Scott Cole,  50+ Jobs Worked Since Harvard

 

92-148 Scott Cole

SPEAKERS

Scott Cole, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Scott Cole Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks. Will So Scott, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Scott Cole  00:24

Okay, well, I’ll start by saying that my journey at Harvard was a quite a long, drawn out one, because I dropped out and returned three different times and finally graduated in 2012 I so I guess I don’t know. Maybe I’ll start after 2012 then, since that was

 

Will Bachman  00:50

No, no, no, let’s let, we gotta start. We start, start, maybe when the first time you dropped out, and just narrate, narrate this back and forth. This is okay. I think you are of our class, at least that I’m aware of the longest between freshman year and graduation. So that’s we still think of you as one of our own, of class of 92 despite what class of 2012 says.

 

Scott Cole  01:13

So yeah, well, I definitely feel more attached to the class of 1992

 

Will Bachman  01:20

so what’s the first time you dropped out? And just take it from there.

 

Scott Cole  01:23

Okay, yeah, well, I dropped out after freshman year. I finished. I finished the freshman year was kind of rough. I I had a great first two weeks on dorm crew. I loved it. Met, met some really great people, and had had a lot of fun. And then once classes started, things kind of went south from there, and so I I actually bought it, bought a bus ticket to go back to California after one or two weeks of of classes, but I called my sister, and she talked me into sticking it out, so I managed to make it through the year, and I came Back for sophomore year, and after about a month, I decided I just wasn’t up for it, and left. And so I got back to California. I lived with my parents for a while, and worked at a car wash in Fresno for, I don’t know, half the year and through the summer, and that was so so bad working at a car wash in Fresno for a summer that I decided to to come back to Harvard. So I came back for another, another two years, and then every all my classmates, my roommates and friends and everybody graduated in 92 of course. And and after the with, with them all gone, kind of my support network. I I ended up leaving again. And so that’s when my, my adventures started. I decided to just kind of pursue a different path of of having a lot of different jobs and and learning through through my jobs. So let’s see,

 

Will Bachman  03:14

yeah, walk us through some I think, before we start recording, you said you’ve had like 50 jobs. So well,

 

Scott Cole  03:21

yeah, yeah. Just recently, my dad said, Why don’t you sit down and make a list of all the jobs that you’ve had in your life? And so I so I did, and it was, it was over 50, and then I kept remembering more that I had had forgotten course of

 

Will Bachman  03:37

Yeah. Okay, so this was not hyperbole. You were, you were not kidding, 50 plus jobs, wow, yeah,

 

