The Undergraduate Chair

Summer Absence Seems Short On Return To Hanover's Familiar Scenes and Faces

THE TRAIN TUGS ITSELF UP THE VALLEY in spasms, and you hear "Brattleboro, Brattleburro-o" through a haze of head-fog as you try to focus after a nap in the rolling coach. The sophomores across the aisle talk about how to pick their courses—"l always pick mine by the profs; that's the only way." "That's right," says their friend, a former junior who left school to join the Naval Reserve and who is coming back for a few days to see the place, "that's the only way to pick courses. .... I always picked mine that way Of course, College seems like nothing after the way we study. . . .up at 7:30 and study on to 10 at night. . . .navigation, ordnance, seamanship You guys are lucky to be getting back for a year's vacation."

You think about a summer at home where the food was good and the summer job just a job—tough, at times, murderous on steamy days when city streets swam in humid heat, boring when the routine of moving hands in quick-found, deft patterns became senseless, thrilling only at very rare times when something new was learned, something that had a new meaning for dead hours of routine. You think about week-ends away from home—a visit on a lake where you got badly sunburned sitting on the sand with your girl, reading and talking. And about a cool evening at a dance where you argued about the war with a friend who didn't want to be drafted but who was going just the same, and about leaving early and driving in the cool quiet and wishing things weren't so complicated.

You wonder why you left home, a little, and mix that with wondering how your friends are, how many are back, and if they got the wire and will be at the station. You get a heavy, soggy, unhappy feeling in your stomach thinking about the good summer left behind and wondering when you'll see your girl, and then start thinking about having her come up for one of the early football games. The sophomores talk on, about their summer and the courses they're going to take, about girls and getting jobs and getting married, about the Army and the Naval Reserve and when they'll be called in the draft, about what the team will do to Cornell this year. "I'd like to meet a nice girl. .. .live in a place where a lot of my friends were married too, where the women could have their hen parties and we could drink together and play poker," the Reserve Ensign says. There is agreement on that, across the aisle, and you wonder how that permanent wish for comfort and security and happiness sticks through wars and years when the chances for it are slim.

The dusk deepens slowly after the long wait in Bellows Falls, and impatience scrapes along the back of your spine and you wish you would get there, just to be off the train. The hills and the river and the old, grey, unpainted barns and white houses slowly start the old magic ripple of recognition and pleasure, making you forget your hot stomachful of train-ride home- sickness. Before Windsor, while the dusk is just about to close out the day, that big hill, Ascutney, with its lumpy ridges and the fire-tower on top, comes up and you have the new exciting feeling that it's not far now and that it will be good to be back.

From there on it's only impatience and anger with the train for stopping every half-mile without reason. You get your bags down off the rack fifteen minutes before you're due at White River, and say to the sophomore who's collecting his belongings, "Damn it, I wish we'd get there," and he says damn it he wishes we'd get there and we stand in silence and wait. After several jerks and stops the conductor comes back with a read lantern to put on the back of the car and says "Five minutes more, boys," then goes back to the front of the train. Finally, when you can see the rows of tracks and the switch engines in the yards, he returns and makes the official announcement: "White River, White Rivurr. All off here."

You get off and look down the platform and there's the gang waiting, looking the same as they did in June, and you yell, loudly, and they say "How's the boy?. .. . Javva good summer?" Then you know that June can't have been more than a weekend ago, and you talk when you get in the car about who's back and when they got there and why didn't you stop when you drove through in July and whadja do all summer and what's new in Hanover.

And within an hour you're back on the streets again, everything the same, talking about the war and the President's speech and who's in the army and are you going to take CPT and have you read "Berlin Diary." But it's a different way of talking about the war, surer that there's something to be done about it in Hanover, more definitely committed about it, and with no more wondering about whether to come back for the last year.

You watch the football squad scrim- mage, and you stare at the big sophomore who looks as big as Punjab in Little Or- phan Annie. You talk about the tough games to come, the week-ends in early October looking awfully close. You walk past the mobs of green-topped freshmen; they're the same as ever, rushed and har- ried through matriculation and physicals and exams and rug-beating and furniture- buying. "I was getting off the 7:50 in Whitetown Saturday night," a friend tells you, "and I was right behind this one wiry little '45. He was grunting like the devil over a little suitcase, so I thought I'd help him and asked him if it was loaded with lead, and if it wasn't could I help him carry it. He grinned at me and said, 'No thanks, I'm okay, I just carry my own shot- puts with me.' They get funnier every year."

You know the College is the same as on every opening week, the freshmen the same, the campus the same, the feeling of returning the same, the jokes about "Javva good summer?" the same, the trips in the evening down to Allen's for a look at the ball-scores the same, the holler "Going to the first show?" the same, the look of coming autumn the same, but you and your friends somehow are different from the summer, back at school for different reasons, and glad to be back for the same reasons.

You register, and unpack your books and put them back on the shelves, and write your first letters home, and eat your meals at the same times and in the same places as last year. And you know before you're in town for three hours that Dartmouth . . . the part that doesn't change ... is as good as ever, and you suspect that the only things that are different are the people, but you're too busy doing things with them to tell how they're different.

AT START OF THE D.O.C. ANNUAL TRIP FOR FRESHMEN More than 100 freshmen and a corps of upperclass leaders set off from Robinson Hall fora hiking and camping trip in the Moosilauke region a week before College opened lastmonth, in the Outing Club's annual introduction to Dartmouth out-of-doors activities.