YALE OVER HARVARD
In 1955, during a picnic with two fellow Yale classmates, a friend discovered to his horror that an unimaginative dullard had scrawled something on the base of Starboard Rock, the primary jewel in the crown of our Fox Islands. It was a pathetic effort, particularly when compared with the lofty and daredevil accomplishments of the truly inspired, before and since, who have gone to extraordinary lengths to achieve truly meaningful notoriety on that sheer rock face. The miscreant responsible for this defacement had only to get up off his butt and scratch his adulteration a few pathetic feet from the ground. Worse though was the unmistakable significance of the three symbols staring back at him—‘H47’. The message, contemptible and typically perfunctory, was clear. Harvard, however pitifully, had been there before him. Notwithstanding its mundanity, it was a crushing reality. His honor and that of his fellow Yalies, here, gone and yet to come, demanded that the world would know how much more inspired is a Yale man. They hurried home to Calderwood Point and, mindful that neither of his friends had ever worked with such gear, gathered up block and tackle and a pot of white paint and returned to Starboard Rock that afternoon. The tide was such that they could get up into the Privilege, the only spot from whence there was ready access to the summit, and from that beachhead dragged their gear to the top of the cliff. Fashioning a sling for himself, they took a turn around a tree and, trusting blindly, he inched his way over the edge. It took several minutes for him to loosen his grip on greenery and clefts in the rock and realize that his friends did, in fact, have his full weight and seemed in control. Squawking directions from below, he had them maneuver him, in nerve-wracking jerks to a spot that would most visibly demonstrate Yale’s indisputable superiority. Wafting gently about a hundred feet above the rocks and water below, he scraped away a large patch of Foliose Lichen, an accumulation that (he knows now and regrets) had taken over a hundred years to colonize and, with a great deal of attention to penmanship, painted the witness that all see and appreciate today: ‘YALE 55’, high above the laughable testament to inferiority that languishes somewhere behind the bushes a hundred feet below.