Long-time readers will remember that both Nicole and self have a deep, abiding, uncritical love for Deep Springs College, the bonkers, hyper-isolated, working cattle ranch slash all-male two-year university in Eastern California.
Founded in 1917, Deep Springs College is a unique institution of higher learning. The educational program is built upon three pillars: academics, self-government, and manual labor. The school is located 40 miles from Bishop, California on an isolated cattle ranch in Deep Springs Valley.
Between 12 and 15 students are admitted each year. A scholarship covers the costs of tuition, room, and board for every student offered admission. In exchange, Deep Springs students are expected to dedicate themselves to lives of service to humanity.
“But Mallory,” I hear you say, “isn’t your whole deal kind of questioning and thinking critically about the Lonely White Man Mythology?” Yes, absolutely, except for this one thing. I remain convinced of two things in this life: that if I had been born a man, I would have been A) completely insufferable and B) a Deep Springs alum. I have never had any desire to make Deep Springs change their policy even for one-off bookish female mascots; it pleases me to simply know there are a handful of doofuses out in the Bishop Valley reading Plato at one another and darning their own socks. I love and cherish the idea of Deep Springs, even though it is the product of flawed human beings and not just like, the fantasy of the American History Boys that exists only in my head.. (Look at their list of notable alumni sometime. I mean, if you’re going to preserve the LWM Mythology, this is how you fucking do it.)
(Also: how many all-men’s colleges are even left in the US? Morehouse, some yeshivas, and Deep Springs. I’m okay letting them have this!)
ANYHOW. The point is, we don’t have to worry about getting into Deep Springs anymore, because they are building another Deep Springs only this one is in Alaska and they are letting girls in!
Outer Coast College will be a new two-year institution of higher education, located in Sitka, Alaska. It will offer a curriculum for the whole person, built upon the three pillars of Academics, Labor, and Self-governance.
We draw our inspiration from the work of education visionary L.L. Nunn. In 1917, Nunn founded Deep Springs College in a quiet valley just east of the Sierra Nevada, recognizing ahead of his time the pedagogical potential of manual labor and political deliberation. Though Deep Springs has proved to be a remarkably successful experiment, it is not widely known. A century after its founding, it remains the only college of its kind.
Labor & Service
We intend for students to invest well over 20 hours a week in valuable work. Students will catch and smoke salmon, maintain campus facilities, garden, keep chickens, intern at one of many local non-profits, and perform the dishwashing, cooking, and janitorial work that is done by paid staff at most colleges.
“But Mallory,” you protest again, “what’s keeping you from smoking salmon now, or washing your own dishes at home, or becoming the kind of person you wish you had become a long time ago?”
It would be different, somehow, at Outer Coast. I would be different, hard-limbed and keen-eyed and I’d rise with the dawn every morning and my genitals would be carved from flint and Marcus Aurelius quotations, and things would be different, there.
So now my only problem is that I’m ten years too old and have to just deal with the fact that I went to the wrong college and have regretted it ever since. It would be the last unicorn that came to Molly Grue.
I have always said I didn’t care where my kid went to college, or whether she went to college at all if she found more satisfaction elsewhere. I now CARE DEEPLY.
Wow. You could scratch your nethers with complete impunity in a place like that–surrounded by nature, hard work, and quiet thoughts about muskrats. And then you could spit while others nod solemnly, yet happily at you. It is a dream.
Yeah and when you scratched your flinty nethers you could literally start campfires. I mean, that’s just efficient.
When you teach yourself to shit beans, though–THAT’s a man.
DIDN’T NEED THAT MOLLY GRUE/LAST UNICORN REFERENCE TO RUIN MY DAY AND MAKE ME CRY TEARS OF BLOOD INTO MY KEYBOARD
Oh, Molly.
I <3 MOLLY GRUE AND I AM HERE FOR YOUR PAIN, FOR WE SHARE IT.
SHE NEVER HAD A CHANCE! MOLLY/UNICORN AU FOREVER
I’ve always been really mad that Deep Springs didn’t accept women, ever since I read about it as a college-bound high school student. Why, just a couple of years ago I got into a flame-war in the comments section of the Los Angeles Times website under and article about the debate about Deep Springs going co-ed. I wish I was as generous of spirit as you are, Mallory! But I think you know something I do not know.
