In 1991, Don Snyder '72 lost his teaching job at Colgate University. His subsequent descent into a hell of
manic indulgence and self-deception that nearly tore his family apart and the
reclamation of his soul is the subject of The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job
Lost and a Life Found.The power of The Cliff Walk is its gruesome honesty. Snyder confesses to a
litany of bizarre, pathetic actions, the worst of which involves soliciting
buyers for his wife's unborn child without her knowledge. Yet even as he
relates his degeneration into a misanthropic heel, Snyder's refusal to make
excuses for his behavior gives the book its moral grounding. If redemption is
to be secured, he seems to be saying, sins must be well documented.Snyder first believes his dismissal from Colgate is a mistake and then deludes
himself into believing that his departure merely signals an opportunity for a
better, more prestigious job at another school. When rejection notices begin
arriving by the dozen, he holds on to his arrogance with anger. He sniffs at
suggestions that he find temporary work to hold him over, and when a man who
owns a cleaning service offers him a job, Snyder thinks, "Do I look like a
janitor, pal?" The downward spiral begins shortly after he moves his family back to Maine,
where they are closer to relatives. Bereft of prospects, disbelieving his fate,
Snyder thumbs his nose at the situation confronting him and acts out every
reckless impulse. He spends money lavishly despite his family's shrinking
savings and lack of income. He cynically exploits past friendships to try to
wheedle his way into unadvertised jobs and makes a surreptitious trip to Ohio
hoping that a former student can arrange a new car for him from her father's
auto dealership.The man Snyder describes is selfish and self-pitying, a Baby Boomer whiner who
wants to cut in line to get another chance when denied the lifestyle he
believes he deserves. And yet, ultimately, he finds in himself the quality that
early on he ascribes to men of earlier generations, a willingness to do what is
necessary to feed his family and keep it together. He gains a little traction first by taking a job as a golf course
groundskeeper, but his wife, Colleen, finally pushes Snyder to understand his
own denial and come to terms with his snobbery. "I think you look down on
people who just do regular jobs so they can pay their way," she says.Throughout the book, Colleen serves as a counterweight to Snyder, exhibiting a
stoic determination to raise her family with dignity regardless of their
circumstances. And to Snyder's everlasting credit, she, not he, is the hero of
The Cliff Walk.Finally, Snyder snaps out of his funk. He is hired by a contractor to help
with simple carpentry, then over the course of a brutal Maine winter, during
which he spends long days performing menial jobs, he finds that admiration has
replaced his contempt for working people. "Until this winter," he writes, "I
always thought that there would be a slot for me at the top, far from guys with
mud on their faces, and I had really always thought that I was a little better
than these guys and entitled to a life that was more celebrated and easier, a
life that eventually reached a point where the struggle to make ends meet
subsided."
By the end of the book, Snyder has established himself as a house painter and
reclaimed a measure of self-respect. Describing himself in the final chapter,
he says, "I'm just a man who paints houses for a living, and who pays his own
way through this world, and who takes care of his family and fears for his
children's future and doesn't try to become something else and doesn't judge
others, and who lays down his tax money willingly because he can afford to help
people who can't find their own way."Snyder says he had no intention of writing a book even after he published an
article about his experiences in Harper's magazine in 1995. "I thought then and
I still think it's a very small story," he said. "When you consider that so
many people in this country have gone through much harder times than what we
went through, I'm still amazed that the book has gotten so much attention."The truth is, I felt terribly embarrassed about writing this book because if
I had been a plumber or an electrician who went through this, my story never
would have been told," Snyder said. He says profiting from his story is
"inexcusable" without a totally honest depiction. "The only way to redeem the
book was to be honest enough that others who had gone through similar problems
could find solace from the shared experience."Snyder has accepted a part-time teaching job at the University of Maine at
Farmington and continues to work as a house painter and construction worker.
"If I stay grounded in that way, hopefully the lessons I have learned won't be
lost. I will never think of myself the way that I did before," he said.Perhaps the greatest lesson he has learned, he says, is that a life should not
be measured by one's work but by "the small, private moments" that go into
making a home. "When my life came to a dead stop I was forced to live in the
present tense, which is exactly where my four small children live every day.
All of the tender moments in the book between the children and me would have
gone right over my head if I had been cruising along," he said. In The Cliff Walk, Snyder points out where human worthiness resides. Near the
end of the book, Snyder's son, Jack, visits a summer cottage where Snyder is
laying an attic floor. When Jack looks down through the ceiling into a closet
he notices expensive tennis and golf equipment owned by the wealthy owner of
the home. Snyder, who accepted the job at the half-rate of $7.50 per hour
because the family needed the money, asks the boy, "Do you wish I were him?""Nope," the boy replies, "but I wish I was you.""Why?" asks Snyder."Because you've got blood all over your face."
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