Don J. Snyder | The Cliff Walk

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Snyder's account of temporarily losing his way in life presents a heartrending and inspiring memoir that "confronts the not-so-secret fear that haunts every American who works for a living"

- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In this moving, clear-eyed memoir, the author chronicles his journey from college professor to a day laborer on food stamps, capturing in powerful detail the economic free fall so many middle-class Americans fear and reminding them of the things they so often take for granted.

THE FOLLOWING IS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Without a Parachute - A professor falls from high to low estate, and warns the world.

by Anne Matthews

At 41, Don Snyder thought he had earned the right to an exceptional life. He'd edited a newspaper and published three books. As an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Colgate University, he threw himself into college teaching, volunteering for extra courses, toiling over student recommendations for weeks and hectoring senior colleagues on their lack of literary passion.

But after three years, his contract was not renewed. Mr. Snyder assumed he could move on and up, as he always had -- to Princeton, perhaps, or another of the Ivies. His wife and children would adjust, eventually. But ''when it came to telling Colleen that I had been fired, I could never seem to find the right time, or the right room in our house,'' he recalls. ''There was always her with her lovely pregnant belly and her faith in me, and then there was me with my pink slip.''

Ninety-six rejection letters later, Don Snyder's world had shrunk to the back bedroom of a tiny rented house on the coast of Maine. As savings dwindled, he gulped sleeping pills while Colleen kept their young family afloat with heroic economies. After nearly two years of denial and distress, Mr. Snyder jettisoned his many illusions. Hired first as a greenskeeper, then as a construction laborer, house painter and cottage caretaker for the summer rich, he reluctantly embraced the kind of hard work he had evaded all his life.

''The Cliff Walk'' is Mr. Snyder's first-person account of life after campus. It blends several genres of memoir: the Orwellian literature of class slide, the lament of the disillusioned academic and the downsizing tale of the midlife executive. Like G. J. Meyer's ''Executive Blues'' or Jon Katz's corporate-revenge novel ''Sign Off,'' Mr. Snyder's book is a cautionary fable, a scarred survivor's warning to ''the class of managerial mercenaries of my generation who moved anywhere for money, who called places home when we had no attachment to the land or the people, but where the opportunity for advancement was high.''

Excerpt

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 dismissed this comment. Things had gone so well for me for so long that I didn't see I was standing right next to him on a dividing line between how you imagine your life will turn out and how it actually does. After spending my whole grown-up life shaking hands, making promises, and smiling at the right people in order to be liked and to get ahead, to stay ahead and never slip, I was a man who had forgotten how lucky he was.

It was early March of 1992, I was forty-one, married, with three children under seven years old and a fourth due in June. We were living an unhurried life in upstate New York, in a small town in a big house on easy street where we paid our way each month without much sweat.

This was pretty much the same safe and privileged life I had known from the time I left behind the rattrap apartments of my childhood in Bangor, Maine, for a classy private college on a football scholarship and then graduate school on a big fat fellowship I don't remember even being grateful for. I was in the passing lane, leaving behind my uncles, grandfathers, and cousins who lived out their lives as low-wage, no-ambition, Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights, two weeks off a year, classic American working stiffs. They were nice enough guys but guys who were going nowhere. As soon as I was old enough to see how the world worked I began working hard to get enough velocity in my own life to escape theirs like a man fleeing a fire.

I never looked back. I went from one promising job to the next. Even when I had a good job I was airways looking for a better one, and sometimes I would take job interviews just for the chance to see what I was worth to a stranger and to listen to him tell me how marvelous I was. I had quit a good job at the University of Maine, where I was completely happy, to take a job in the Department of English at Colgate University for more money than the combined income of both of my uncles when they retired. At the time there was that goofy commercial on television where a handsome Irishman goes dashing across an impossibly green field, smiling like a politician because he's so happy with his new deodorant soap. It could have been filmed on the Colgate University campus, where the lawns and the playing fields were as lush and green as Ireland when we arrived in late-August 1989. My students affectionately called the place Camp Colgate and the Colgate Country Club, and told me that they had chosen this over other schools because of the university's ski slopes, which I could see from my office window, or the squash courts and beautiful indoor tennis courts, or the award-winning eighteen-hole golf course and the trap-shooting range that were a short bike ride from campus, or because the university was ranked academically among the top twenty in the country for getting students into law school, or because Colgate had been celebrated as one of the nation's best party schools, based upon its per capita consumption of alcohol.

