The Bowdoin Orient

April 30, 2011. Saturday of Ivies. The day I’ve been looking forward to since I arrived on campus at the end of August for orientation.

I wake early, I head to Ladd patio, and I drink champagne even though I’m hungover as shit. Soon I’m drunk and I’m dancing on the couches and the tables. We all are. It’s a party, the kind of party we don’t usually get since we chose to study at a small school, since we wanted the benefits of the small community, the close relationships with professors, the etc. But it’s Saturday of Ivies, so we party. We motherfucking party.

But then I remember: I’m working at the Pub at 5:30.

When I got to campus at the end of August, I didn’t only find out about all the Bowdoin rituals; I also found out about my assigned campus job required through my financial aid package. Although Bowdoin hands out phenomenal grant money–believe me–not everything is free, and I was assigned to work at Jack Magee’s Pub and Grill, or the Pub. And even though Bowdoin uses the ‘first-year’ moniker rather than ‘freshman’ for those new to campus, its new members are treated just like at any other institution in the world, and so I was handed the Saturday 5:30-9 shift, which, though a pretty damn good shift most weeks is still the runt of the litter in terms of Pub shifts, falling on Bowdoin’s day of days: Saturday of Ivies.

So there I was, hammered, with about seven hours to go until my shift. Shit, I thought. But I did stop drinking. 

This was before, for those of you who know, met, or just remember the names, Eric Edelman ’13, Isaac Brower ’13 and Steve Borukhin ’14 started the wonderful Campus Food Trucks, and so, after the kitchen was prepped and the doors to the Pub opened, all of the intoxicated concert goers streamed in. And I mean streamed in. Everyone was there.

Angie Menard, the head cook at the time, tells me I’d be working the sandwich and salad line. She also said, “Sober up quick,” and “don’t let Richard find out.” Richard Hart is the boss of all student workers at the Pub. He didn’t find out. But Rich, you have my permission to hit me when you see me again.

I was working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, and I wasn’t handling it well at first—my mind is shot and I can’t focus. Since that day, I never came to work the least bit intoxicated. The kitchen is a dangerous place if you’ve never worked in one—sharp objects, scalding hot oil and ovens, etc.

Orders were coming more frequently and in greater quantity than they ever have, and I struggled to keep up, especially while paying attention to comments like: “Dude, like when the balloons dropped? How sick was that?” in reference to the Janelle Monae concert I had to miss to get to the kitchen on time to prep for the shift. Why couldn’t Mac Miller have gone last? That absolutely lame guy, pulling his shirt up and telling, not asking, all the girls in the crowd to do the same (with less eloquent phrasing, mind you). How the much-too-PC student culture didn’t erupt at his comment, I still don’t know.

I got through it, though. Richard was goofy and kept me upbeat, and then was serious when it got real, making sure I was focused. And Angie was goofy the whole time, especially when Richard turned his back, making sure the positive vibes never went away. And I kept my mind on the motto of Don Day, another head chef in the pub: “A clean kitchen’s a happy kitchen,” and focused on keeping the hundreds of Bowdoin students healthy through it all.

I never thought how much that day—and the rest of the countless days I worked at the Pub during my next three years at Bowdoin—would come to mean to me.

April 25, 2015. Saturday of Ivies. I’m a graduate now, though, four years on from my first Ivies, and I haven’t woken up early to drink this time. It’s 10 a.m. in Kathmandu, Nepal, and I slowly get out of bed, feeling the shits coming on again, burning up with fever.

My coworker and I decided I needed two days of rest before heading on westward to work with rural communities on options for climate change adaptation. I had just spent a week in the Terai region of Nepal doing the same, and that’s where I picked up the fever and shits, probably from eating goat blood and intestines as beer snacks. 

If it weren’t for that sickness I would have gone west earlier, right into the epicenter of the earthquake.

I felt better, though, and so I figure I’d head to a café to do some work. I settled down, and that’s when it happened. The building started shaking. And I mean shaking. Girls shriek, tables fly across the room, and people can’t stand as we tried to escape the collapsing building. As I pushed through the crowd towards the exit, a bookcase fell on me, pinning me against the railing. Someone pulled on me and then I was through. And then, in some Lord of the Rings shit, I ran across a crumbling walkway to the other side of the building, and then down and out, out into the streets, bricks coming down. Then I was in a parking lot, safe from the fatal falling objects, riding out wave after wave of aftershocks.

But the guy—Jay Wellman of Denver—who had helped me unpin me now realized after the adrenaline subsided that he had badly hurt his ankle during our escape, and so I helped him get to the US embassy as it was getting dark. There, once he was safe with the US military medics who had flown in for avalanche rescue training, I went to the kitchen on instinct.

Dinner had already been served for a couple hundred, but there were only two people in the kitchen: Julie, a former cook, and Malcolm, a U.S Army chef. And so I joined—and later a former Peace Corps member, April, who learned her kitchen trade at a Taco Bell, joined, too—and we stayed up all night cooking for the consulate workers taking calls from back home about missing Americans and then prepping for breakfast, which we then cooked and served, never once getting a wink of sleep. And that’s what we did for the next three straight days: cook, clean, prep; cook, clean, prep. And we never slept.

At one point, we fed almost 400 people. And throughout, I existed on what Angie, Rich, Don and Kathy Reed and her husband Dave, a janitor in the Union, taught me back at the Pub in Brunswick: working with goofiness and humor, and with seriousness when needed; prioritizing cleanliness at all times to make sure no one gets sick (with four hundred people sleeping in one public space, if we had gotten one person sick, that might have been a disaster in itself); and above all else, being generous even when there is not much to give.

We started running out of supplies about two and a half days after the first quake. One American woman complained that I only served her four pieces of ravioli. The military ate as little as possible so others wouldn’t go hungry, and the Nepali staff worked tirelessly without eating even though they were the ones who had lost their homes and some, their relatives.

While I truly appreciate everything I learned at Bowdoin and  believe all the knowledge I gained from my professors is truly invaluable, when faced with survival, the only help I could offer in serving for the Common Good was what I learned at the Pub from the incredible Bowdoin Dining Services workers, who, like most other service workers, go unappreciated far too often.

So, if you’re still looking for a job for the summer or for after you graduate, consider the service sector. You never know when the skills and values you’ll learn will come in handy.