Scott Cole  03:45

yeah. Some of them were as short of as short as a day, and others lasted for three years. But So yeah, and when I dropped out in 92 I well that, that summer of 92 I had a great job at the I worked at the Harvard forest, working for a scientist there as a research assistant. He was studying how the forest rejuvenates after a hurricane event. And I really enjoyed that. And then I came back to Harvard to try and finish my final year. And like I said, I was just kind of lost and floundering. And I had had a great summer working at the forest and and decided that I just didn’t want to stay at school. So I went back back home for a while, to California, to my folks house, and then I came back in 93 for a wedding of my college roommate, Mike Fisher and his now wife, Jill Shapiro and and when I was there, I was staying with another classmate of ours, Ivan Rudnicki, and I got a job with a landscaper in Cambridge. Just saw her. Truck parked out in front of his house one day. So I asked if they needed any help and and she said, Sure. And so I ended up working for her for a summer, and then when, when the season was up, they usually shut down for the winter. I moved to San Francisco to try to join up with another classmate of ours, Elijah Aaron, who I enjoyed your interview with recently, and and another friend from class of 93 because I had, I had had the good fortune of being part of some of Elijah’s productions at at Harvard, and they were trying to start a theater company out there in San Francisco. So I moved out to join them there, and couldn’t find any work and and was having a hard time, and kept getting calls from the loan college loan people and wanting the money. So I ended up going back to landscaping back in Boston again, then that next year and and worked, worked another season back back there. And after that, oh, that I after that season ended in the winter they used to have at Harvard, there was in the employment office, there was this binder that you could go in and look through. I don’t know if you remember that like jobs that were available, you know, for Harvard students and and so anyways, my friend went in there and found a job listing for a ranch in Wyoming. It was some Harvard graduates who had a ranch out there. I don’t remember when they had graduated, probably like in the 70s or something, that Scott was their last name, Scott brothers, and is Bates Creek Cattle Company. And so I put an application for that, and they hired me, and so I ended up staying there for a year on this ranch outside of Casper Wyoming. And had had a really great experience there. And what were you doing? I was irrigating their their fields for the hay fields, and then also just regular cowboy work, you know, feeding the feeding the cows. And then I got to go on cattle drives. They taught me how to ride a horse. I had never ridden the horse before, and so I got to, got to ride a horse and go on cattle drives and and then I also worked driving a swather, cutting hay, and and then I went to away for the winter. They they I had some time off to come back home over the holidays and and then when I came back, they were in the middle of calving season, so I was helping with calving, where they’d wake me up in the middle of the night, if there was a cow that was having trouble, and you’d have to go out and keep an eye on it and help the the regular ranch hands, who really knew what they were doing, you know, pull a calf or whatever. So after that, I Well, while I was there, when I had that time off in the in the winter, I went, I went to New York City for New Year’s because I had been out there in Wyoming, in the middle of nowhere, and I was kind of craving some contact with some of my friends and and chance to be in the big city. So I went out there and ended up meeting someone who was going to school at Middlebury College and, and so we had a connection and and so we decided that in the spring I’d move out there to to Middlebury and join her while she was finishing up her college career there. And so I left the ranch and moved out to Middlebury Vermont, and had a great string of jobs there, where I got to work on an organic farm in Shoreham Vermont for a season, and then that winter, I worked at a cross country ski area, the Reichert Carroll cross country ski area, that’s associated with Middlebury College, and Also at the Middlebury College Snow Bowl, their downhill area during the winter. And then I got a job. I’d always been interested in cooking and and so I got a job at otter Creek bakery in Middlebury, and worked for some really, really great people there, and was like a prep cook, and kind of got my chops down, learned how to cook, and then we were there until she graduated in 96 and then we moved back to Boston for me to finish college, and decided I was going to try to finish again. So I went back. In 97 the school, and I got a temp job at a law firm downtown Boston, and was doing that part time and going to school. And I went for a semester, finished another semester, and then they had a policy back then that if you had been out of school for more than five years that they would cut off any financial aid after that point, so I was going to have to pay out of pocket for the full last semester. And plus, I was finding it harder and harder to balance working and home life and and going to school. And so I dropped out again in one semester, one semester away. Yeah, I was actually six classes down, because a couple times during the undergraduate years I had dropped the class to get by, you know. So I was, yeah, six classes down, yeah. So ended up staying there in Boston for a while, continuing to work at that law firm, and then our relationship, we decided to go separate paths, you know, and I so I ended up coming back to California at that point, and that was 99 I Guess. And I got a job at a Montecito Sequoia resort up in the Kings Canyon Sequoia National Park area teaching cross country skiing because I had had that experience in Middlebury, and I had grown up downhill skiing, but in Middlebury I learned to cross country ski. So, yeah, I taught cross country skiing up there through the winter. And then my dad was teaching Spanish high school Spanish at that time, and he was taking a group of kids to Guatemala to study Spanish. So I quit that job to go to Guatemala with them, and stayed down there for three weeks and learned a little bit of Spanish. And then when I came back, I was

 

Will Bachman  12:04

that an Antigua Guatemala? Yeah? Uh huh, yeah. All right, perfect. Great place. Yeah, we almost crossed paths. I, I went to Antigua Guatemala in 2000 to study Spanish. Oh, okay, what?

 

Scott Cole  12:17

What school? Do you remember the I don’t remember the name of the school, school, but, yeah,

 

Will Bachman  12:23

it was, it was one of those, probably, like the one you went to where you could stay with the family, and then you would stay with the family and get room and board, and you would go to this place where it was one on one lessons, but they had students on these, like tables in a big courtyard, you’d sit across your teacher and you get think 20 or 25 hours a week of classes and room and board for 200 bucks a week.

 

Scott Cole  12:50

Yeah, you could do that for a

 

Will Bachman  12:52

long time. Wow.

 

Scott Cole  12:55

Yeah, that was it was great. I learned so much in such a short period of time. I’ve always kind of dreamed of going back again and doing that.

 

Will Bachman  13:04

Okay, so you’re Guatemala, you go along with your dad and his school group, and you’re learning Spanish, okay? And then I interrupted. You keep going,

 

