one level, actually seeing that Atlas missile was the apotheosis of my dreams.
Yet, on another level, it also embedded into my consciousness forevermore the very real threat of imminent nuclear annihilation. Every single one of us who grew up back then has this scar that is so pervasive we hardly even know it’s there. It gave my entire generation a soupçon of pure nihilism.