A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

2 May 1999 - The Outsiders

Mars isn't red. I am shattered to learn this, but that is the report from NASA. It is really a yellowish-brown, they say. First the astronomers try to kick Pluto out of the ranks of planets and now this. You can't trust anything any more!

There's obviously been a lot in the news about teenage outsiders. It prompted me to look back at my high school yearbook and think about those years. I wasn't exactly popular but I don't think I was a total outcast either, though there were times when I felt like an absolute loser. Mostly I reacted by escaping into books and by deliberately cultivating a certain level of eccentricity. That was what prompted my interest in the occult in 8th and 9th grades, for example, and I have to admit to liking the reaction of my 9th grade English teacher when I wrote "witchcraft" in the hobby section of her silly "getting to know you" form at the start of the school year.

There were nerds who were dismissed as hopeless, but I think they were more ignored than made fun of. The one guy who I remember being actively hassled my freshman year was Marc, who (to my dismay) had a crush on me and spent much of biology class tilting his chair back towards mine in attempts to fall into my lap. I was way too concious of public opinion to be at all interested in him. The next year, one of the popular girls decided he was kind of cute and he was instantly transformed from geekdom to relatively high social status. After which, of course, he had no interest in me - but, then, I had met somebody at the weekend program I went to at Columbia so it was a moot point.

The guy in my high school who was the ultimate outsider, though, was Alex Miles. Not that he was unpopular - he wasn't disliked. He was just weirdly aloof from normal teenage concerns. For one thing, he was obsessed with French Guiana and had been since a report he had written a few years earlier. (And, in fact, he hopped a freighter to Cayenne one summer.) For another, he refused to accept an allowance from his parents and allowed them to provide room and board only out of sheer financial necessity. I used to talk with him sometimes during study hall because he read some of the same sort of things I did (e.g. Carlos Castaneda's books) and we were both involved at the margins of an underground newspaper. (It was 1973 - underground newspapers made more sense than writing about the chess club for the official school paper.)

At my 20th reunion, a few years ago, I found out that Alex is a journalist with Reuters now. He's based in Cayenne, French Guiana. And it turns out that his book, Devil's Island: Colony of the Damned is considered one of the best sources of background info on that country.

I read Alex's book this week. It's not perfect, mostly because his attempt to be comprehensive makes for some choppy transitions. But it's reasonably well-written and held my interest and there are some haunting stories in it. I will not easily forget the case of the two men who were chained together and attempted escape to a mining camp, where they hoped they could persuade the miners to break their chains. One of the men was bitten by a poisonous snake and the other had no choice but to return to the prison camp, carrying a corpse that was nibbled at by vermin and insects along the way. Now there is someone who wouldn't have cared to save the rainforest!

But what struck me the most was that I could hold in my hands this tangible proof that being an outsider could mean opportunities. That all of what other people saw as weirdness could be channeled to creativity, that obsession could drive someone to scholarship, instead of violence.

And I wished that the school principals who are busily worrying about which of the student outsiders in their school will snap, would also give a thought or two to the possibility that they may really be dealing with an Alex Miles, instead of an Eric Harris.