As Monday became Tuesday, the convenience store in Frist Campus Center buzzed with students fueling up with candy bars, Diet Coke and Red Bull. They were just passing through on the way to finishing their last papers of the term. Bob Logan, sitting behind the cash register, went unnoticed.
Though by closing time at two he had sat there for almost eight hours, he too seemed to be just passing through. Or at least, he was trying to just pass through. As he swiped charge cards and counted change, thanking each customer, he really just wanted to focus on the algebra problems he was trying to solve.
Logan, who has worked in Frist for three years, didn't want to be there but knew he had to. He has just begun the slow process of what he hopes will one day bring him a master's degree in plant science, through the tuition assistance the University offers its employees.
For now, the 34-year-old is working on his associate's degree in community college. His life goal is to have a little piece of land somewhere to experiment with plants, and working at the University is the latest in a series of steps he is taking to earn enough money while working toward his passion.
Now, like at other times in his life, it isn't easy.
In the convenience store, his gray Frist shirt tugging around his chest and a baseball cap covering his head, Logan lifted and then dropped a plastic bag below the cash register.
"Sometimes," he said, "it makes me feel like one of these."
Logan was referring to his frustration working at the University. He's in a class of workers called term employees, who work, at minimum, five months a year for half the hours a full-time employee would work. He receives health insurance, but because he's not full time, doesn't have easy access to summer positions at the University. He said he needs to work here over the summer to make enough money.
The employees of this campus — full-time or part-time — all have their own stories. Many are immigrants, traveling far from home to find a better life in America and Princeton. But Logan is at home. He grew up nearby and has lived nearly his whole life minutes from campus.
By studying gardening and botany, Logan is trying to cultivate his own life. His interest might seem mundane, but it is full of meaning for him. He is morally repulsed by the increased use of pesticides in preparing fruits and vegetables and wants to develop unique methods to grow organic produce. He has spent the better part of the past decade-and-a-half trying to make it to a point where he could work on that simple project. But however hard he has tried, from day to day he still has to face the economic pressures that have held him back.
On most nights, Logan hasn't taken a break by midnight, and because of his tough schedule, hasn't eaten since lunch. "It's usually like this," he said one night. "It gets to midnight, and I still haven't eaten dinner. I still haven't had a break to eat anything or even go to the bathroom."
Logan wakes up before 7 a.m. each day to go to class at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, where he's a freshman taking 10 credits of classes in English, math and plant science. He starts work at 6 p.m. three days a week at Frist and stays until 2:30 a.m., getting home a half hour later and usually falling asleep by 4 a.m. That schedule leaves only two or three hours of rest.
"When I get here at six, I'm too late to stop and eat something before work starts," he said. "And by the time I get a break, it's at least midnight. And then I have to think about not eating too much, so it doesn't upset me when I try to fall asleep."
Getting an associate's degree should take only two years, but it will take Logan three. He takes it as his responsibility to pay his own way through classes and daily life. He works 24 hours a week and lives in his parents' house. He can't afford to live on his own; he says he makes about $15.00 per hour.
A round trip
Logan grew up in Hamilton Township, about 10 miles south of Princeton. His mother tended to a small garden throughout his childhood, but he never paid much attention to it. His father and grandfather ran an auto mechanic shop together on Route 1. They were workaholics, on call 10 hours a day, six days a week.
"You have to do what you need to do to succeed. You do your best to make things right," said his father Bob, Sr., now an auto mechanic at the University.
But the son didn't feel a calling to work alongside them. Graduating from high school in 1988, he studied computer repair and electronics for two-and-a-half years in technical school. He held a range of related jobs in Central New Jersey, but still spent a lot of time with his family. The money was good, but he didn't feel inspired by his craft, and so he sought another one.
He learned to be a butcher and worked in several New Jersey supermarkets, cutting steaks and roasts. He enjoyed cooking. In the mid-1990s, he started to work with his mother on her garden and began to grow herbs to add flavor to his cooking.
