The Longest Ride

College.

Though I’d lived in the state all my life up to that point, I’d never heard of the college; for most people who spent the rest of the century in North Carolina, a casual mention of the college would elicit blank stares. Now, more than half a century after it closed, there are few people who remember that Black Mountain College even existed. But by 1946, the college was entering a magnificent period – perhaps the most magnificent period of any college, anywhere, at any time, ever – and when we stepped out of the gallery, I could tell by Ruth’s expression that the name of the college was already known to her. When I asked her about it over dinner that night, she told me that her father had interviewed there earlier in the spring and had raved about the place. More surprising to me was that its proximity was one of the reasons she had wanted to honeymoon in the area.

Her expression was animated over dinner as she explained that Black Mountain College was a liberal arts school founded in 1933, whose faculty included some of the most prominent names in the modern art movement. Every summer, there were art workshops – conducted by visiting artists whose names I did not recognize – and as she rattled off the names of the faculty, Ruth grew more and more excited at the thought of visiting the college while we were in the area.

How could I say no?

The following morning, under a brilliant blue sky, we drove to Black Mountain and followed the signs to the college. As fate would have it – and I have always believed it to be fate, for Ruth always swore she knew nothing about it beforehand – an artists’ exhibition was being held in the main building, spilling out onto the lawn beyond. Though it was open to the public, the crowds were relatively sparse, and as soon as we pushed through the doors, Ruth simply stopped in wonder. Her hand tightened around my own, her eyes devouring the scene around her. I watched her reaction with curiosity, trying to understand what it was that had so captivated her. To my eyes, those of someone who knew nothing about art, there seemed to be little difference in the work displayed here from that at any of the countless other galleries we’d visited over the years.

“But there was a difference,” Ruth exclaims, and I get the sense that she still wonders how I could have been so dense. In the car, she is wearing the same collared dress she wore on the day we first visited Black Mountain. Her voice rings with the same sense of wonder I’d witnessed back then. “The work… it was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was not like the surrealists. Or even Picasso. It was… new. Revolutionary. A giant leap of imagination, of vision. And to think that it was all there, at a small college in the middle of nowhere! It was like finding…”

She trails off, unable to find the word. Watching her struggle, I finish for her.

“A treasure chest?”

Her head snaps up. “Yes,” she immediately says. “It was like discovering a treasure chest in the unlikeliest of places. But you did not understand that yet.”

“At the time, most of the artwork I saw struck me as a collection of random colors and squiggly lines.”

“It was Abstract Expressionism.”

“Same thing,” I tease, but Ruth is lost in the memory of that day.

“We must have spent three hours there, wandering from one work to the next.”

“It was more like five hours.”

“And yet you wanted to leave,” she says reproachfully.

“I was hungry,” I reply. “We didn’t have lunch.”

“How could you even think of food when we were seeing such things?” she asks. “When we had the chance to talk to such amazing artists?”

“I couldn’t understand a thing you said to them. You and the artists were speaking a foreign language. You would talk about intensity and self-denial, while throwing around words like Futurism, Bauhaus, and synthetic Cubism. To a man who sold suits for a living, these words were gibberish.”

“Even after my father explained it to you?” Ruth seems exasperated.

“Your father tried to explain it to me. There’s a difference.”

She smiles. “Then why did you not force me to leave? Why did you not take my arm and steer me to the car?”

This is a question she has wondered about before, whose answer she has never fully understood.

“Because,” I reply as always, “I knew that staying was important to you.”

Unsatisfied, she nonetheless presses on. “Do