As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.
Back in about 1989, I started going to uni at New College in Sarasota, which was, at the time, a tiny liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. It has since been caught up in the ongoing American culture war; Florida governor Rick Desantis absolutely hated the place, and staged a hostile takeover, replacing the Board of Trustees with arch-conservative MAGA Trumpists in an attempt to reshape it as a bastion of conservative Christian thought. (There’s reportedly a statue of Charlie Kirk in the making for the campus grounds.)
When I went there, it was an interesting place modeled on intellectually rigorous European schools, where students are graded in essay form instead of with an A/B/C/D/F system, and undergrads were expected to complete a Masters-level thesis to graduate.
New College is located next to the Ringling Museum, the mansion that was once the home of John Ringling of Ringling Circus fame. The Ringling mansion is exactly as posh as you’d expect from a millionaire circus founder, with an immense garden behind the sprawling five-story, 36,000-square-foot Venetian estate with its own ballroom and lookout tower.
The garden features a 200-year-old banyan tree. This very banyan tree itself, in fact:
The museum was separated from the campus grounds by a chain link fence that ran right down the edge of campus to the bay, which of course made it difficult to secure, since the fence stopped at the water’s edge. One could, if one were of a mind to do so, simply walk around the end of the fence and that was that.
It was customary among a certain subset of the students there, myself among them, to wander the Ringling grounds once night fell and the museum closed for the night—not from any malicious intent, but simply to take in the ambiance. A few friends and I started spending our evenings there, climbing up into the banyan tree and just chilling.
Until, that is, the museum hired a security guard to patrol the grounds at night.
We discovered this fact one fine evening when we were lounging up in the branches of the tree and that security guard drove his little golf cart right up to the tree. He parked just under the branches we were perched in and sat there for about half an hour or so, doing paperwork in his little cart, while we were all paralyzed above him thinking don’t look up don’t look up don’t look up…
It was, let me tell you, the longest thirty minutes of my life.
Eventually, he finished whatever he was doing and drove off, at which point we shimmied back down out of the tree, booked it for campus, and never returned.
Years later, I told my girlfriend this story. She was like “You know he totally knew you were there, right? He was absolutely just fucking with you.”