WOODSTOCK EXPERIENCE IN LANDOUR
As I have come to the conclusion that the major reason that my Woodstock grade school and high school years were so intense was because I was at a time in life, adolescence, in which the transformation from childhood to adulthood was taking place and whatever experience you have at that age is likely to be very intense. But even if that is true, I am realizing that there were a number of things about Woodstock School and it’s Landour Himalayan setting that, combined together, were extremely supportive of this intense time of transition and which made my adolescence a very rich and good time. I’ll try and sort this out a little bit.
1. Boarding. Woodstock was, and still is, a boarding school. For all the years I went to school, I was in the company of a number of other boys, first sleeping in long rows of beds in dormitories, twenty to a room, and then as we got older moving finally to two person rooms. For at least six months of the year and for some nine months of the year Woodstock was as much like summer camp as a school. This led to creating both many kinds of group experiences and to creating intense friendships. From the age of 9 I saw my father 3 months of the year and my mother, who moved us out of boarding to a cottage on the hill during the intense heat of the summer on the plains where she lived with my father, for six months of the year. My second family was my fellow Woodstock students.
2. Isolation. Woodstock was isolated from the world of plains India and even from Mussoorie. We had to walk everywhere. There were no cars or scooters in Mussoorie, and certainly in Landour. We were an isolated community of a boarding school with missionary cottages on the steep hill above the school.
3. Himalayan Setting. We were isolated in an absolutely beautiful setting of the lower Himalayas with the views of the Doon and the plains of India to the south and the high range of steep snowcovered 20,000 foot peaks of the higher Himalayas to the north. The climate was temperate year around, cool in the summmer and quite cold during the winter (when we all went home to our parents on the plains for a three month winter vacation). Walking through oak and deodar forests with flaming red rhododendrons in the spring and a riotous profusion of ferns and flowers bursting up everywhere during the three month summer monsoons when it poured rain daily were part of our everyday life. Nature was a big part of our school experience.
4. Small Size. The entire school from kindergarten through high school was 400 students so individual classes were small. We knew each other very, very well as we traveled together through the years which cemented us together for life. We were a school but also a community.
5. Outsiders. We were a community of outsiders in the immensity of Hindu and Moslem India with its 15 major languages. We spoke only English, played American games of basketball, learned about American and British literature and knew we didn’t belong in India and on graduation assumed we would leave India forever and many did. And while at least half of the students were from the United States, the other half were from all over the world: India, Britain, Germany, Afghanistan, China, Thailand, Burma and on and on. Except for the Indians we were all outsiders and even the Indians with their American education and accents were somewhat outsiders within India. Without ever considering it, on my part at least, we were very multicultural and cosmopolitan. As far as I was concerned this is the way the world, at least as I knew it, was. But because we would part forever and spread around the world at graduation, we knew this was just a moment in time of community.
6. Academic Quality. And we were a good school academically. Although I remember very little of what I learned in class at Woodstock, which was college preparatory for both the American and British higher institutions, there was never any doubt that we were all going to college, never any questioning of the value of school and the need to study hard and to achieve good grades. We were all determined to learn and serious about learning. But luckily we were not taught toward a test and the our learning was very progressive including a number of courses helping us to understand and honor Indian cultural traditions. From intense classes to long study halls under the eye of a supervisor every evening we studied hard.
7. Equalitarian. It never occurred to me until now that unlike many English and Indian private schools and even American high schools there were no class or rank differences at Woodstock. There were no cliques, no insiders and outsiders. Upper classes didn’t lord it over lower classes and we accepted everyone equally regardless of country, religion, gender or anything else. This seemed so natural that it wasn’t worth noticing. But now I see it as a special quality.
