To the Editor:
Most mornings I launch my boat from the small public boat launch on the Connecticut River in Norwich, Vermont. I enjoy the row as the river is beautiful, a wonderful asset to be enjoyed by all who live or pass through the Upper Valley area.
Each year on the third Saturday in July, hundreds of Dartmouth students trash the place, as part of what has been an annual event called Tubestock. The students should be ashamed of themselves!
Dartmouth College distances itself as much as possible from Tubestock, closes the Ledyard Canoe Club for the day and patrols its shores to keep its students from washing up on Dartmouth College private property. This of course means that the only place for the Dartmouth students to go is across the river to Norwich, where the two-person police force is not equipped to deal with the onslaught.
Dartmouth students invade public and private property on the Norwich side of the river with hundreds of cars, construct crude floats uninvited on both public and private land, consume large quantities of alcohol in the water and on the private and public land and then leave all the mess for Norwich to clean up. It has now been weeks since Tubestock, and the public boat launch and adjacent private land is still littered with floats, trash, junk, furniture, as well as two large Sigma Delta sorority signs.
Such blatant disregard for the environment, as well as both public and private property, does not reflect well on Dartmouth students or Dartmouth College. And this is not just a few isolated students, but hundreds of them.
I think the Dartmouth students who trashed the Vermont side of the river should finish the cleanup job as soon as possible, and take steps so that such blatant disregard of the environment and the rights of others does not happen again.
