Cold Black Water

The bells in Breslin Tower played out the Westminster cadence and tolled nine plaintive notes. In spite of the freshness of the spring night, the melancholy sounds from the clock tower better reflected the somber surroundings within the Gothic stone building. There, in the library, portraits of bishops long past peered down from dark paneled walls like stern and watchful overseers. Hovering intently over books and papers, students diligently went about their work because, if they were there at all, it was likely that they were trying to avoid the distractions of the Sewanee campus on such a tempting spring night. It is the same every year on the mountain when spring really begins to feel like spring. This annual transition from the bleakness of winter inevitably stimulates an awareness that life in its fullness is again here for the taking; and, like the primal urge of renewal, it usually wins out over the proper pursuit of academic excellence. That was the mood outside the library as students drank beer on fraternity-house lawns and enjoyed a bacchic camaraderie with other sojourners seeking release from the winter. Only the desperate or conscientious would confine themselves to the seclusion of the library on a night like this. And so it was that I found myself in that austere realm studying for a Spanish test. I would rather have been any other place in the world than those hallowed halls but the last-minute need to prepare for an exam had thrust me into the ranks of the desperate. Little did I know how far away from study the night would soon take me.

As the last notes from the tower bells faded, I was startled to see Chief McBee from the police department striding through the stacks toward my table. I had never seen the chief in the library before but knew him reasonably well since I was fire chief of the student fire department and shared offices with him. Chief McBee and I had regularly worked together to coordinate events involving the fire department, and his inside knowledge acquired over a lifetime had been invaluable to me. But for the chief to be coming here at this time of evening was way out of the ordinary. If there had been a fire, the loud campus siren would have already been sounding and firemen would have been boarding the trucks by now. This had to be something else entirely.

Contrary to what one might expect, the fire department at Sewanee in 1964 was not some unruly hodgepodge of students organized to carry buckets but was, instead, a highly professional team of thirty well-trained members with two fire trucks at its disposal. The unit not only served the university and community of Sewanee but aided the towns of Monteagle, Cowan, and Tracy City as well. One of the practical organizations at Sewanee, the department was out of sync with the stylized traditions of a college priding itself on its English heritage. The university, moreover, had a distinctly elitist culture that was fueled by a combination of aristocratic tendencies from high-church England and the aloof attitude usually associated with America’s better colleges. The University of the South, on occasion referred to as the “Princeton of the South,” basked in a tradition of the “Sewanee gentleman” and maintained a sophisticated image whenever the excesses of its famed partying were not in play. The fire department, on the other hand, fulfilled a more mundane role and was one of those few university organizations that reached beyond the artificial environment of academia. Practical by nature, it served the needs of not only the university but also interacted with the local population. After all, the surrounding community had fires of its own.

In spite of the university’s dominance, another distinct culture existed on the mountain that was just as real and perhaps, in some ways, more authentic. This other world consisted of the permanent residents on the mountain, many of whom were descended from or influenced by pioneers that had settled there in the early 1800s. Although most of these people owed their...