Remembering Bill

Email by Jay Stroud from Holderness School and later headmaster of Tabor Academy sent to Bill’s son Bob Jul 16, 2012

Tribute by Jay Stroud from Holderness School and later headmaster of Tabor Academy sent to Bill’s son Bob: Two days before learning of your father’s death through Phil Peck at Holderness,

I had been walking with my spouse Leslie on a section of the Appalachian train near our house in Vermont. She asked me if I had ever known anybody who hiked the whole trail. No, I responded – but, then I said – but if I had ever known anybody, it would have been Bill Biddle. Then, for about a mile along the trail, I told her of my friendship with your dad and of many of our adventures both outdoors and in while at Holderness. Your parents came to Holderness in 1968 and I arrived three years later. So, we overlapped for almost their entire tenure at the school. Your dad was one of the most fundamentally good people I have ever known. I was deeply saddened to learn of his passing. I assume he must have been ill for some time. He was such a vital personality – both spiritually and physically – one has a difficult time thinking death could have taken him easily much before a hundred. One of the stories I told Leslie was of a Chapel speech your dad gave called – as I remember it – “Books and The Oxalis Principle.” Your dad had read in a trail guide someplace that leaves of the plant oxalis would remove pine pitch from your hands. He was leading some kind of group into the woods and recalled this story. Boldly, as he told he, he saw some oxalis growing by the side of the trail [he recognized it] and then went to a pine tree and smeared his hands with pine pitch. While the group waited with great expectation for this monumental display of arcane woodslore, your dad proceed – as he tells the story – to rub his palms with the leaves. Nothing happens except the leaves shred and then become embedded in a piney mess on his hands. The idea, he says, is to test what you learn in books with the hot breath of reality. Of course, what your dad didn’t say, was that it was truly a wonderful lesson in not taking yourself too seriously. He made the “mistake” of experimenting while leading – but what he really did was assure a bunch of high school kids in Chapel that it was OK to make mistakes and that if you didn’t puff yourself up you would put them into their proper perspective.

Your dad had a wonderful interest in poetry and liked to recite things by memory. He got me interested in doing the same and I can still call up many of the lines we shared in those days. One of them – a poem called “Reluctance” by Frost comes to mind. I think I can still recite the words though not call up the line divisions. “Out through the fields and the woods and over the walls I have wended. I have climbed the hills of view and looked at the world and descended. I have come by the highway home and, lo, it is ended. The leaves are all dead on the ground save those that the oak is keeping to ravel them, one by one, and let them go scraping and creeping out over crusted snow while others are sleeping. And the dead leaves lie, huddled and still, no longer blown hither and thither. The last lone aster is gone. The flowers of the witch hazel wither. The heart is still aching to seek but the feet question whither. Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason to go with the drift of things. To yield with a grace to reason and bow and accept the end of a love or a season.” Your dad and I talked that poem over in the woods.

One of the things I remember was that I think your dad had a “lovers quarrel” [another Frost line] with the Holderness Outward Bound/Outback Program. I think for him the program was “using” the woods rather than being part of them. I liked his iconoclastic side – at an “outdoors school” – very much.

When he left Holderness and then I did four years later, we fell out of touch. I had known that he had moved to Idaho and was active with the Park Service then I lost touch. I knew that he had gotten remarried.

Your dad left an indelible mark on me – and it was so very very odd that a walk along the Appalachian Trail early this summer called up such a vivid picture of him and a long discussion with someone who didn’t know him – and then, two days later, I learned of his passing.

Please remember me to your siblings and know that your dad really does live within. I am very sorry not to be able to attend his memorial service this weekend. I will go to the top of the trail and look at the sky and woods that day, though, and think about his voice which sounds so very clearly in my mind.