Logan heard about an opportunity to work as a butcher in the Caribbean, and he was attracted by it. Having endured enough seasonal variation in New Jersey, he was ready for a warm climate and curious about what it might mean for his gardening. He moved to Bermuda in December 1998.
The experience didn't live up to its promise, and he deeply missed his family. While he had two weeks of vacation per year, the company laws said they could not be taken consecutively.
When he returned to New Jersey on vacation, he had to make up for months of separation in a few days. But he made a good living in Bermuda and stayed for three years, until the separation from his family and friends became unbearable.
On Christmas Eve 2001, Logan landed in Newark and moved back into his parents' house. After a few uncertain months when he tried to come to terms with his life goals, Logan desperately needed to earn an income.
His father, who by then had worked at Princeton for a decade, suggested he apply for a job there.
Beginnings of a passion
Back at home, Logan started gardening a plot of land behind the house. It expanded from a few plants to a quarter of an acre over several years. As his knowledge about gardening increased, several things started to trouble him. He began to believe that pesticides were ruining the vegetables that nature offered and wanted to do something about it.
He developed a theory about how gardening and agriculture ought to work — using natural selection, the kind of pea-plant, organic genetic mixing developed more than a century ago by Gregor Mendel, to build diseaseand drought-tolerant vegetables. His way, he said, is "the longer way, but also the more sound way than genetically altering a plant's makeup in order to do the same things."
Late last year, he decided he really wanted to study this subject and prepared to go to community college.
In the greenhouse
On a recent cloudy Saturday, Logan went to volunteer at the greenhouse connected to his college's plant science department. The department was holding a plant sale on this day, but he didn't engage with the customers. He spends as much time in the greenhouse as possible.
The greenhouse sits off to the right of the parking lot. Two glassed-in wings branch off from a small brick building painted dark green. Big yellow block letters painted directly on the side of the building read "Horticulture" just below the building's roofline. A pathway surrounded by just-sprouting flowers leads to the building's green door, set above ground level with a slowly sloping ramp.
When Logan stepped into the greenhouse, his eyes glimmered. He had come to water his and his classmates' plants. He tends a full range: from cucumber and pepper to chamomile and anise. He walked between two rows of tables filled with beds where students are growing projects for their labs.
He circled a pointed finger through the air, directing attention nowhere in particular. "This is just how I want to grow things," he said.
Everything is grown organically but strategically, so that certain plants will attract bees to his garden and other ones will repel tomato hornworms and other harmful parasites. "The idea for me is to do as much as I can to grow things that don't have pesticides," he said. "Keep the food clean."
While most students have two or three trays of plants, Logan has two tables of plants — 20 trays worth.
"I can't wait to take this stuff outside," he said, looking at a bed where he's growing a spicy chili pepper hybrid. "It's going to be interesting to see how it does, once I plant it behind my house and see how it sustains itself."
Hopes for the future
Though he's given most of his produce to friends and family for free, Logan's begun to think about starting a business, called Bob's Garden of Eaten.
He is growing concerned that his passion is becoming too costly and would like to expand the garden beyond his parents' backyard.
But for now, he takes small steps, confronted by the reality that he must make enough money to live.
"My hours have just been getting later and later since I first started working here three years ago," he said of his time at Princeton. "I don't know how else this would work with regard to my class schedule, but having to have these late nights here isn't making my life any easier."
This summer, while he tries to develop his business and, he hopes, work at the University, Logan will study math at college for 10 hours a week for five weeks.
He needs a refresher on some of the material he learned more than 15 years ago in high school before he can go onto the calculus needed for advanced study of biology and chemistry.
As Logan scanned some cans of Red Bull around 12:30 a.m. one night, his manager came over to tell him to take a break. "I'm going to give it to you," the manager said. "So whenever you're ready, you can take your break."
Logan was ready.
"Mother Nature takes care of itself as long as man doesn't get in the way," he said as he stepped out from behind the register and headed downstairs to get something to eat.
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