Scott Cole  13:13

Oh, no, that’s fine. Then I came back and got a job in Oakhurst, here where my where my folks lived, and at a at a restaurant. It’s kind of a high end restaurant called earner earners, elderberry house. And actually, I worked as a doorman there first, and I kind of got fired from that job because I wasn’t didn’t pay enough attention to detail, and that I always wanted to cook, and so the chef and the sous chef were said, Oh yeah, we’ll let you come and, you know, be a prep cook, since I had some knife skills and things from that job at otter Creek bakery and and that turned out to be really fun, because there were a bunch of young chefs From Austria who had gone through apprenticeship program, and this, this job was kind of their first job where they had a lot of freedom and creative freedom. And so I was basically just the prep cook for all these guys. You know, they’d come up with ideas for the menu, and then they’d, they’d say, okay, Scott, you know, should we need a bunch of this chopped up or whatever? And so, yeah, I worked there for about a year, and had a great time. Learned a ton, learned how to make stock, and learned how to make bread and and just, you know, kitchen, kitchen work. And then left there after about a year, because everybody, all the other guys were moving on to different jobs, and so we had kind of a tight knit group, and they changed head chef. And so I got a job making donuts for a summer in Bass Lake, California, where I was having to go to work at like midnight and get off at eight in the morning. And was right next door to a bar. So everybody was just coming out of the bar when I was showing up for work. And so, yeah, I worked. I worked there for for summer, and then after that, I went, moved to Fresno and got a I had an apartment there for like, $300 a month in downtown Fresno, and found a job at a bakery cafe down there, and was kind of like headed up the kitchen there and was making three soups a day and lots of salads and sandwiches. And so I worked there for, oh, probably almost two years, and that was when I finally paid off my college loans, which was a great, great moment. And when that, when that happened, I kind of wanted to reward myself. I decided, Oh, I’m going to quit, and I’m going to spend a summer hiking around the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And so I quit the job and went on a backpacking trip for about a week and by myself. And when I came back, I stopped in at this place. I used to work in high school, a little resort up at Bass Lake, and I used to work on the dock there in high school, and but they were looking for a prep, prep cook there. And so I said, Okay, I’ll help you guys out for the rest of the rest of the summer and and so the rest of that summer, I worked as a prep cook there. And I every night, I would hike up to this fire lookout and sleep there for the night, and then come down and they let me use their shower at their house where they lived. And so yeah, I did that. And then after that summer, I went back to Fresno. I still had my apartment down there, and I got a job

 

Will Bachman  16:46

with sorry, so you in bass lake, there you had, you had no apartment. You were basically sleeping out at the campground and showering at the Yeah.

 

Scott Cole  16:57

Well, I had, I still kept my apartment in Fresno, but I would just go there on the weekends when I was off or whatever, because it was so cheap. But yeah, it was. There’s an abandoned lookout up at it’s called Goat Mountain up above Bass Lake, and it’s like a two mile hike. So I’d go up there every night, watch the sunset and just sleep there and then come down in the morning and go to work. Sounds pretty awesome, actually. Yeah, it was. It was pretty nice. Yeah, spent a lot of time picking blackberries that summer. But then, yeah, then I came back to Fresno and got a job at the UC Cooperative Extension promoting the title of the job was to be promoting school gardening as a way to teach nutrition education. And I was pretty excited about that. But then as as I started the job, I found out that, because it was funded by the USDA, a grant or loan or grant program, yeah, that they had very specific guidelines. And one of the guidelines was that I could not actually do any physical labor or, you know, gardening. I could only try to go out and promote, promote this curriculum, and try to convince teachers to who are already overloaded, you know, trying to teach to the teach you the standards you know, to take on this whole other project of creating a school garden. And so, so I, I did try. I volunteered at one school and and planted a garden there. And they were, they were kind of using it for nutrition education purposes. But then when the garden developed and they had the produce started coming on the plants. Some kids came in in the weekend and pulled up all the plants and threw them on the roof of the school. So that kind of broke my heart, and ended it for me there. And so I left there, and I actually went back to Montecito Sequoia, where I had taught cross country skiing back in 1999 and I worked there through the winter. And then I taught with this group called naturalists at large. They came up one time with a group of students. They would take students out for anywhere from two to two days to a week to different locations in California, and, you know, teach them, teach them the plants and how to go make their way in nature and stuff. And so I did that. And then after the school year ended, after that Job was ending, there were some people that had been working up at Montecito Sequoia, who worked at a place in Denali. It’s called cantishna At the very end of the Denali road. And they were trying to get people to go, go there and work for the summer. So I ended up doing that, going to Alaska for. Summer and working as a hiking guide and naturalist there and and then after that, I ended up meeting someone there who was in graduate school in Michigan. And so we, when we left there, we came back to California and then drove across the country, and she started school at Michigan, and I continued on to Boston and stayed with my friend Ivan rudnicki, who was also in our class, and he was renovating a Victorian house that he and his girlfriend at the time bought that was his grandparents house in Dorchester, and so I stayed with them and helped a little bit with that, and also worked for Pascal, the the gardener that I had worked for right after college in 1993 and and worked for her For that summer and fall, and then got a job after that with the Boston Children’s Museum. They were looking for somebody they were closed for a while and renovating all their exhibits. And so they had a shop in South Boston where they’re working on all those and so I, I worked there for the the rest of that winter. And then, and then, let’s see, Oh, that. Then after that, I went spent the summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with my girlfriend at her parents place. There.

