Back to School: The Sul Ross Desk

0:00If I think back to my college years, and yes, okay, it was a while back, this was a familiar pattern for me. I'd be in the library trying to write an essay or something, and the clock would just be ticking by, and I wouldn't be getting anything done, and I could not focus. And then I would notice someone like blowing their nose next to me a couple tables over, and then I wouldn't be able to stop hearing it. And oh my god, if that person wasn't here, blowing their nose and distracting me, I could really get some work done. I think we all experience that moment when you're studying, and you're like, I know I have to keep studying, but I would give anything to be anywhere else right now. This is Victoria Contreras. She's an archivist at Sol Ross State University in Alpine, Texas. Victoria spends a lot of time at the library. It is after all. Her job. But at her university, there's actually another place you can go if you hit a studying wall

1:01like this. It's not at a library. In fact, it's not even indoors. It's only like two miles there and back, and most of it is a very kind of like laid-back hike up there. Alpine, Texas is an area basically surrounded by hills and mountains. So yes, we are going up one of them. There is apparently one section that's a little dodgy. So, hopefully everyone like warns you when you're like, oh, you're going up there, keep a night. Don't worry. At the top of this hill, you will be rewarded. You will have this amazing view. The land just stretches out forever all around you. Sometimes it looks dry and yellow like desert, and other times it's lush and green and full of flowers after rain. In the distance, there's the hills and the mountains and the sky is just huge and beautiful.

2:03And there's also something else here. Solitude and quiet. Should you want to take advantage of this and really get some good thinking done? There's also a desk here. Yes, a clunky dorm room metal desk with a plastic dorm room chair right on top of this hill. I'm Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange incredible and wondrous places. For centuries, monks, hermits and philosophers have retreated to the wilderness to do their deepest thinking. That tradition continues today in Alpine, Texas at Sol Ross State University with a desk and a chair stolen from a nearby dorm room put on top of a mountain. That story after this.

3:16I was imagining like a middle of the night, caffeine and deuce, like, you know what? All of us just lift this desk, we're taking this desk up there and we'll study up there. Here's Victoria Contreras again. One of her jobs as an archivist at Sol Ross State University is to be the keeper of the Sol Ross desk notebooks. That is a collection of all of the notebooks that visitors to the mountaintop desk have filled up over the last 40 years. We will get to that in a minute, but first, you might be wondering how this desk got on top of a mountain in the first place. I had like this imagined version of why I was up there and how I was up there and it was nothing like that at all, which almost just quite in me, but not really. But it was actually a little bit more... The story starts with a kid named Jim, who ran track.

4:17Jim Kitchens. The year was 1981. And he loved running up that hill over and over and over again a few times a week even. And he just loved being up there clearing the trails. He had a job on campus going through like discarded furniture from the dorms and like taking care of that. So at one point, he just kind of pieced the two together and it would be really cool to have a desk on top of the hill. Unfortunately, he tried taking it by himself and it didn't quite work. So he commonered a couple of his friends and the three of them in the middle of the night because they were scared of getting caught, like stealing a desk and taking... Even though it was a discarded desk, but still. And yeah, sure enough, like just in the middle of the night, they decided to trek up the mountain, bring a pretty decent sized desk up there. Once the desk was placed, Jim put a notebook in it.

5:18He liked to use this notebook to keep track of his run times and the distances that he covered when he was out training and soon his friends on the track team found out about it. And then they started using the notebook too. I can just imagine like little like run times or like just a little back and forth of quipits. But at some point the word got out outside of the track team and then more and more people started using the desk. But then it organically just kind of blew up from there and it was all over campus and soon all over town and has kind of taken a life of its own sense. Once more people started using the desk, the notebooks expanded from just run times and little notes between the track team to a little bit of everything. Confessions, thoughts, peoples names or initials, drawings, all kinds of things. And then after that first notebook filled up, someone put another notebook in the desk

6:22and then that notebook filled up and so on and so on and so on. In fact, the desk has been regularly generating notebooks for the last 40 years. And today many of those notebooks live in the library at the university. We have approximately about 60 of them. Notebooks are very sizes of course and like folders with like loose leaf papers or just things that people dropped off and left there. So what do people write? What kinds of things come to mind when you are absolutely alone on the top of a hill overlooking the desert? Where everyone and everything feels miles away. Some of it is very contemplative and some of it is very long. Like we've, I've seen some that are like a couple pages long. I was like how long were you up there? And beautiful drawings and sketches and poetry that I don't know if they prepared ahead