Anyway, good news!
If there were like, a BUNCH of men-only colleges, I might be worked up over it, but there are (I think) way more women-only colleges and also I’d die in about eight hours without internet access so I could never actually have gone to Deep Springs even if they’d let me in.
I read a while back that the faculty and students of Deep Springs want to go co-ed, but the board of trustees keeps shooting them down. They even accepted women into an entering class a few years ago, and then had to rescind the acceptances.
I think that was the LA Times article. Reasons given for not accepting women include “tradition” and something stupid about romances ruining something or other. Because men never get romantical with men.
Or…. hmm… this is just occurring to me. Maybe the trustees want to maintain an awesome gay ranch situation and they’re all “ixnay on the aides-lay, that will ruin the hot and cold running blow job situation we have worked over a century to maintain!!!”
We voted in 2011 to begin the transition to coeducation. Since then, the process has been bogged down in the courts (due to the active dissent of two trustees). You can read more at: http://www.deepsprings.edu/coeducation-news/
Of the many reasons that the college decided to move towards coeducation, most relevant to the above speculation is this: we had no contemporary institutional reasoning as to our single-sex status. Any particular feelings on the matter in the Deep Springs community were just that, particular.
The most recent pursuit of the coeducation question was designed to either a) provide institutional reasoning for maintaining Deep Springs as a single-sex institution, or b) provide institutional reasoning for transitioning to coeducation. For an institution that values self-governance, it was necessary to resolve the apparent contradiction in merely saying, “We are single-sex because we always have been.” Much of the college has changed since Nunn’s time, and the college now finds itself far from many of his original words. This is, I think, as it should be.
Lastly, we did not accept women into the class of 2013 – we did, however, solicit their applications. Legal counsel had intimated that an initial ruling was likely to be in our favor. Unfortunately, in January of that year, we were forced by court order to cease all activities related to the transition. At that point we notified all of the women who had applied that we were unable to consider their applications for acceptance.
We had no desire to pique the interest of prospective female Deep Springers in vain. So, the college decided that, in order to avoid a repeat of 2013, we must wait until the current situation in the courts is resolved.
In any case, Outer Coast College is an exciting project that I will follow with interest.
Thank you for clarifying! The link you provided was, in fact, what I was half-remembering.
Those conversations I had in (I think?) Monday’s Link Roundup about how I’m glad a certain type of person exists but I would rather chew off my own arm than be like that? Applies here, too.
See, you’re more mature than I am. I’m still in the “obstinate denial that I’m not that kind of person” stage, so I read about things like Deep Springs or this weird kibbutz thing in Connecticut and I think “I could be that person. Lean, tanned, genuinely enjoys eating vegetables and milking goats. The only reason I’m not that person is that I haven’t given myself a chance to be.”
It is a lie and deep down I know it is a lie; I am a squishy, pale, genuinely enjoys eating mac and cheese and drinking riesling person for whom exercising and eating right are like pulling teeth.
I’m just too old and lazy to lie to myself anymore. I highly recommend embracing sloth as a means to self-realization.
!!!!! This is my town! I welcome a school of deep thinking, hard working women.
Of course, Alaska is simply littered with tough, amazing women. There should be a formal training for them.
College-age me would have run in horror at the prospect of more than an hour a week of non-sedentary labor.
Now? I would gladly volunteer for 20 hours a week of chicken duty.
Why does the West Coast get to have all the character-building fun?
I mostly cannot even handle that Last Unicorn reference. 10/10, well done.
agreed 10000% I have even the graphic novel of The Last Unicorn. <3.
I have the Litograph.
I mean, those who read my Friday updates know I am IN LOVE with my college. But man….
WHERE WAS THIS A YEAR AGO WHEN I WAS APPLYING TO COLLEGE
I knew a couple of folks who took a 2 year gap from their undergraduate studies at a normal college to go and do the Deep Springs thing, then come back and finish their Bachelors. So, you might still have a shot!
