One of the more enjoyable facets of a Spring day at Dartmouth is spending time on the green playing the cello, solving mathematical riddles or perhaps watching people with not much clothing on doing suitably athletic things.
However, the serene tranquillity of my last Friday afternoon was suddenly shattered as the Earth started shaking, and loud noises filled the air. I got up, took a spin around, and saw a plethora of construction at Dartmouth, around town and a very large brown spot on the Green.
While construction is not terribly bad -- it will leave us with lots of cool stuff when it's done -- it makes the College rife with eyesores, torn up ground, inconvenience and mud.
I was hosting two prospectives over the last few weeks. One, a friend from high school, was choosing between Dartmouth and Cornell. Of course, I was quick to tell her that we were older and better and more academically fulfilling, etc. In the midst of the height of my sales speech, when the victim usually blurts "I'll take it!", we walked through the mud past Collis, and she was quick to quip, "You'd think that a college that is this old would have finished building itself by now."
This was only topped off by her having to walk across wooden planks over big dirt pits to get into the Co-Op to give the usual libation of cold cash in exchange for the honor to wear Dartmouth paraphernalia back at high school, drawing jealous stares from the future Brown students, and snickers from those misled future Harvard students.
The truth is that as long as I have known it, Dartmouth has been under construction. As a prospective, I saw the Green being run through by those big pipes, and as first term 'shmen, I saw Collis shut down and torn down and the steam-pipe construction barely crawl off the Green, only to tear up the street nearby.
Of course to complain about progress is childish, but I am just getting tired of seeing things betting torn up by heavy machinery everywhere I look. Most people -- those Pizzagalli fellows being a notable exception -- find construction equipment to be ugly and dangerous.
Do I have a solution to this problem? No. I hope the College will lay off on the machinery for just a little while when this construction frenzy is finished, so I can lay on the Green and admire my school unspoiled by the mechanisms of progress.
Now, on a completely different tangent, I would like to talk about shorts. I was told by my parents when I was young that shorts were for when it was warm out. But, at Dartmouth shorts do not seem to be for any particular type of weather at all. Instead, wearing them seems only to be a function of how much clean laundry one has left.
In fact, the only rule seems to be that it not be snowing. Along these lines, there is no rule about wearing Tevas, except that one might wear them with socks if it is snowing or hailing.
We must bear in mind that "spring" and "warmth" are not necessarily two related concepts here in Hanover, and so while "warmth" and "shorts" are related, it does not follow that "spring" and "shorts" need have anything to do with each other.
It is my opinion that students are attempting to delude themselves into thinking that Hanover is more hospitable than it actually is. After a long winter, where if you can feel your legs after a walk back from Baker it's a good sign, just the sun being out is reason enough to think "It's spring, and it's warm. I don't care that frost is on my window pane --It IS warm, and I WILL wear shorts."
One day I decided it was going be to warm out, despite the rain, and I wore my shorts and Tevas. Walking through cold puddles, I kept a steady pace, remarking to myself all along "What a charming April day this is! I think I just might have to take off my shirt it's so warm." When I got back to my dorm, I had to slowly thaw my toes. Construction, Tevas, shorts and snow-- such is spring at Dartmouth.