7:22of time and then just transcribed or came up with while they were sitting at the desk. That's the beauty of it. Every ascent along some scans of a notebook from 1992 and looking at it almost reminds me of being in a bathroom stall at a dive bar where they're just writing everywhere, spread out all over the place. And same in the notebook, people do not stick to the lines. They just cover every page. Across one page is a big and arki symbol. Punk rock and hardcore rule. It says country sucks. One of the cutest ones is like all of our loves Leo. And then like in completely different handwriting next to it, it's like Leo loves all of her. So they might have hacked up their together. They might have just accidentally like bumped into because it was early on in the notebooks. Another entry is squished across one corner. It seems to be apparent going hiking with their son. Tyler Barrow is here and he walked most of the way himself in like giant proud letters

8:25and underlying and like exclamation point. He's two and a half. At first I didn't read that he's two and a half. So I thought it was like one of the other ones where it's like, where do I go? Why did we come here? Like there's a few of those. We're happy in the notebooks. Someone who ended up crossing their name out wrote kind of a long note dated December 30, 1992. Seven PM, it starts off. It's dark by gosh. And it's still great. Really nice night if not too cold. And then they drew a little picture of what the moon looks like. Nice to look at all the Christmas lights. So empty with no students. Lost a good buddy this Christmas, Duke the dog. I'll miss him a lot. Hope all have a nice, safe new year. I'll be back if I don't break nothing going down in the dark. There was one that I saw. It did jot it down. Ah, I like to think that this place is all to me and that I don't have to share it.

9:31This one is kind of funny to me because on one hand, maybe the draw of the desk and the notebooks is coming up here to be alone. Maybe it's also writing in the notebook alongside so many other people who are also writing in the notebook jotting down some like little mark that you were there right next to theirs. The main thing was kind of that juxtaposition between that feeling of isolation and feeling of being alone that everyone seems to enjoy and encompass in whatever they write or draw. And the balance of that in turn becoming a shared experience amongst all of them. Like the moment where you're thinking you're the most alone you've ever been, you're actually sharing something with hundreds of thousands of people before you and hundreds

10:32and thousands of people after you. The experience of writing in the notebooks seems to leave a mark on people. Victoria says visitors often come into the archive looking to find notebooks that they may have written in 10 or even 20 years ago. Yeah, they come in as like, I don't remember what it looked like, but it must have been sometime between like 2000 and 2004 or and then I just bring out as like, okay, that date range is here. I hope you find it. A couple of the ones when they do find it, they're like, show the person that they're with. Like, hey, it's like, look what I wrote. And some like, they just kind of smile and like, I guess, have a moment of nostalgia. It also seems like Jim Kitchens, the original place of the desk is still kind of involved in this project. There's no formalized system for the library to go collect the notebooks when they fill

11:34up. People kind of just bring them down on their own when they notice that they're full. And Victoria tells me Jim himself came and hand delivered a full notebook from the desk in 2021. Well, the initial placing of the desk happened under the cover of darkness and was probably against a lot of university rules. Victoria says she doesn't believe Jim ever got in trouble for putting the desk up there. That's good. And in fact, now 40 years on, the desk and its notebooks have become a tradition at the university. The current notebook, it's actually really nice because it was taken up there by our most recent freshmen as like one of their welcome activities as they went on a hike up to the desk and brought their own like notebook and like that group of freshmen signed the notebook all together. It's a warm fussy. And in the age of like having constantly like our cell phones with us, people are still

12:37actively and frequently going up there to completely just detach, sit on the desk and write whatever comes to their mind. And it's beautiful to see how that humanity hasn't changed over the last 30, 40 years. You can find more information about the desk and the archives online. We will post a link in our episode description. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Dylan Thuris, Doug Baldinger, Chris Snaka, Camille

13:40Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manola Morales, Votolaire, Gabby Gladney, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luce Fleming. Our theme and end credit music is by Sam Tindall. And if you like our show, give us a good review and rating wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to follow us so you never miss an episode. I'm Amanda McGowan, wishing you all the wonder in the world. I'll see you next time.