My own reason for choosing Colgate was no more substantial: it was right up there with the Ivy League schools, maybe not quite an Ivy League school, but definitely just one step, one job away. There was also a long list of irresistible perks that included several thousand dollars to order any books I wished for the library; a retreat on Lake Saranac where we could spend weekends as a family and have out meals prepared for us; a low-interest loan for the purchase of a house in town a few blocks from campus; a gift of three grand for a summer project, plus paid student research assistants if I needed them; generous health, dental, and life insurance plans; a marvelous retirement pension plan that would multiply like cells dividing; free tuition for my wife to take courses toward her master's in education and for my four children to attend any college in America; a discount in the campus bookstore; a new Macintosh computer system; a paid sabbatical leave after three years of teaching; and most of all, time. Five weeks off at Christmas, ten days off during spring break, three months in the summer. This amounted to roughly eighteen weeks of paid vacation per year. Plus an additional ten weeks if you added up my two free days each work week of the academic year.

It was a dream. My full teaching load was nine hours a week in the classroom first semester, six the second. There had never been a violent crime in town. We bought a six-bedroom house on a tree-lined street a few blocks from campus and the elementary school. In contrast to the nonacademic residents of town, most of whom earned little more than the minimum wage, my faculty salary enabled us to live like royalty, and Colleen was able to fulfill her long-standing desire to stay at home with our children.

That first winter it snowed every day in December but two, and the campus was transformed into a wonderland. We pulled the kids all over town on their sleds, and got them up on skis. Colleen taught them her fine technique for making angels in the snow. Once when I turned my head from a department meeting on the third floor of Lawrence Hall to glance out the window, I saw my whole family down in the quad putting the finishing touches on a giant snowman. It made me feel that our life was charmed.

I remember the nights best. They were so magnificently cold and bright that Colleen and I often stood outside looking up at the stars before we went to bed. The only tension between us in those days was the result of my wife's honesty. A true Maine woman, she felt no need to try and impress anyone. I was in the faculty lounge schmoozing the feminists in the department one morning when Colleen appeared with the kids. They got to talking and when one of my colleagues related how she had gone straight back to work after her baby was born because she didn't feature spending her days at home changing diapers, Colleen coolly announced that on the worst days there were maybe ten diapers and each took no longer than a minute and a half to change. The feminists looked at her like she was quaint or exotic, and when we were alone I cautioned Colleen that someday I might need letters of recommendation from these women in order to grab a better job at a much better school.

The best part about the job by far was my students. They were so pleasant and eager to please that I went the extra mile, taking on more of them as my advisees than anyone else in the department, inviting them to our house for dinner and movies, and teaching literature with a no-holds-barred passion that made my classes some of the most popular on campus. That wasn't hard, really, because these were the days in academia when most professors droned on about preposterous literary theories while their students fought bravely against sleep. I was well paid for my efforts and nominated every spring for "Professor of the Year" by the Student Honor Society, which sent me beautiful letters extolling my devotion to bringing literature to life for students.

In fact I received another one of those letters in March of 1992, my third year, the same day the dean of faculty wrote to inform me that I was being fired.

The following excerpt was taken from The New York Times website. Click here to read more.

REVIEWS

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

"An achingly lyrical memoir...I marked paragraphs to read aloud, to share to others, on almost every page."

THE LIBRARY JOURNAL

"Snyder's book is timely. Highly recommended for general collections."

BOOKLIST

"Several years ago, G. J. Meyer wrote a dramatic personal account of being unemployed titled Executive Blues (1995), which was featured in Harper's magazine prior to publication. Meyer's story was told from the point of view of a corporate vice president who had been downsized after 38 years of work. Like Meyer's, Snyder's tale has appeared in Harper's, as the November 1995 cover story; Snyder, however, is from a different generation than Meyer, and an admitted "classic" baby boomer who took everything for granted. He is the author of two novels and a biography, A Soldier's Disgrace (1987), which attempts to clear the name of a U.S. officer charged with collaboration during the Korean War. At the age of 40, Snyder lost his job teaching college English after he failed to gain tenure. From there, he lost his home, depended on food stamps, and took a series of construction and part-time jobs. Snyder's moving memoir, with prose that flows like a novel, traces his journey from self-pity to self-discovery. "

AMAZON.COM

"This book might have been preachy or self-indulgent. It is neither."

Back Bay Books | 272 pages | ISBN 978-0316803489 | July 20, 1998

THE CLIFF WALK

A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found

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