as long as four months each year, while early darkness falls upon New England each evening, the region is regularly visited by cyclonic nor'easters. The storms spiral northward up the Atlantic Coast, afflicting New England for three days. Saturated with relatively warm moist air upon arrival, they unload heavy rain, sleet, and snow, whipped along by powerful winds. Boston, it turns out, is one of the three windiest cities in America. The nor'easters next pass on out into the North Atlantic, pulling down masses of arctic air upon the hapless citizens. The first day the streets and sidewalks of Cambridge are filled by rain pools and slush. The next day they are coated with black ice and walls of frozen slush. On through the third day and beyond, high winds, familiarly called the Montreal Express, drive the chill factor down while causing more pedestrians to slip and fall on the slick black ice of the strangled walkways.
There are almost no signs of life during this dreadful season, outside of humans in heavy clothing scurrying through the whistling arctic air amid desperate pigeons and house sparrows, aliens of European origin, their feathers fluffed out to keep warm, hopping about in search of rare scraps of food. Raff was reduced to asking, "Why do people stay here? Don't they know any better?"
The exhilaration Raff felt upon his arrival, in the deceptively cheery fall days, was soon darkly balanced by the hollowing sense of alienation. He would never lose it; he would always feel like an outsider. In time, he was to learn that everyone at Harvard is an outsider, or at least feels that way once in a while.
The torrent of Harvard's life spun like a vortex around the new center of Raff's life, the gray stone buildings of the Law School. To step outside his studies and sample it was like trying to sip water from a fire hose. The earnest battalions of smart people and the ideas they promoted were disorienting. Most of the students had achieved intellectual distinction before arriving. Valedictorians and National Merit Scholars were commonplace among the undergraduates. Phi Beta Kappa membership was the rule among the entering graduate students. Ideas were coin of the realm at Harvard, and competition among their champions to express them intimidating.
Before he made the trip north, Raff had comforted himself with the hope that Harvard, while quantitatively different from Florida State University, would prove to be basically the same. Harvard, he thought, might just be FSU on steroids. But he soon learned an important different truth. When any organized system, whether a university, a city, or any assembly of organisms themselves, reaches a large enough size and diverse enough a population, and has enough time to evolve, it also becomes qualitatively different. The reason is elementary: the greater the number of parts interacting with one another, the more the new phenomena that emerge within it, therefore the more surprises student and teacher alike encounter each day, and the stranger and more interesting the world as a whole becomes. Exactly the same is true of ant colonies among different species, as Bill Needham had explained to him at Florida State University. Large colonies, like those of the Nokobee anthills, have complicated division of labor, and the queens are much larger than and more physically different from the workers.
One such phenomenon true to the big and venerable principle, Raff soon discovered on campus, was the Gaia Force, a radical student environmental movement. An announcement in the Crimson announced its first meeting of the fall term.
GAIA FORCE
There will be a meeting at the Lowell House Common Room, Wednesday, September 25, at 8:00 P.M. The Gaia Force, a democratically organized group of concerned students, will discuss NATURE FIRST! FOR THE BENEFIT OF HUMANITY!
The boy from Alabama thought this might be just the group for him. He was after all an environmental radical--well, sort of; at least in Mobile he was.
An added and completely unexpected attraction within Gaia Force, for Raff upon his arrival at the Lowell House meeting, was one JoLane Simpson, a brilliant undergraduate major in social studies who hailed, of all places, from Fayetteville, Arkansas. JoLane's father was an Assembly of Jesus Christ minister, an evangelical locally famous for leading the crusade against atheism, homosexuality, evolution, abortion, socialism, and godless science. JoLane, brought to Harvard with a scholarship on a perfect-A high school record, had by the end of her freshman year rotated 180 degrees from Dad's beliefs. She had deserted her upbringing