 

Will Bachman  21:37

What year are we up to?

 

Scott Cole  21:38

That would be like 2007

 

Will Bachman  21:43

or something, alright, so you’re now like 37 basically, yeah, uh huh, 37 Upper Peninsula. Girlfriend up in the Upper Peninsula, okay, all right,

 

Scott Cole  21:54

yeah, okay. And then after, after that, Oh, she got a job out in out in Arizona with a Conservation Corps crew, and so she took off for that. And I started driving back across the country to California, and I stopped to visit a friend in Iowa at the maharashi Vedic University there, he was, he was in school there, and and they had a organic greenhouse, organic farm that that provided a lot of the food for the like religious pundits that were affiliated with the college. And they had a crew of Guatemalan workers who were working there. That all, I guess they were all undocumented. And there’s kind of, they told me, there was kind of a, they called them the the taters and the haters, the people that were involved with the school were the meditators, and the people who the like the local yokels from Iowa were the haters, because they didn’t, they didn’t like them. And so anyways, they turned this guy in, and they lost all their crew and and they were looking for somebody to work at the at the organic greenhouse. So me and another guy kind of did all the harvesting and everything for for the rest of the season there, and I was just living camping in the back of my truck, and would go in on the weekends into town and take a shower at the YMCA. And they also had a pond that we could swim in out there. So yeah, I worked there and tell the till the fall, and then continued back on to California, drove rest away, across the country, and I got a job with the Nevada Conservation Corps, on a chainsaw crew, like doing fire reduction work all around Nevada. We’d we’d go out for, I think it was 10 day hitches, and then we’d have six days off, but so we’d camp out and work full days, and I took over the cooking for the crew, since I had cooking experience, and I think we got like an $8 a day per person meal allowance. And so we’d pool it all together and buy as much food as we could. And so I did that for a little while, and then I was getting kind of burned out with that, and I looked on Craigslist and found a job at this place called White Mountain Research Station in the White Mountains of California. And they were looking for a cook and a caretaker. It’s it’s up at 12,000 feet, that’s on the east of the Sierras out of Bishop, California. And so I, I ended up getting that job. And that was, that was a great job. They were, I was, I was a cook, and also taking care of research animals. They had a herd of about 80. Sheep that had to clean the pens and and feed the feed the sheep, and then also cook for anywhere from, you know, two to 30 researchers who happened to be there at the time, they were also doing high altitude research on human it’s a human study where they’re bringing people up from UC San Diego and and test how they their climatization and how it affected them to come up to from sea level to 12,000 feet up there. And so, yeah, that was a that was a seasonal job I would because they closed down for the winter every year. And I did that for about three years, I guess, and and then I started thinking about trying to come back and finish my last six classes, because I had, I, I was always having nightmares that I would wake up in the night and in a cold sweat. You know that I had had all these, had a class that I had completely forgotten to go to all semester, or something like that, which I’ve heard now that’s that’s kind of a common people have that dream all the time, but I thought it was related to not finishing. And so I called, I got in touch with Harvard, and they were having a the financial somebody from the financial aid department was coming out to San Francisco to meet with the the Harvard Club of San Francisco, or at the Harvard Club of San Francisco. And so I decided, oh, I’ll just go and ask them, you know, if they’ve changed their policy, if, if I still would have to pay out of pocket for the whole semester. And so I went to this meeting, and everybody else was asking questions about, like, legacy, you know, for student, for children or relatives or stuff. And and I waited and and I and finally, I got a chance to talk to them right before they right before they were kicking everybody out. And I said, you know, is there any chance I have six classes left? You know, what’s your policy? Is it still the same? I said, you know, my parents had to take out a lot of loans. I had to take out a lot of loans and paid them all back. But, you know, just wanted to see and she said, Well, come see us. And so, so So I I had borrowed a I had ridden my bicycle down to the meeting, and I was I had borrowed some shoes, because I and to try and like, dress up a little bit. And as I was riding away in the rain, I rode past the the where the cars were parked for that place. And, and I noticed that the the financial aid officer was in the car driving out, and I was like, riding along in the soaking rain. And I thought, oh, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe she’ll have pity on me. So I went to, I went to visit and, and they ended up telling me, yeah, we’ll just, we’ll cover it, you know, we’ll pay for your last semester. And, and so I so I went back and was able to finish up. And I lived with my friend, Ivan and in Dorchester and and biked eight miles into school every day, and and took some classes that kind of things that I had always wanted to take when I was there at an undergraduate and, and, and really, I read everything that was assigned, and I did all my papers on time, and, and it was, it was a different, totally different experience. But, you know, it was great to, great to get it done. And so yeah. Then after, after I finally finished, I went back to the White Mountains. I finished. I I finished in the it would have been our 20th reunion year that I that I finished. But unfortunately, I had to miss the reunion because I went back to work at White Mountain to finish up the season there for them. And then after that, that season, things had changed. I had a co worker who we would switch off. She would work one shift and I would work the other. And we had kind of a system worked out, and she ended up leaving to help her, her partner, work on a they had an organic farm down in Big Pine. And so I decided to leave too, and I took this bike trip. I biked across the country with a friend. I think he’s class of 94 Noah Albert. We biked from Big Pine all the way to Virginia, where he was from, and on the Transamerica bike trail, and had an amazing, amazing experience. And then when I got back there, I my friend Ivan rudnicki, was in transition too, and I. So he we decided to bike back, and this is how I bike back across the southern tier route.

