We come to Dartmouth in a million different ways by car, by bus, by plane. Some come to Dartmouth because they hear it's a good school, only setting foot on campus for the first time at Orientation. Some scout Dartmouth for years and come to pursue a specific interest, from sports to music to business.
And then there are those who come here by way of family. They have grown up with framed photos of scenes from Hanover on the walls of their childhood homes, hoping or perhaps at times fearing that one day they too would attend the College like their parents and grandparents.
I'm the first person in my family to go to Dartmouth, so when I tell them about it, I have to do a lot of explaining and describing. I only get to bring them here through temporary visits, whether briefly in person or only in my head.
Because of this, I'm always fascinated by my friends and classmates who have family members that went to Dartmouth. To hear your mother talk about the time she broke into the bell tower, to joke with an uncle about this or that fraternity, to inherit your grandfather's varsity sweater I think these all make for a different experience of Dartmouth. To be in the same place where your elders were at this time in life, to know that, as you creak open a door in Sanborn, or walk through the graveyard when the snow is melting, that they have been here too.
Shortly after I met my girlfriend last spring, she emailed me an attachment titled "laxbro." I assumed it would be some all-too-perfect Facebook picture of me wearing a tank top and shades, but when I opened it, I found something quite different a black and white photograph of an old Dartmouth lacrosse team.
The image was cropped from a team picture. In it were six young men with short 1950s hair looking straight at the camera. The guy in the middle wearing number 15 was her grandfather. He looked strong and relaxed and had a smile so slight you can only really see it in his eyes. He held a wooden lacrosse stick like a shepherd staff, his left hand resting on top of his right.
They were standing on the steps of some building, probably Alumni Gym, wearing their uniforms and gloves. Their jerseys, which were dark (presumably green) with white shoulders, looked more like sweaters. On some, the stitching around the numbers was frayed, and the shorts barely reached halfway down the players' thighs a stark, almost comical contrast to the baggier variety worn today.
Two of the men wore glasses. Three of them were skinnier one was short and stocky, and my girlfriend's grandfather and the guy to his left sported the more classic athlete look with broad shoulders and thick necks. At first glance, they seemed to represent the essence of old Dartmouth a group of young, clean-cut white men in matching green and white outfits. Behind them to the left was a sliver of brick, and to the left, an empty black void, as if these characters had emerged out of nothing.
But the more I look at the picture, the more distinct each figure becomes. The more I realize how different each individual's story must have been. Each man came to Dartmouth in his own way and, of course, went onto different adventures afterward. I'm reminded that this moment in time was only a small piece of the greater whole, merely one station in a much greater and more complicated story.
When I first set foot at Dartmouth, my dad and I decided to visit on a whim on our way from Middlebury to Boston. As we drove up the hill on Wheelock Street from the Connecticut River, he told me a story about going to Winter Carnival in the 1970s and how he and his friends saw the ski jumping competition and slept on couches at a friend's fraternity. It's stories like these that remind us that our time here will eventually fall into the great stream of memories, photographs, journal entries and bits of flotsam that wash up during car rides and email exchanges that soon enough we will come to another place where we will live out new stories.
