I graduated from Barrington Consolidated High School in the spring of 1970. Five friends and I decided we would all meet on Nantucket that June for a reunion. None of us had ever been there. I was inspired by a high school English teacher named Charles White who got me interested in literature. I loved Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and wanted to see the island. I hitchhiked from Barrington, located about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, to Pittsburgh, then to New York and on to Concord, MA, where I camped out at Walden Pond for a few days.