 

Will Bachman  30:10

Yeah, it’s like finishing a marathon, like the Boston Marathon. Oh, I think I’ll just run back.

 

Scott Cole  30:17

Yeah, it’s kind of a, I guess it’s kind of a common thing with these experiences, you know, when you have an intense, great, you know, experience, you’re just kind of at a loss of what to do afterwards. So I don’t know, it just had a fit. Plus, I didn’t want to have to ship my bike, so shipping My

 

Will Bachman  30:40

bike was too much trouble, so I decided to bike across.

 

Scott Cole  30:46

Okay, so we ended up back in San Francisco right about Thanksgiving. And of a good a good friend from also from our class, Reuben Margolin, who’s a amazing sculptor. It’s these beautiful mechanical wave sculptures. And he was working on a project, a big wave project called the Helio curve for Hyundai, for for a design show in Milan, Italy. And we helped him out for a little bit there, in in Oakland, in the in the shop, where he was putting it together. And because I had had over the years, I had had a few different chances to work with him on on sculpt sculptures. And also we had a great adventure after, after I dropped out in 93 then I had moved to San Francisco to try and start the theater with Elijah Aaron and Charles Guerrero, and that fell through, but I was hanging out with Reuben, who had a space in a shop there, and he was building this table car called the traveling commons, where he he cut a couple Volkswagens in half and put them, welded them together to a short make, a shorter wheelbase, and then built a table on top. And the goal was to kind of drive this table car around and foster discussions around the around the table. And so we got, he invited me to go on this this table, and we drove it all the way to to Tucson, Arizona, where we ended up staying with a friend of ours from class of 93 Grace fan who was in graduate school there at the time. And and then he went on to do other things with that, and I had to go back to work and make some money. So yeah, I went back and work. So anyways, I I, I’ve worked with him on different sculptures, and so he was working on this one when we got back to, back to Oakland, and so I helped him with that. And then after that, I’ve done a lot of dog sitting and house sitting over the years and and then I, I’ve also worked for a friend that I know from the Nevada Conservation Corps, who’s an arborist in Reno, and they hired they I work for her every once in a while is there they call me the branch manager, because I’m the guy that stays on the ground and drags all the branches that they Cut from when they’re climbing up in the trees. And then I was going to go back to the White Mountains. The new director up there asked me to come back and work up there. But they had kind of changed their whole arrangement. We used to work eight days on six days off, which was, you know, a much better schedule. But then they they switched to a more traditional five and two schedule. And so I moved back to Big Pine to do that, but then just decided I didn’t want to go back up there. And so I ended up living in big pine for a year, and did some volunteer work at at Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp there. And also volunteered at a cafe to start up a cafe grocery store in Independence, California, on the east side and and then I, I also worked for my my friend that had I had worked with up in the White Mountains, her and her husband that had an organic farm. So I worked with them some and and stayed there for about a year. And then Ruben Margolin, I mentioned before, he got a fairly good sized commission to build a wave for somebody in New York. And so he hired me on to help him put together this wave. So I moved to Emeryville and lived in his shop there in Emeryville and worked helped build this incredible sculpture and and then after that, I helped him on another sculpture. That he was building just for it was an idea of his own called the dandelion wave. And during that time, I also did some gig work. I worked for this organization called outstanding in the field that puts on these dinners in on a farm. They’ll just put out outside the put a table and cook a really fancy meal with all the stuff from the farm and serve it there. So I did that, and then I did some volunteer work for this organization called historicor that rehabs historical buildings. And I worked in Death Valley on on a Adobe restoration project where they were restoring this, this adobe wall that had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. And the the group that was doing that work was called cornerstones, and so I ended up getting a job with them. And that was kind of, that was gig work. They would just call me every once in a while when they had another job. So I ended up working in Death Valley a few different times on this particular project. And I also worked in Casa Grande Arizona on another project, and in Joshua Tree on another project. And so that that work that’s still, I’m still in contact with them, but I haven’t done any of those, those Adobe restoration works in in a while. And then after that, I also did a spent a couple summers, house sitting and dog sitting in the mission. Some friends that go to Brazil every summer, they had a great dog that used to like to ride around on my bicycle. So I’d go San Francisco and put it in a basket, and we’d go for rides every day. And even took a little bike trip up the Bodega Bay one time with her. And so then when covid came along, I moved back up here with my parents, and I had a couple jobs here. I did some painting and and renovation work on a house just around here. And then I got a job as a ranch hand on a on a farm, that kind of a hobby farm that was started by the the daughter of a of a famous rock musician who I’m not allowed to say, because I signed a non disclosure agreement. But did that for a while, and then, let’s see. Oh, and then, after covid was was cooling down a little bit, I took a bike trip, another long bike trip. My friends took me up to Eastern, eastern slopes of the Rockies in Canada and dropped me off. And then I rode across the Chilcotin plateau of Canada out to place called Bella Coola, and then took a ferry down to Vancouver Island and biked down Vancouver Island, and was hopping off on some of the Gulf Islands on the way down there, and worked my way down to Washington State, and was exploring some of the San Juan Islands. And then I was visiting a friend in Twisp, Washington, and I was getting kind of I had been done this trip by myself, so I was getting a little burnt out of being on the road by myself for so long and ready for something different. And I got a call from Pascal, the the landscaper that I had worked for in 1993 and she said, we’re having, we’re having trouble finding people to work, and would you be willing to come back and work, and you can stay in the office and live there and for free, and so that, that’s what I’ve been doing now for the last three years. I go every spring, I go and work until June. I usually go March to June and help with the garden, preparing the gardens and spring cleanups, and then, and then I come home here to my folks house and and help out around here. We have a good, good arrangement, and we’re, we have a unique, I don’t know, unique relationship that they’re kind of my best friends, or some of my best friends, that we get along really well, and we enjoy being roommates. So it works out good. We’re I’m here for the the summer, and then I go back for the fall in in Waltham and do the leaf cleanups and and then come back here for the winter. And so that’s, that’s basically the story. That’s what’s happened since Harvard,