*quickly texts my mother* THIS IS HAPPENING PEOPLE
My mother, who is a very nice Sunday school teacher type, went on a summer-long kayaking trip up the Yukon with (among others) an early punk band that heavily influenced Nirvana back in the 70’s.
I have not done anything close to this.
This is why I will never succeed in life.
I want to envision your mom kayaking with the Melvins but I know that’s not it.
Meat Puppets
I got obsessed with reading first-hand accounts of deep springs during high school when I was supposed to be applying to a college I could actually attend. I bet most of them are not available anymore, they were all on blogs and before people worried as much about what they said on the internet so they were very honest and very interesting. God I wanted to go to deep springs back then, and now I never ever would.
I mean… This is kinda like where I went to high school? I went to a small Quaker boarding school with a working farm, no janitors or grounds keepers or cooks, we all had to work. Collect eggs, then work on your senior thesis.
Where did you go? My husband went to a Quaker college, and I’m always interested when I find more Quakers/people who went to Quaker schools.
I went to Scattergood Friends School and then went to Earlham for part of my career.
A working cattle ranch/university? Where was this in 1986? Obviously not in Canada, otherwise BOOM!, my massive boobs would have been strapped down tighter than Dad’s Tarp On A Woodpile.
Sigh. Sometimes I feel like I’m always just missing the bus…😣
This is hilarious because my daughter would not be able to run away fast enough from a place like this. But me? Sign me up.
I…
I….
I have a college applicant age son.
SEND HIM TO DEEP SPRINGS THAT HE MIGHT BECOME A LEADER OF MEN
Just sent him the link.
Tangentially, I just learned in my additional research that the campus newspaper for all-male Wabash College in Indiana is called The Bachelor. I found this oddly charming.
AWWW
Wabash College for Men, or, if you were dumped by one of their students, Wabash School for Boys.
(Wabash College for Misogynist Frat Boys, mostly. Source: I’m married to a DePauw alum.)
co-signing, with an addendum that those who aren’t Misogynist Frat Boys are Badly-Closeted or Extremely Flambouyant Gays
I mean, DePauw is also for frat boys. But Wabash is still garbage, and I hate them and their dumb beanies.
-A DePauw alum married to technically-a-DePauw-frat-boy, but Sigma Nu so w/e.
I’ve always wanted to visit Sitka. I do not EVER want to be that young again though. I guess what I’m saying is if you are the kind of person who would be a teacher here and you want to go on a hobby farm vacation sometime, I’m down.
I emailed them and said are you looking for profs still??? Because I would LOVE to work there.
not one of those alumnus names could be given an infant by parents earning less than a million a year
I too am mildly excited by this, but I feel that this place could only approach the mystique of Deep Springs if it were a women’s college. THE HOMOEROTIC UNDERTONES ARE PART OF THE MYSTIQUE!
Regular old co-ed working colleges do exist, notably Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes, Kentucky, which is apparently sneakily one of the most selective schools in the country.
why even HAVE single-gender universities without HOMOSEXUAL UNDERTONES
I went to a single-gender university and it was more of an overtone tbh
I did not know there was a town in Kentucky named after a Robert Browning verse drama. Well done, founders of Pippa Passes!
Let’s all go back to college!
— Me, every day of my life
http://blog.dominionstage.org/wp-content/uploads/…
There is a 0% chance that 17-year-old me would have given that place even a millisecond of her precious thought time, and a 100% chance that I would be applying right now if I imagined they would accept 32-year-olds who already have degrees.
I just need two years of hard labor and contemplation to get me to stop looking at my phone and the toast every twenty seconds so I can accomplish things in life.
On one hand, I am so thrilled that that campus is being put to use. It’s a gorgeous, magical location and is perfect for students. But man, all the talent out there and only 11 out of the 29 people involved are women or identify as women? And only 1 out of the 4 on the principal team? Seriously, they can’t do better than 25 – 30% for a college that is explicitly for women?
Is the college explicitly for women? I don’t believe it is. In the FAQs, is explains that eligible candidates are:
“All students who are younger than 30 years of age, have graduated from high school and have not graduated from an undergraduate program are eligible to apply, international students included. We require TOEFL scores from students who do not speak English as their first language.”
