Above it All

Editor’s Note: The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., is an hour-and-a-half south of Nashville on Interstate 24. Its campus is situated atop what is referred to, with some hyperbole, as “The Mountain.” The interstate approach to Sewanee is the steepest grade of federal roadway east of the Mississippi River. However, it does not lead to a mountaintop, in the classic sense. It leads, instead, to the Cumberland Plateau, which is dotted with coves and valleys, waterfalls, springs, and some of the last remaining virgin timber in the state of Tennessee.

Just prior to the Civil War, Nashville started dispatching the sons of its finest families to be educated at this isolated institution. Because of its connections with the Protestant Episcopal Church and its Gothic-style architecture, Sewanee summoned up images of the great English universities; it suggested nobility, serious intellectual pursuit and, most of all, a life of privilege. Nashville still sends many of its privileged sons and daughters to the mountain, but change, inevitably, has brought more diversity to the campus.

Nonetheless, by virtue of its geographic isolation, its close ties to the Episcopal Church and Oxford University, and its long-standing ties to the Agrarian literary movement, Sewanee has developed a unique identity in American higher education. Classes are small. Teachers teach. The basics—the sciences, literature, history, foreign languages—rule. Revisionists might condemn the place as an anachronism. Some have even called it an enclave of racism. Others find it graceful, idyllic, a place of peace in a world of chaos.

Scattered all across Nashville are Sewanee graduates who make their annual pilgrimages to the campus. Some go once a year to throw down a stiff drink at a football game. Others hole up for weeks in a cottage at “The Assembly,” the tiny village-within-a-village that, for well over a century, has provided a patrician retreat from Nashville’s stifling summers.

Jonathan Meiburg was last semester’s editor of Sewanee’s student newspaper, the Sewanee Purple. Jennie Sutton succeeded him in that job this semester. Together, they offer a view of the motionless, yet slowly evolving, life on The Mountain.

Luke's car, 10:30 p.m. Monday

Luke Schrader’s olive-green 1965 Pontiac Catalina is a big car. Three people can fit comfortably in the front seat, with some room left over for a fourth. Tonight, making the trip to the Monteagle Waffle House in Luke’s Pontiac is like taking a cruise on the high seas. Like most other students at Sewanee, Luke taps the roof of his car for luck as he passes through the gates that mark the entrance to The Domain, the 10,000-acre tract of forest owned by the University of the South, the mountaintop bastion of hard-drinking Southern literacy, the sacred training ground of Episcopal priests.

Luke is a junior physics major from Ohio. His head is smooth-shaved, and he has a penchant for the Grateful Dead. Mackenzie Johnson, a freshman from Gainesville, Ga., shuffles through a tape case until she finds a Dave Matthews Band bootleg. “Is this OK?” she asks.

“I can’t see it,” Luke replies. “What is it?”

“It’s Dave.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “That’s cool. Put it on side B.”

Two years earlier, before Dave Matthews was a staple of Rolling Stone, he played Sewanee twice, and students still take pride in his success. But bands come to the Mountain only once every couple of weeks, and places for nighttime entertainment are few and far between. Most of the time, an excursion into Monteagle is about as lively as Sewanee nightlife gets.

The Waffle House is a place to eat, talk—sometimes with the employees—and waste an hour or two; Pop’s Happyland Restaurant and Truck Stop, a little further down Highway 64, is the place to study. On most nights, clusters of Sewanee students with plates of chicken strips and piles of books are camped out there. Pearl’s, a classier restaurant just off the highway, fills the need for a place to go for a dressed-up date, a place to order bourbon-glazed bread pudding as a dessert. Pearl’s has made a killing.

Shenanigans, the perennial favorite hang-out of many students, is a restaurant in the “town.” The lighting is dim, Dead tunes blare from wall speakers, there is a small art gallery, and there are posters, pottery and road signs on the walls. Every night at 9 o’clock, Shenanigan’s turns into a bar. Students in the baseball-cap-khaki-and-flannel-wearing, Range Rover-driving crowd feel the need to put in frequent appearances there. The food, standard lunch and grill fare, is moderately good and a bit over-priced. Shenanigans is packed every night. On the mountain, there is nowhere else much to go.

Students figure any restaurant is a welcome relief from the Sewanee dining halls. In a much-publicized flap last semester, students discovered squirming maggots inside a frozen yogurt machine. Marriott food service representatives were appropriately contrite; one company exec insisted that “a piece of meat had to have been put in there maliciously.” That explanation wasn’t very comforting to most students. The frozen yogurt machine now attracts fewer customers than it used to.