‘Cliff Walk’ Chronicles Life After Downsizing
When he strolls through the wealthy seaside enclave of Prouts Neck, Don J. Snyder can point to a house he painted, one he repaired, another he helped build.
And to a life rebuilt in the process.
Snyder, 46, said he never imagined that dismissal from a cushy college teaching job, descent into prolonged unemployment and redemption through hard, outdoor labor in the depths of a Maine winter had the makings of a book.
He was convinced otherwise by calls from publishers riveted by his 1995 Harper’s magazine piece describing how he hauled debris to the dump and nailed shingles onto the frame of a towering shorefront mansion while icy winds bit at his bones.
The result is “The Cliff Walk,” a book that captures two notable trends of the 1990s: corporate downsizing and the insatiable hunger for memoirs and true confessions.
Snyder and his wife, Colleen, had three children and a fourth on the way when he was fired in 1991 by Colgate University because its English department was top-heavy with tenured English professors.
His initial confidence that he would land another faculty position eroded as he sent out 93 resumes without getting a single interview.
After his dismissal took effect, the Snyders sold their house and moved their family back to Maine, where the couple had grown up. The book recounts Snyder’s struggle with poverty, diminished self-worth and the assumptions about success that had guided his life up to the day he got his pink slip.
He likens himself to Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a man whose sense of worthiness was tied to his work. Disdainful of those back home in Bangor who seemed content in what he saw as dead-end jobs, he prided himself as being different, someone in the fast lane who had “velocity.”
“The velocity - keep moving upward, always better, always bigger,” he said in an interview at the Prouts Neck vacation cottage in which the family spent the winter but must leave before summer sends rents soaring.
The author of a biography of a Korean War POW and nine novels - two of them published - Snyder seems surprised by the buzz surrounding his latest book, which he summarized in The New York Times Magazine.
“It’s not lost on me that the first book of mine that was truly wanted was one in which I portray myself as being a coward and a liar and a fool,” he said.
The Walt Disney Co. has optioned the film rights to his story. If the movie is made, Snyder said, he will be able to buy a house for his family that would provide a room for his ailing father.
He was initially reluctant to expose himself and his family’s adversity to public view in “this talk show age where one person’s misery becomes another person’s entertainment.”
But he was won over by what he calls the “true holiness” of literature, “the solace of shared experience” that allows others to discover themselves in what they read and recognize that their own struggles are not unique.
Snyder also sees his book as testimony to the need to build the minimum wage into a living wage, enabling one spouse to stay home with the children while the other earns enough to pay the bills.
Despite his re-entry into the work force as house painter, writer and - during the past year - as a part-time English teacher at the University of Maine at Farmington, Snyder regards himself as still on probation with those he loves most.
“I have to earn my way back to my wife’s admiration and love, and the same thing with my children. I misbehaved quite terribly during that time, and they look at me a little bit differently than they used to,” he said.
He harbors doubts about whether he would return to teaching, even if a position opens up. The physical strength he regained in his new work painting houses is matched by his satisfaction in being independent and on his own.
xxxx EXCERPTS FROM ‘THE CLIFF WALK’ The Associated Press When word started getting around the university that I’d been fired, a student came up to me after class one morning and gave me the lay of the land. He was a smart kid, sweet, too. He said he was sorry first, then he let me have it. “Man, not another baby boomer out of work,” he said, shaking his head. “Every time one of you guys loses his real job you take the crap jobs at Blockbuster and the mall so I can’t even pick up summer work.”
I began returning to the office at the same time every morning to ask the same woman for the same thing each time - “Work with health insurance for my family, please” - and from the first day I believed that somebody would pick me out of the crowd waiting in lines there and lead me to a desk where the really sweet jobs were handed out to the special people with graduate degrees and a certain refinement. I confided to the woman that I was having nightmares about the kids getting sick. The cheapest insurance policy for a family of six was over six hundred dollars a month, and all I wanted was some kind of work that would place us among the insured. Each day she checked the computer printouts and shook her head. “Nothing yet. I’m sorry.”