The following question has to do with gender, and the response is that there are no gender-based eligibility requirements.
http://outercoast.org/faq.html
(I thought it was explicitly for women at first, too.)
THAT’S KIND OF MY FAULT, I said “for women” to denote the fact that it’s co-ed but sort of makes it sound like it’s a women’s college!
oh geez! Ok. that makes me feel better, thank you for clarifying.
well, still. at LEAST 50%, come on guys, you can do it.
Well, MY college had a working sheep farm.
I didn’t work on it, but I did see it. They had a llama there, too, because apparently llamas think that sheep are baby llamas and will protect them from coyotes.
WHAT
YOUR COLLEGE HAD A GUARD LLAMA
WHAT
I just googled [my old university] + guard llama and while it’s unclear if there’s a guard llama on campus, there is a least one research paper on the use of guard donkeys from there.
I miss that place.
This is a fairly common practice. Donkeys also make excellent sheep guards. And llamas and donkeys, unlike dogs, eat what sheep eat, so you don’t have to haul kibble out to them every day.
Apparently guard llamas are pretty common on alpaca farms, as alpacas have wonderful soft perfect wool and pleasant demeanors and are total predator magnets without surly-ass llamas around to protect them.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god
MY BODY CANNOT HANDLE THIS
SURLY GUARD LLAMAS PROTECTING SMALLER SWEET FLUFFBEASTS
I DIE, I DIE
It becomes even more adorable when you have seen freshly shorn alpacas and how silly they look.
That poor darling!
My college had a farmer’s market that would appear in front of the dining hall once or twice a week, and in the middle of the farmer’s market would be a pen, and in the pen would be a sweet shy scared alpaca trying desperately to hide from all the idiot college students like me who were trying to snuggle it. Now I feel bad about all the time I spent trying to win over that poor little guy who just wanted to be left in peace.
Uncle R worked on a llama farm for years, and Jane the guard llama (she might have been self-designated, honestly!) did almost as much to fend off the coyotes as the Great Pyrenees who’d been actually employed for that task: she kicked hard, and she had good aim. I helped with feeding sometimes after work, and most of the llamas were a genuine joy to be around, and amiable about having their (VERY SOFT) necks scritched. But I gave Jane a wide berth.
Toasties will like this: Llamas are matriarchal, and female llamas move up in the hierarchy if they have daughters.
My old workplace was across the street from a goat farm that had a guard llama named Harley. He was pretty fierce, no coyotes would cross him.
Awwwww sweet llamas!
I lived on campus for my first year in the Netherlands and behind my building was a herd of sheep. I was never sure whether the field was rented to a local farmer or if they were For Science. Once I saw some people standing around by the sheep with clipboards, so maybe the latter?
Guard llamas are great! There was a sheep farm that my parents and I’d drive past fairly frequently that had a guard llama, and for some unknowable reason I called it Wallace.
Aw, now I’m reminded of the musk oxen from the local herd that used to be taken for walks around our vet college.
The sheep next to my mom’s farmlet have a guard llama; she HATESSS anything canine, and therefore is an awesome protector. Everybody in the grange laughed at the young farmer who got her, but when they saw the first couple of stomped coyote corpses, they fell over themselves getting llamas. None of them are as fierce as Wonder, but they do pretty well.
My college had working research farms, because it was a land-grant school with a large agricultural department. Notable animals included a cow with a window into its stomach, and a turkey that got stolen leading to radio PSAs saying “we don’t need to get the turkey back, or even to know who stole it, but please, whoever took it, DO NOT EAT IT.”
While driving from Chicago to San Francisco, my travel companion and I passed through many small ranching towns. And I thought: This. This is what builds character. My best friend and I had often marveled at our Fathers, and the Manly Qualities they embodied, that Modern Boys seem to lack. Her father worked in rice paddies in China; mine worked in orange groves in Florida.
And as I drove past horses and cows and endless rolling plains I thought: This is where my child shall go. Not for life, not for years. But for one summer, at least. When my child turns 15, I will send them to a ranch in one of the forgotten states like Wyoming, or Montana, and there they shall become A Man. Or A Woman. Because regardless of the sex or gender of my child, I believe with all my heart that Adulthood will be earned in the West.
