But it's not the posters, nor the Van Gogh replica, nor the skis leaning against the window that seem worthiest of mention. Not when there's a huge forest mural sprawled across a wall with fall leaves dangling along a string from the ceiling above and a pumpkin sitting on the wall's ledge as if perplexed by a passing salmon in the creek.
"I painted a river scene on my wall after going on this epic camping trip through Alaska this past summer," Anya '14 says, holding one of the thick birch branches bolstered to either side of her simple wooden bed frame, "I just couldn't stand falling asleep with white walls."
Anya invites me into her room with a compass slung from a long chain around her neck and an evident sense of direction. Inspired by "Into the Wild" (in which the protagonist goes looking for adventure and ends up dead in a bus after 119 days foraging in the Alaskan wilderness), Anya raised funds for a solo backpacking trip across Glacier Bay, where she saw her first glacier and kayaked with a jailor from the Yukon Territory through the bear-lined inlets that inspired her wall.
"My dorm's modeled after my family's country house five hours north of Moscow, where lilacs literally grow through the windows," she says, sitting on an Urban Outfitters grass rug as we flip through a book of the British environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy Anya's favorite artist. "I wanted to bring the outdoors inside."
The birch branches that frame her bed come from a tree she found split open at Occom Pond, and the leaves that cloud her ceiling were hand-selected in the fall, dried between the pages of the ORC course catalogue, and covered in vinyl gloss. "I was that freshman picking up leaves with a huge garbage bag full of them, totally late for class," she said.
On her windowsill, a gilded lobster sits peacefully in the shadow of a ski helmet. "I'm doing a work-study with the theater department and for Two Gentlemen of Verona' I had to spend two weeks standing in this booth spray-painting all this plastic stuff gold," Anya laughs. She explained that the strands of loose ivy were the hardest, "because you have to spray both sides."
