The desert was decreed to the men. That is why, in my eleventh and final term at Deep Springs, I was called a dairy boy when it was my job to wake up at four to milk the cows at four thirty and do the same thing in the afternoon. The cart we (Trey and I, another member of my class) pushed down to the barn in the dark early morning was the longest-lasting vehicle on campus—constructed some time in the forties, with two mismatched tires and an old DC license plate hanging on with the help of rusted baling wire. The dairy barn is the oldest structure on campus built, yes, by the men and for the men, but really for the persistently female cows, who lumbered in to meet us and eat the grain that we’d put out for them as we prepped their teats for milking. After, as we pushed the cart with a shotgun full of milk back towards the main campus, made, again, by the men and for the men, it was easy to forget what others call me, what I call myself, in the early dawn and majesty of the lighted desert. But that truth lingered in the morning air: it was for the men, this education in that rock over there, this project of reverence.
Deep Springs College was founded in 1917 by L.L. Nunn, an entrepreneur who believed higher education had fundamentally misunderstood its own purpose. He found a small valley in California, bought the ranch and much of the land, hired professors, ranch and farm managers, and sent the first class of seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen year olds—DS ’17—to build what buildings needed to be constructed. DS ’17 did so while running the ranch, attending classes, and practicing self-governance—a word I am wary to use because I know modern readers will misunderstand, so please imagine you are an ancient Athenian for the time being. DS ’18 joined them a year later, and then, when most members of DS ’17 had left, DS ’19 arrived. A language developed: first and second-years, pillars and ground rules, and with it, a school began to grow roots.
By 1923, Nunn felt death approaching and knew it was time to hand off power to his trustees. The Deed of Trust dictated the terms by which the college would continue to exist, which, Nunn insisted, must strive against the solipsism of conventional post-secondary education and instead educate “in a manner emphasizing the need and opportunity for unselfish service in uplifting mankind from materialism to idealism.” It stated, also, that Deep Springs was “for the education of promising young men.”
Some time in the 50s, a class of second-years decided to prank their first-years. They told them about the Eureka Valley Girls School, the all-women’s college in the neighboring valley to Deep Springs. The all-male class told their sons the supposed mailing address, that they had hiked over recently and that the women were excited to write them. For the next few months, the younger class sent and received letters from the women of the opposing valley. The girls wrote about how they drove their herd expertly, smashing all fears that women couldn’t work cattle, about their pigs and their civil student body meetings. The boys talked about wearing dresses and the student adherent of Nietzsche who decided to tackle anyone he disagreed with, be it in class, labor, or committee meetings; about what it took to touch but still resist barbarity.
The boys fell in love. Finally, the first-years convinced the women to come visit them; and this was a great performance. They came at night, down highway 168 they came, their shod horses clicking on the newly established pavement. They wore white dresses, ethereal in the moonlight; I imagine that there was a slight breeze, such that their dresses billowed out gently beneath them, I imagine they all were blonde, and their hair appeared as gold. The first-years stood at the cattle guard, flowers in hand to give to their long-distance lovers. They would have been all alone in the cool air of the valley, looking out at the mountains shrouded in darkness, holding their breaths to make way for the quiet to be interrupted only by the coming clip-clopping.
At some distance, then, they must have recognized the horses as their own; the dresses as sheets left over in the bonepile; the blonde hair as wigs. And as their second-years jumped down from their horses, their barely placed disguises must have fallen off of them like skin during the slaughter, and the first-years must have realized their upperclassmen had been their correspondents for all of those months. I am told Nietzsche did not know what to do, that the realization that there were no women and never had been tore his heart out and he did not speak for months.
Like them, we came to spectacle and hushed gasps. But it was not of our own doing: we did not premeditate our own arrival. The first co-ed class came just as every other class had, only that, by 2018, the cars were bigger and the nearest airport was Reno. The rented vehicles clamored into the Main Circle as they always do in early July and fifteen families gave their farewells as they disappeared over the pass. We said nothing besides what one says their first days at Deep Springs: the mountains are beautiful, I am happy to be here, I am here to understand work and forget myself. The writing that had been done about us was not ours, it was theirs—it was decades of debates in the student body about whether or not to become co-ed, enshrined in the archives where all of the minutes for our meetings are kept, it was the countless motions over the decades whose “Be It Resolved” clauses were all the same, it was the victorious scrawl when it passed in 2011, it was the seven years of legalese brought on by the alum who sued because Deep Springs was not for promising young people, it was for promising young men. It was the signature of the California Supreme Court who dismissed the case and it was the hushed writing of the minutes from deliberations about who to admit into DS ’18. These were not our words.
The men were waiting for us with bated breath. The women prayed they were not the fish.
I arrived in 2022, the fifth class of co-ed. Nunn, of course, was wrong: there is nothing gendered about the mountains and the unselfish life we are taught to lead while raising our chickens and caring for this land. Despite its size—no more than fifteen students in a class, and normally less, and a campus of over a hundred square miles for all of us—there is no lone movement at Deep Springs. We work together, in harmony or conflict, with long memories and far-reaching judgements: one does not pass a moment without being recognized. And when the women, no matter how hard they try, are simply not able to lift the same side of beef as the men before them (and we are always before each other), it becomes urgent: I have so much to make up for. A woman comes to Deep Springs to work. We resist every aspect of that ethereal image of those blonde women on horseback: we wear Carhartt like a religion and dirt as a necessity, to fend off old accusations of trickery. The men read; the women read, exhausted. There is no ubermensch, man or woman, the men never got their climax, the women arrived as all others did and we are no different than them.
I was riding out in the Bog Mound one day, a pasture south of the college near the alkali lake at the end of the valley. There were three of us gathering the herd of about two hundred cows, trying to push them through a gate into another pasture. I had split off from the main herd to round up a group drinking from a bog up north. I had thought there were only ten, but a divot in the earth had hidden the forty or so right behind them from view until I was there. I needed help: I screamed louder and louder but they could not hear me, the serene desert was no use to me, I needed help I had no help so I simply moved, still screaming, without any genius. I gathered them and pushed them to the rest of the herd. I never told anyone what happened.
2025