Returning to Santa Fe

By A.J. Peters

And we’re back!

In a little over three and half hours, we’ll don our warmest clothes, grab our books, our pens, our paper, and venture off to the first seminar of second semester. Seniors are reading the Brothers Karamazov; juniors, Gulliver’s Travels; sophomores, Anselm’s Proslogium; and freshman, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. (I should probably add that January Freshmen will be doing the Iliad.)

It’s always exciting to be on campus – I tend to forget how much I enjoy this place when I’m away. And to return, I had a bit more of an adventure than usual. Sometime before New Year’s, a friend sent a text that said little more than, “I bought a pickup. Sell your plane ticket, let’s road trip back.” I’m from outside Seattle, and he lives in Portland, so the drive to Santa Fe isn’t exactly your daily jaunt. But it didn’t seem like an opportunity I could pass by, so a few days back I hurriedly packed my bags and hopped on the train to Portland. We spent Thursday night in Portland, Friday in Boise, and Saturday with other friends from St. John’s in Salt Lake City. They piled in the back, joining us yesterday morning for the long haul to Santa Fe, laughing and listening to Gulliver’s Travels on audio tape.  We would have made a pretty funny sight, four college kids crammed in old Ford Ranger, listening to a mixture of Macklemore, Bill Withers, Bob Dylan, and a perfectly composed British voice reading from the pages of Jonathan Swift. I think scenes like that are a pretty good illustration of what I like so much about St. John’s College.