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to West Point for $100.
    â€œWest Point? A hundred bucks? Sure, man,” the driver said. “Where’s West Point?”
    Caswell said he couldn’t read a map in a moving car without throwing up, and Lee Hall couldn’t comfortably fit in the front seat; the meter crowded him (Lee had to cut a lot of weight to weigh 177 pounds). Therefore, I was our navigator—I sat up front with the driver.
    â€œYou just go up the Hudson,” I told him.
    â€œSure, man,” he said. “Up the
what?”
    I have flown nonstop from New York to Tokyo; I have driven nonstop from Iowa City to Exeter, New Hampshire. But that trip up the Hudson was the longest of my life. Didn’t the Dutch explore the Hudson in boats? Not even in a boat could we have made worse time.
    In the first place, the only map was a map of Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. In the second place, as soon as the city lights were gone, our driver informed us that he was afraid of the dark.
    â€œI never drove in the dark before,” he whimpered. “Not
dis
dark!”
    We inched along. It began to sleet. It seemed that only back roads led to West Point—at least they were the only roads we found.
    â€œI never seen so many trees,” our driver said. “Not
dis
many!”
    If our taxi driver was terrified of the dark, and of the unusual number of trees, the soldiers who were dressed to kill—and who guarded the formidable entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point (I presume they were M.P.s)—were his undoing. The Military Police were not expecting the predawn arrival of three wrestlers from Pittsburgh; the other wrestlers had long ago arrived—the soldiers presumed they’d gone to bed. However, it was not necessary to open our gym bags in order to verify that we were wrestlers; it was only necessary for the M.P.s to get a look at Lee Hall.
    It was then a matter of deciding on the whereabouts of our barracks. Where were all the other wrestlers sleeping? The soldiers at the gate, intimidating though they were, were not brave enough to call the Army wrestling coach and ask him where we were to be sheltered—it was about 4:00 A.M. , only three hours to weigh-ins. Lee Hall and Caswell knew what I was thinking when I suggested to the soldiers that we sleep in the gym. I explained that the mats were usually rolled out the night before; that way the mats are lying flat by the time of competition—you don’t have to tape the corners to the floor. We could sleep on the mats, I offered—we didn’t mind.
    Lee Hall and Caswell knew that I was thinking of the
scales
, not the mats—I couldn’t have cared less about the mats, or sleeping. We had three hours before weigh-ins and we hadn’t been able to check our weight since we left Pittsburgh. If I was a half-pound over, I needed to sweat; I’d been a pound and a half over when we left Pittsburgh. I’d eaten nothing, and I’d had nothing to drink; usually, if I was a pound and a half over in the afternoon before a morning weigh-in, I could drink eight ounces of water and still lose the weight in my sleep. I hadn’t slept or had my usual eight ounces of water, but I was dying to get on the scales, to be sure.
    The M.P.s didn’t think that letting us into the gym was a good idea. There was a barracks somewhere for visiting teams; the soldiers sounded more or less sure of this, although they weren’t sure which barracks it was.
    Lee Hall confided to me that he thought we should go somewhere warm and “just run.” That way we’d at least be losing weight. And how much sleep would we get before weigh-ins, anyway? I agreed with Lee.
    Caswell looked remarkably well rested; he’d slept the whole way from Manhattan and was now viewing the austere buildings of the military academy with the eagerness of a child who’d just arrived at an amusement park—apparently Caswell