 

Will Bachman  39:51

yeah, how do you reflect on these experiences you’ve had? You’ve worked with your hands? More than any other classmate that I know like doing real work, you know, cooking every kind of building sculptures and fixing houses, and reflect on, how do you think about that experience that you’ve had and how different? I mean, it’s very different than most of the folks that are on the show.

 

Scott Cole  40:24

Yeah, I don’t know I, I, I was, I did listen to some of the, some of the interviews, and, you know, just all of my friends from Harvard, at times, I’ve felt kind of like, oh, everybody’s doing things that are so useful to to society, you know, but and I, and I was felt a little, I don’t know, just I felt bad about that, and would kind of get me down. But then I just realized, this is kind of what I’ve had to do. This is, this is who I am, you know, I like, I like working with my hands. I like being active and I can’t, you know, I’m not, I’m not really a leader. I’m not someone who has these great ideas that I like to be in the support, support role and and I love being like, especially, you know, help building these sculptures with Reuben, you know, being able to see this amazing, beautiful thing, and just have a have been a part of it, and, and like when I worked at the research station, it was, it was fun to talk to people about the research, you know, and it’s just, so, yeah, it was, it was just kind of necessity, is what I is what I had to do. But it was also, I kind of looked at it as a way of of continuing an education, a different, a different form of education. I always felt like Harvard was not really a good match for me, because I had dreams of being an intellectual and getting, like, really into academic subjects. But it, it just didn’t. It wasn’t my, my thing, you know, and and I thought, Oh, maybe I would have been better cut out for some kind of a vocational program, but, but yeah, I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything.

 

Will Bachman  42:33

Well, my intuition is that a lot of our classmates will hear your story and would be like thinking to themselves, I couldn’t have done that because I got married and I had kids and I had responsibilities to support them, but that sounds a lot more fun working on a ranch for a year and then biking across the US, like cooking the White Mountains and Having all these incredibly diverse experience living outside, and like a lot of people, probably, you know, envy your experiences in a lot of ways, might not have had the willingness to do it themselves because they felt like needed to live up some of these expectations around like white collar work. But I mean, it sounds like you’ve gotten to really do things that you love doing, and just move around and have a lot of freedom about it too.

 

Scott Cole  43:30

Yeah, that’s true. That’s, I was thinking about that as well, that it’s people can’t, can’t live this life. You know, I’ve made decisions and I’ve given up certain things. You know, I know that there’s tremendous joy and in raising a family and being able to see your children grow and and I have missed that experience. So I feel like I kind of had a responsibility to myself, to to to have all these other experiences, because I had the I had the chance to do it, and I didn’t have a lot of financial responsibility. Or, you know, like

 

Will Bachman  44:13

you said, of all these jobs that you told me about, this 50 plus, how would you spend your off hours? Were you like listening to music or reading or writing letters to people? Or how would you kind of fill up your off hours?

