A day of contrasts. I spent the morning and afternoon with a couple of friends and a wilderness skills instructor, Peter Wolf, who was kind enough to give us a workshop filled with pointers on awareness, shelter, fire-building, finding water, and the uses of a few plants. I learned a lot of little details and was inspired by Wolf’s easygoing style and his life experiences. It’s good to get in touch with those people who know about the spiritual life in nature, and are humble about it and eager to share their knowledge.

This evening, my friend Peter Castorena and I went out and bought some hot tea and sat by the lake near our dorm, just lounging on the sandbar and smoking cigars that Wolf had made gifts of. It was only my second cigar and Pete’s first; we are not by nature the kind that indulge ourselves in vices, but it’s nice to stretch the boundaries once in a while. I don’t do drugs and I don’t drink at all (can’t stand the taste) and I don’t have wanton sex. But tonight, we smoked cigars.

The sandbar was located near a trail. Not too far away we could hear the loud music and voices of a typical party, but we were far enough away to be able to enjoy the rhythm singing of Pacific treefrogs. I had spotted one a little earlier, a large frog (or perhaps it was a toad; hard to tell in the darkness) that must have been more than three inches long. Peter and I were glad to have seen it, and I gave thanks to it silently, for it was the first one I had ever seen here.

Not long after we sat down, the tone of the evening began to change. A group of guys passed by on the nearby trail, evidently heading to the party, and upon seeing the two of us sitting together near the water, proceeded to make polite comments in our direction, such as, “Hey, are you gonna fuck?” and “So when are you going to start fucking?” They weren’t the only ones to say things like this; others that passed by called out similar things. We ignored them and drank our tea and smoked our cigars and talked with each other or sat peacefully.

To our left, amid a copse of trees, a few people also lit up. Peter said he was pretty sure it was something a little stronger than cigars.

A bit later, a couple of guys came to sit on the other end of the sandbar. They asked if we had cigarettes. We didn’t, of course.

Someone threw an empty beer bottle into the lake.

A while after, more guys came down onto the sandbar, talking loudly. They were joined by the guys who wanted cigarettes. They found a frog. They decided to play with it. This consisted of one guy pitching the frog while another guy batted it into the water with a skateboard. There was a sickening thud.

Some people who had come by earlier returned, and while passing by tossed more comments toward us, things like, “Hey, aren’t you guys fucking yet?” and something about gays and San Francisco.

Peter and I finally got up to leave. As we walked along the trail back toward our dorm, we saw two different people peeing by the side of the trail. “At least they’re not being conspicuous,” I commented sarcastically to Pete. This was a trail well-lit by bright lampposts, and they were no more than two feet off the trail.

When I returned to my dorm, I checked up on my potted giant sequoia sapling that was sitting out on the third floor balcony. Someone had poured beer in it.

I made a few trips to the men’s bathroom to fill up a small bucket with water so I could flush the alcohol out of the soil. On my third trip, a guy and a girl stumbled in and made their way into a stall, so the guy could throw up.

I don’t know if this is a typical Saturday night. What I do know is that these people are supposedly the cream of the crop. This is Stanford University. This is our future. These are the leaders of tomorrow. And these are typical college students, partying.

Now I better understand why I like being alone rather than being with most people, or prefer the company of less “adventurous” friends; why I hate large groups; why people are stupid and mean and dangerous; why humans are the most dangerous predators on the planet. We don’t even have to try. People act like gods without consciences.

I don’t believe in original sin or anything; I think people are basically decent. I would like to think that most of those people would help a person who was truly in need. I would like to think that these people were only a cross-section of the worse side of campus culture. But I don’t know. My faith in humanity has been seriously challenged. I could perhaps understand if these people had been raised under cruder, harsher situations. But again, this is Stanford, populated in large measure by privileged young adults.

Anyone who wants to try to restore my faith in humanity, feel free to contact me.