I couldn’t be bothered with this. I just turned over my surgical records to my mother and Molly. My hand and finger wrestling injuries were so numerous, but they were minor; they were a nuisance, but they lacked gravitas. Whereas my concern for the snowshoer, my fear about his dressing as a woman—this preoccupied my thoughts, this was serious. And Mr. Barlow had a plan to bring me home from Pittsburgh.

Ever my champion, Elliot Barlow was still helping me with my homework. He was trying to make my coming home to New Hampshire not feel like a defeat. “Your mom and Molly will be happy to have you closer to them,” the snowshoer wrote. The clincher was that Elliot managed to make me feel I could be a writer before I was one. The little English teacher gave me confidence in my future as a writer, when all I’d written were unending works in progress.

I was barely a beginner as a writer. I was too immature as an artist to understand how Rilke could connect “works of art” to “an infinite loneliness.” I didn’t get it, not yet. But Elliot Barlow knew I’d read Graham Greene, if not Rilke, and the snowshoer knew which passage from The End of the Affair would resonate with me—a passage that gives confidence to all writers with unending works in progress, a passage that resonates with me still.

“So much of a novelist’s writing,” Greene wrote, “takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.”

“Buoyed up by that coffin,” Ishmael tells us in the Epilogue to Moby-Dick—when Queequeg’s “coffin life-buoy” rises from the sea to save him. Thus did the snowshoer offer me the academic equivalent of Queequeg’s coffin—a way to go home and work at being a writer. In those days, the University of New Hampshire didn’t have a wrestling team, but I didn’t need to compete to keep wrestling. If you’re in a wrestling room, you can always find a workout partner.