 

Scott Cole  44:32

Yeah, I Well, a lot of time was spent cooking, because I’ve always I I love I love food and I and also gardening. Like when I was on the ranch, I had a one of my best gardens ever. They let me use the tractor to scoop up the horse manure and go out and get decom. Jose from the pile and mix it all up, and had this really incredible garden. And then when I was living in when I went back to school in 97 I had this really nice porch garden at our apartment there in Union Square in Somerville. So yeah, gardening was one of the things that occupied a lot of my time and music. Yeah, I, I still, when I, when I was, got to be in some of those plays at at Harvard. They were one, at least one of them was a musical and, and I’ve always played guitar and and, and I picked up ukulele and banjo and fiddle. So I always have an instrument around that that I’ll pick up and just plunk around on and reading. You know, I was a, I was an English major at Harvard, and I’ve always loved reading. I just, I never really liked to talk about it or write about it, but I loved reading. So it was that that took a lot of my time. And then hiking, you know, just being outdoors, biking, those are big

 

Will Bachman  46:16

in terms of, is there authors or even fictional characters that you kind of identify with. I mean, to some degree, I’m, I’m getting a little bit of a sort of a Jack Kerouac or Alan bird kind of vibe, yeah, sort of lifestyle, yeah.

 

Scott Cole  46:36

Kerouac was huge, and I can’t remember. I didn’t have any classes where I talked about hair back Kerouac, but I did get to see Allen Ginsberg read at Harvard one time at Sanders Theater and and I don’t know if that’s what something sent me off on the whole beat craze, but I I read, yeah, I read on the road, and it just about paralyzed me. I almost quit school right then, when I read it, I think, and I don’t know now, I realize, you know what a lot of people say, that he was, you know, his treatment of women and his alcoholism and stuff, it’s he’s less romantic for me now, but at the time, you know, of course, it was opened up my mind to all these different possibilities and just having life experiences and the value of the value of that.

 

Will Bachman  47:35

Yeah. I mean, sometimes I feel that college is wasted on the young, and you had the experience to go back, you know, bit more mature, and it sounds like you maybe approached it differently, or had a different experience when you were, what 41 or 42 something like that. Yeah. What was that experience like for you? You know, I sometimes feel, Oh, we should go back and take this course of that course, you know. And what was it like for you going back, you know, 20 years later and finishing your degree and taking those courses after all that inner intervening time?

 

Scott Cole  48:16

Yeah, it was. It was really hard. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done of all the jobs I’ve had and everything, just because, you know, I really had to, really had to buckle down. And it was I, because I had been doing all these jobs that just use my hands, you know, I I kind of always seek job. I joke that I always like jobs that, you know, menial labor, repetitive jobs that free up my mind to go wherever I want to go in my mind while I’m doing the job. And when you’re in school, you have to think about, you know, what you’re supposed to think about, and write a write a paper about it. But, and, and also, you know, Harvard, for me, when I was the first time, was such a great social experience, just meeting so many amazing people and enjoying conversations. And you know, that’s I think that’s why I had so much trouble academically, is because I spent so much time, just like talking to people about themselves and what what they were doing, and getting really fascinated with that. But so when I went back, I didn’t have any of that, you know, the the kids, I don’t know what they thought about me, you know, I was old enough to be their father in class. So, right? So I didn’t have any of that social interaction, which, you know, it was good in a way, because it it allowed me to just focus on on getting the work done. And I did a lot of, you know, took some really good classes that had great reading lists, and got to do some things that I always wanted to do as an undergraduate that I never got to do, like take a creative writing, poetry. Class and take the printing class offer at the bow and arrow press and just, you know, things that, things that I like you said, you know, when you get older, you think, oh, gosh, it’d be so fun to go back and do some of these things. So, yeah, I did, like you. Did get to have that experience?

 

Will Bachman  50:20

Tell me about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard in either the 80s, the 90s or 2012 that continue to resonate with you?