So it was within this context that we went from childhood through adolescence and were headed toward higher education. And it was within this context that we opened up to the world and each other. But we did this in very different ways. One close friend, Ray Smith, was active in one kind of practical activity after another from building a motorcycle out of a well pump which he rode across north India still with poor roads and rare petrol stations, to hunting deer around Mussoorie with an army surplus carbine to one time, in self defense when he was tracking a leopard that was killing village goats came around a corner of the hill to confront a tiger who turned toward him which he killed by luckily shooting it in the eye rather than bouncing a bullet off it’s thick skull. Another friend, Bob Fleming, whose father taught biology and collected specimens for the Natural History Museum in Chicago, later became world famous as an authority on birds, first of Nepal and then world wide. Many of my friends were touched socially by friends and carried away with them marvelous friendships that continue to this day. The ways that I was touched by Landour and the surrounding hills was often private through reading poetry and being touched by the magic of the mountains around me. It was my solitary walks that were most alive for me. The high point for me during my senior year was the half hour I spent in silence before breakfast seated about the trickle of Woodstock Falls near the Hostel as the sun line moved down the hill toward me. It was a form of meditation although I wouldn’t have called it that. I did it simply because it felt good.
I don’t know about my fellow classmates, but I am realizing for me that what has brought me back to Landour again and again during my lifetime (probably thirty visits since graduation) is not so much the place as a desire to relive, or recover, the feeling of intense openness and response that I felt in Landour as a boy. And I am realizing after all these years that that intense response to things is not in the deodars or the oak trees, not in the line of sharp snowcovered peaks behind Landour, not even in the Lyre tree outside Woodstock or Woodstock with its still earthen red roofs and buildings still as they were when I was a boy. I want to return to the feeling of wonder of my childhood and realize that the things that touched me so strongly so many years ago no longer do it in the same way because I can no longer recover my childhood.
Many people who would like to return return to their childhood find that the places have gone, have been replaced or transformed so much that they are no longer reconizable. But not Woodstock. Because of Indian government military contonment laws it is impossible to build anything new in the cantonment area of Landour. Buildings can only be replaced. And Woodstock which owns much of the hillside hasn’t made changes either. Everything it the same. Only I, at 85, am not the same. I, at 85, who has come back to the fountain of youth to relive the childhood exploring and discovery of those days, find myself distant from my old self. The deodars are beautiful but the wonder of life unfolding is no longer there. Age has settled me and closed off the wonder that I once felt.
So this is my lesson to myself on what may be my last visit to Landour or may very well not be since I have been making my last visit every other year for the last 15 years. The way back to that childhood intensity is not through returning to a place on pilgrimage. If I am going to make a pilgrimage to childhood wonder and delight I have to find the way within myself to let go and open up and respond fully to world around me which transforms the world in a magical transformation, the way to return to childhood delight is to let myself be a child again, which I can do as easily in Swannanoa as I can do in Landour.
So why am I here in the new very comfortable Hotel Dev Dar Woods transformed from the old Hotel Dev Dar Woods where I have stayed with students so many time and stayed with my family? I am here because I still feel some of that childhood magic and because it is one of many places in the world where I feel very alive at 85.
One way of looking at this I realize now is that adolescence is a time of intense opening up and exploring and being open to the world around you as you face adulthood and independence. Many people have a painful adolescence, often because they are overwhelmed by peer pressure or family pressure or school expectations or other tensions. But I experienced none of this. For me adolescence, my time at Woodstock, was a very good time of openness and exploration and finding ways to respond intensely to the world around me. I felt extremely alive and unthreatened or disturbed in any way. It was this opening up that made my time at Woodstock so good and why this place has such significance to me. My Woodstock experience was so intensely alive because these were my adolescent years in which I was naturally opening up and responding. It is not Woodstock that was so marvelous, it was my inner unfolding that was so intensely alive and Woodstock and Landour simply provided the framework and support in which this could happen. It wasn’t the deodars that were magical, it was my adolescent unfolding that made the deodars magical. To recover that magic I don’t need to feel the presence of the deodars, I simply have to look within and feel that adolescent response which has continued with me through my life and is here when I write just as it was when I sat above Woodstock Falls in the early morning and opened myself up to the world around me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 