Now I know that, if that summer proves insufficient, there will be a second option for them.
“Adulthood will be earned in the West” can i get a bumper sticker that says that
Bumper sticker, shirt, tattoo, whatever you want, you are welcome to it 🙂
That somehow makes me think of all the “Montana is for badasses” shirts I have seen in my time here.
I want to be there. If I didn’t do anything with my first BA, and still live like an eighteen year old, I can pass myself off as a fresh college hopeful, right? Can we please instate a free take-backs policy on decades of life proven to have been misspent? I promise to be enthusiastic about salmon.
This is my lifelong dream. Just starting college all over again.
I would settle for middle school.
The next big move for The-Toast is a Deep Springs-style commune, right? So we can all feed chickens and read female authors for a few months at a time when we need a break from real life?
The Toast Academy for Flinty-Eyed Women of a Certain Age Looking for a New Life and Second Chances and Also Some Harry Potter Fanfic
*now accepting applicants and donations of fanfic*
Professor Ronbledore
I am renowned amongst my friends for my obsession with the Trans-Pecos region of Texas, and would strongly suggest that this location be considered for the Toast Commune. It has the sort of empty, endless skies and rolling pampas leading to rugged, distant mountains that leads itself to contemplation and pride in one’s work. Also, you can get great pizza and coffee in Marfa, so it’s not TOTALLY the boondocks.
Wouldn’t we be better suited to recreating Black Mountain College? I feel like we’d be better able to justify internet access….
I’m excellent at taking care of chickens and would thrive in this commune.
Can I bring alpacas?
I had no idea that there were others with the Deep Springs obsession. I first learned about it in a documentary about higher education and I have been mildly obsessed since.
The Alaska campus seems perfect, but this is separate but not equal. This is a two year college, not a four year. It isn’t free. And there was something about the same gender education that seemed to be part of the mystique. I would love to pioneer a free, all-women university.
But Deep Springs is also only two-years!
That is upsetting for two reasons: first, I didn’t know that, and second, it makes so much sense. No one could do four years out in the desert like that. Two years is madness enough.
The men get the free school and the gender-neutral is not free? Is it really another Deep Springs, or is it just a new school in the style of Deep Springs? Because if it’s the new campus of the same school, then yes this is a very obvious separate but not equal situation.
There was a guy in my HS who was an intellectual prick who went to the Ivy League for a bit and took some time off to go to Deep Springs. I read his interview in our local newspaper after he got a prestigious scholarship, and one day I will be ambivalent enough to hope that he grew into a good person. Until then I’ll just be salty about it in a way that says more about my maturity level than it does anything else. *sigh*
I worked at a place in college that was basically this, except it ran programs for elementary and middle school kids. It was on top of a mountain in the deep woods of Appalachia and everybody lived on site for the entire season and all of the buildings were yurts (outing myself big time here if any of my friends are reading, hi guys!). Speaking from experience, you can do way worse for yourself at 19 than just disappearing into the wilderness and doing some good old fashioned hard labor for a while.
I grew up in an area where there were a lot of schools out in the woods mostly for messed up rich kids and we gave them pretty serious side eye. I’m glad your school was a good place, it gives me hope for the ones near my hometown.
Uggghhhh when I was a sophomore in high school, the boy I was PAINFULLY in love with went to Deep Springs. Oh the lonely letters he wrote me.
Anyway, it’s 23 years later and Deep Springs Seth is still pretty much my favorite sex dream apparition.
Do you still have those letters just curious
Wait, is it going to be all women? Or co-ed? All women would be fantastic.
Seems co-ed, based on the FAQ page:
http://outercoast.org/faq.html
This post all but forced me to seek out the 2004 Vanity Fair article about Deep Springs, which I love because it is a) completely bananas and b) quotes a guy I went to high school with (and provides the perfect description of him, though in the interest of anonymity I won’t tell you which one he is): http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/06/deep-sprin…
I can only hope the Alaskan school generates something this glorious. Or better? Yes, better.