 

Scott Cole  50:32

Yeah, I freshman year. I took literature and human suffering with James Engel. It was a English, English class, and I remember just being so blown away by his lectures, because I was listening to your interview with Aaron Shetterly, and he kind of said the same thing about how he had this experience where I forget the I guess it was Stephen Jay Gould, he was talking about, but how they they related all these different academic areas or subjects, and could bring them all together into one, like cohesive thing. And it made me realize, like you don’t have to narrow your focus, that the idea is to kind of, you know, bring all your knowledge together. And he, you know, he was bringing in elements of science and elements of history and philosophy and everything into his lecture. So, yeah, that one really kind of got me excited about, more excited about learning and and the possibilities. But, yeah, that was a good class the first time. And then when I went back in 97 I took a couple classes from visiting professors. One was a Chicano literature course taught by this guy, Hector Calderon, from UCLA. And there was just a really good reading list that I appreciated and and then I took a class called folklore and mythology with another visiting professor, Simon Bronner. And in that class, I can’t remember how it was related, but we talked about these older men who had had, like, factory jobs or manufacturing jobs. And after they retired, they were wanting to do something with their hands, they were and so they started carving these wooden chains, like, take us just a length of wood and carve it into a chain. And I got so excited about that that I actually learned how to do it, and made one myself. That was, that was cool. And then the last time I went back, like I said, I got to take that creative writing poetry class with Henri Cole, which was great. Had to write a poem every week, which, I mean, all my poems were not very good because I hadn’t done any writing over the years. But it was just fun to have to do that exercise every week and then memorize a poem every week, and then I took, I took that printing class at the bow and arrow press, which was something I had wanted to do since I think freshman year. I remember having a conversation with our classmate, Kevin young about he was in that class and and thinking, oh man, I’d love to take that class. And then it just kind of went off my radar, and then I was able to do it that that last in summer school that year when I graduated, and then I took a good class with Stephanie Burt about place I forget what the name of the course was, yeah, uh huh. He’s our classmate was, yeah, yeah. And, and she let me write my final paper on on the White Mountains where I worked, which was great, because there was this. We had a big, long paper. Oh, it’s called split place, space and region was the name of the class, and we had a really good reading list and, and so yeah, she let me write that paper at the end, which was kind of fun. That was a good experience, too.

 

Will Bachman  54:18

Yeah. Have you ever thought about writing about your experiences, writing an autobiography such a distinctive story? Yeah.

 

Scott Cole  54:31

I mean, yeah. People say that a lot like, oh, you should write about all these experiences, and I just making the list of all the jobs kind of was fun. It’s hard for me to sit down and focus like that, but I was thinking, Oh, it’d be kind of fun just to flesh out all these different different experiences and try to remember, you know, poignant stories or you. Things about them that might might be interesting to other people. To me, having lived it, I guess it’s not as it doesn’t seem that that interesting, you know, because, just because it was my life, and it was what I felt like I had to do at the time, or whatever.

 

Will Bachman  55:13

But one thing that strikes me about your story is it seems, at least to me, like you’ve really somehow kept in touch with people, because there’s been several cases where people that you worked with, like right after college, they call you back in and so it seems that you clearly have been leaving on good terms and staying in touch with people, and have this kind of national network of people who might call you at any time that you’re free to go cook for a few weeks or go watch the research station or sit their dogs or or whatever, right? Like it’s, it seems like you kind of keep in touch.

 

Scott Cole  55:56

Yeah, I have, in a way. But then, on the other hand, there’s a lot of people that I’ve lost touch with that I really regret, and so I don’t know this. That’s why I like your your project, because, you know, you said the goal is to kind of create connectivity between people, and it’s just thinking about all this, all these experiences and the time has made me think of, oh, you know, I should reach out to some of these people who are very important part of my life and help me through difficult times. And, you know, but, yeah, I am grateful for the friends that I friends that I have, that you know, have given me work, or allowed me to crash on their couch for a while, or gone to share some of these experiences with me that are more meaningful when you share them with somebody else. And so yeah.

 

Will Bachman  56:54

Well, Scott, thank you so much for joining for for listeners who want to follow up with you. Is there any place you would point them online is the best place to find out your latest adventure and how to get in touch with you.

 

Scott Cole  57:09

Yeah, I my email, but maybe I just won’t say you don’t. People don’t usually share their their email here, but I’m, I am on LinkedIn. I guess I’m not very active there, but I’m, I’m there. And then also, I have, I do have an Instagram that I haven’t posted on since that first bike trip, but it’s, it’s called scooters ride 1969 so I’m there, yeah, all right, and well, we won’t

 

Will Bachman  57:41

give out your email, but if a classmate wants to get in touch with Scott, you can email me and I’ll forward it to Scott so that he can reply.

 

Scott Cole  57:50

Yeah, that’d be great, Scott.

 

Will Bachman  57:52

Thank you so much for joining this was so amazing to hear about your adventures, and I really, really appreciate you sharing your journey.

 

Scott Cole  58:02

Okay, thanks. Will I enjoyed it too? I want to hear I want to hear your interview. At some point I need to know more about your journey. Are you planning a

 

Will Bachman  58:14

stay tuned. Bye.