As hesitant as I am to embrace or even to admit it, I am now in the midst of my final Fall term here in Hanover, which can mean only one thing: invasion of the leaf peepers. For those of you who haven't spent much time on the streets, let me give you a quick rundown of these unimaginably dull busfuls of senior citizens.
Basically, "leaf peepers" are tourists who come from miles around in order to view the fine fall foliage of the Hanover landscape. Yes, they are endlessly fascinated by leaves, to the point of spending money on an annual vacation to ride on a Bengay-scented bus chock full of other boreseekers to places like Hanover, N.H. (home of Dartmouth, leaves, a post office or something and leaves).
First off, their name makes me cringe. Leaf peepers? Why? The term calls to mind images of some creepy pasty kid breathing heavily while looking at issues of Photosynthesis Weekly under his sheets with a flashlight. Beyond the immediate off-putting name, they also overrun our town for a few long weeks every year, taking every available parking spot on Main Street and parking their giant buses in front of the Hop, where people wander around taking pictures of Baker Tower and getting in everyone's way.
I wonder, though, what makes us have such a knee-jerk reaction of derisive mockery towards these self-proclaimed leaf peepers (besides the obvious they're self-proclaimed leaf peepers)? I've spent enough time here by now to feel I have a pretty good sense of what many Dartmouth students care about if you'll forgive my blatant overgeneralizations and we care about financial success and job security after graduation. We are drawn to the white-collar dream of solid homes and families, and whether or not we came from privilege, we all have it now just by virtue of attending this school. We don't always notice or take advantage of this privilege, and we love to thoughtlessly balk at the bourgeois as if we aren't all gunning to be just like them in 10 years. Yet we seek the same kind of complacent consistency that defines leafpeeping in the first place.
These leaf peepers share in common the same kind of privilege, adding a little excitement once a year to their cushy, retired lives to witness the gorgeous and strange in-betweenness of autumn slowly consuming summer, leaving fiery streaks across the mountains. They are (almost) literally stopping to smell the roses. With all the unpredictability and uncertainty of youth burgeoning into adulthood, it is tempting to think we should search for constancy, to submit to what seems to be the expectation of adulthood and choose a well-worn path instead of facing the terrifying open mouth of an uncharted future.
But when you see those buses crawl down Main Street, pay attention. Complacency, with all the womblike comfort and pleasant familiarity it brings, will also turn us into dawdling old morons with wide-brimmed visors, above-the-ankle socks and those terrible tourist sunglasses, repeating the same recycled small talk to our new acquaintances and pulling out all the same old crinkled photographs of our grandchildren from our wallets. It's wonderful to be lucky, and we are, but who wants to wake up one day and get their jollies from something called leafpeeping? Leafpeeping is the hell that follows a life of straight lines. Don't give in! Stay always becoming and never once-was. Or at least take up birdwatching and get out of my way.