Well, that was a fantastic read! BANANAS.
The article does note that there are Deep Springs groupies. All I want for Christmas is Deep Springs Groupie tshirt.
thank you for finding this article. i couldn’t remember what it was from but this is definitely the article that got me obsessed
we’re discussing groupies and i do want to note i am not one. I would have been at 16 but today, no
okay I read that and …
..they totally kill and eat a random stranger once a year, right?
It feels like they kill and eat a random stranger once a year.
You know, my friend from high school did suspiciously become a vegetarian shortly after leaving Deep Springs…
Then again, he also got super into baking, and if you’ve seen Sweeney Todd and/or Titus Andronicus, we all know what sort of things you can bake into a pie, so.
My answer to that? William Vollmann is an alumnus. So yeah.
Deep Springs factoid from the ’80s: at the time, it was one of the five colleges with average math SAT > 700. (The others being MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, and Cooper Union.)
IIRC the faculty at Deep Springs are not permanent. Maybe you could get to teach at this Alaska place for a year?
I wanted to go to this college, but my mother was convinced it was a front for some weird cult.
We just need to convince Nicole and her husband to let us have a cattle ranch on her property out in Utah, she can tell us what books to read, and make us do CrossFit with baby calves for resistance-training, and run sprints after chickens (though I patently refuse to handle chicken manure). We can write, and howl at the moon, talk about menstruation and parental leave policies, have celebrities come and do lectures. Who’s with me?
it’s ok we figured out a way to skip the handling of chicken poop and still have chickens and eggs: http://www.richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp
I want this. i want this so bad 🙁
Wait, lifting a calf eventually leads to being able to lift a cow, right?
Greetings from a Deep Springs alumnus. I adored Ms. Ortberg’s article — she would’ve been a welcome addition to any admitted class; when can you have too much wit and moxie? — and liked many of the comments.
Suffice it to say that anyone who wanted to go there should’ve been allowed to apply. The college is trying to go co-ed; there are legal wranglings and wrinkles involved. There is an affiliated summer program for women called the Arete Project. And now this deal in Sitka, which sounds great.
I have two daughters, and it always chapped my ass that they couldn’t even apply to a college I went to.
And, as an aside to one of the commenters: it wasn’t so much the spitting. It was the peeing outdoors.
Do you think a gal could have pulled a “Just One Of The Guys” at Deep Springs and gotten away with it? Ignoring the peeing outdoors thing?
What a fascinating question. Yes, it probably could be done. In my day, and I’m sure this is still the case, many — if not most — if not all — of us were comprehensively self-absorbed, and therefore unlikely to scrutinize a roommate’s idiosyncrasies about privacy and bathing, for instance. I haven’t seen the movie; did it go into things like menstruation? At Deep Springs, you’re totally cheek-by-jowl with the same bunch of guys, 24/7, for weeks and months at a time. Maintaining the gender fiction would be a tough sell, but a clever woman with good planning skills might make it work.
Thank you for the reply!!!
In re menstruation, have you heard of a thing called Thinx? Because, by golly, I think we’ve got a chance!
Oh hell yes. I had not heard of Thinx, but having read the Sarah Burton review on Buzzfeed, I’m sure they’d get the job done at DS.
Am I now cudgeling my brains, trying to figure out if perhaps one of my classmates was a woman? Yes I yam.
I await your possibly-nonexistent classmate’s memoirs.
Well, if eight months into being a student she just stopped bothering to keep up the gender fiction, probably she just could have stayed. I mean really. It would have given you all so much to talk about for the remaining time.
“…my genitals would be carved from flint and Marcus Aurelius quotations…”
I am pretty sure your wit comes from a bargain with the devil, Ortberg.
I need to leave work now so i can go home and cry about never having anything like this in my liiiiiiife.
…why am I an adult and not a scared little freshman again? Because this, and what it can be, is amazing.
I WISH TO HELP MOULD THESE WILLING YOUNG MINDS.
New head canon: Ron Swanson is a Deep Springs Alum.
Nah, too much yammering for him.
He thinks Deep Springs alumnae are soft, likely to patronize libraries, and possible commies since they worked for room & board & not cold hard cash.
