North Country Spring

A LATE winter institution, duckboards, appealing before robins dare to, thread the slush of March with safety. Even in early April, pickings for robins on the campus are so slim as to cause dejected head droopings, not the jubilant May cockings. Up Dartmouth way, Spring is often negative. At feeding stations about white Dutch colonial faculty homes, evening grossbeaks no longer quarrel yellowly over sunflower seeds, and red-breasted nuthatches no longer walk upside down on suet. They forage afield, and housewives note instead how under lilac hedges fox sparrows, migrants, brown like last year's leaves, scratch with both feet at the same time in buoyant jumps.

What is Spring in Hanover anyhow? Well, faces aflame, skiers returning from Tuckerman will tell you that they have found it. Owl-eyed, still blinking over flies hand tied before fireplace fires in December, fishermen head for pools—never ask them where. On such activity you may count better for the assurance of Spring than on the calendar reading May 1 and at any moment freezing you back into the middle of March.

The delicate, frail green of birches, maples, and beeches below Velvet Rocks just after the buds have burst is Spring. Spring is in the way the undergraduates lounge after lunch and supper by Dave Storrs' and Jim Campion's, John Piane's and the Tanzi Brothers' and in the way they stare lazily rather than talk. In winter darkness after supper, returning singly to dorms, they whistle in doleful cheerfulness; in Spring twilight they sing barbershop. On the senior fence, philosophic seniors carve canes and discuss Success in a tougher world. And Spring is certainly the time of browning bodies stretched out on dormitory lawns, of dark glasses and pillows, and of Eccy assignments grumbled at when thirsters after knowledge are not lying on their backs looking trustingly towards the sky from whence comes, proctors reflect regretfully in gym finals, no help. But finals are June, and June is summer, and summer works differently on the blood.