However, at least one kid who joined The Swansons is applying.
*sings reedily, as befits a Deep Springs fresher*
Oh I wish I could go back to college, life was so simple back then! What would I give to go back and live in a dorm with a mealplan again!
LOL no, I don’t wish to go back to college and Avenue Q is kinda racist but … Deep Springs! I have never heard of you but I was a very smart high schooler and I grew up on a farm, I could fit right in!
I’m so glad someone went there.
I’m 40 and I have multiple advanced degrees and usually I’m grateful that I will never have to write another term paper or take another exam, but suddenly I want to go get a second undergraduate degree while smoking salmon in Alaska.
I figured out that I did not want to be an archaeologist by doing a six-week field school in the Alaskan taiga. My BSing-a-paper-on-deadline skills far outstripped my trueing-a-transit-in-muskeg ones, my proven inability handle a shotgun would shame my Texan relatives, and sweet JESUS I missed hot showers, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. If you’re gonna chuck it all and start over, there are worse places!
YOU ARE 8 YEARS TOO FUCKING LATE DEEP SPRINGS/OUTER COAST!!!!!!!
It was my dream to attend Deep Springs as a young person. All I wanted was a fucking dick so I could go play in the wilderness and work hard and be smart!!!!
Well, shit. Except for the salmon, apparently I am living the dream.
I was expecting something more. I guess the salmon make all the difference. Also, maybe not working for a soulless corporation at the same time might help, but I’m addicted to being paid.
Judging by the names, at least one-third of the notable alumni are dissipated New York society types from an Edith Wharton novel.
My son is waiting to hear if he has made it through round one of the Deep Springs application process, which itself is kind of nuts. I want him to go there so bad I can taste it, if only because he’s 100+ years too late to be a Rough Rider.
By the time my brother was applying to college, six years after me, I had found out about Deep Springs and was seriously considering an Alanna-of-Trebond-type situation. This college was made for me. I’m honestly a teensy bit upset I didn’t drop out of college when I really wanted to; I’d be eligible for this school now if I had! (I mean, I’d rather chew off my own arm than be 18 again, but still.)
Seriously though, reading that Vanity Fair article linked above, I am not that into some of the cultural stuff that goes on at DS, but I love the practical day-to-day intensity of work & study and hope that that’s what carries over to this new school. Makes me really happy to think of the weirdo women like me who will get to have this experience. I hope they find a way to make it affordable, if not free.
Would read: 5 THOUSAND words of Deep Springs erotica.
“‘Frost’s come in,’ the ranch manager said and walked away without further instruction. John was confident enough now to deal with it himself but there was just something about Chris that made John want him by his side. They looked out across the valley, foggy with early morning mist….”
PAGES. I meant pages, 5K words is nothing.
“Tell me,” said John, letting their fingers touch a split second too long over the milkpail. “What do you think of the portrayal of eros vs. philiain Plato’s Republic?”
Chris looked up sharply. His eyes went dark, and in the dancing light of the fire’s embers they were pools unfathomably deep. “I don’t know,” he said in his lazy West Virginia drawl. “But what do you say to a practical demonstration?”
Marry me.
I feel like I want an entire series of romance novels to be written about these two institutions and their alumni IMMEDIATELY.
I never want to live in Alaska again and am glad to have escaped the smell of smoked salmon, but am so glad for this!
I’d be even more excited if this was a woman’s college, as a woman’s college alum who worked for girl scout camp in Alaska as an 18 year old (and then for the forest service later, but that’s another story).
I did! At 33 I went back to university and got a BSci, then a masters in clinical psych. I don't know what the US college experience is like (I think it's a lot cheaper in Australia), but it's definitely not impossible.
I strongly recommend Tasmania in Australia. Mountains, forests, the cleanest air in the world PLUS artisnal cheeses and wines.
Or you could just work in Yellowstone as a wrangler. Way more fun. And at least one queer woman here 🙂
My grandmother met my grandfather when she came out to visit her brother at Deep Springs.
I hear from my mom that there’s an active debate currently about reforming the rules to admit women there.
My answer to that? William Vollmann is an alumnus. So yeah.