Looking Ahead
Tradition says that the first editorial of the new year should be a message of hope tinged with caution, a reflective look at the past, and perhaps a glimpse of what may lie ahead. How does an editor prepare this sort of annual bulletin?
This question was in back of our mind as we placed skis on the car last Saturday morning following a New Year's weekend at a ski lodge above Hanover. Maybe the girl who approached could read those thoughts, because she remarked: "I suppose you have gotten all the material you need for an editorial out of this weekend."
"Unh," we replied. "Unh" is a special sound editors utter when people ask about editorials still to be written. But perhaps she had something in mind. "What sort of editorial do you think this weekend could produce?" we countered.
The girl was the wife of a Dartmouth graduate of a few years back. She was young, pretty, and very obviously pregnant. "I guess I'm thinking about the hope and the inspiration," she said. "Here we have just welcomed the new year together, parents, children, grandparents, grown-ups and toddling babies, in surroundings rich with memories and dreams. . . ."
The New Year's weekend had been a gathering of old friends, all connected in some way in years past with the Dartmouth Outing Club. This year, since the closing of the Ravine Lodge on Mt. Moosilauke, the traditional get-together was at Damen's Ski Lodge in Hanover Center, a hostelry of hand-hewn beams and flagstone floors.
You can have been to Hanover itself many times, and never have seen Hanover Center. It is a high country of slopes covered with pine and hardwood, with long connecting pastures from which it is possible to look out over the valley of the Connecticut to the Vermont hills. The snow was deep and sugary last week, held in place by a light crust. If your idea of skiing is to clamp your feet onto expensive laminated boards, and then pay to be carried to the top of a mountain for the privilege of chattering down over patches of ice and rock, then the skiing was terrible. If by skiing you mean following the contours of winding woods roads and striking off across those high pastures, then the weekend could not have been more ideal. A goodly number of that Dartmouth alumni group came equipped with narrow touring skis, and spirits were high.
Outside were the hillwinds, but indoors the logs blazed bright in the big stone fireplace, and three Dartmouth generations, past, present and potential, relaxed in winter camaraderie.
The girl spoke again. "To me it was thrilling," she said, "the atmosphere of hope and faith in the future. After this weekend I really look ahead to next year with confidence.
We thought of the New Year's Day headlines of Indonesia, the Viet Cong, Castro's missiles, and we started to say something bitter, but we stopped because maybe she was right and they were wrong. If there is going to be a worthwhile future perhaps it has to be based on this kind of faith, symbolized by a young and expectant mother looking off across the snow-covered hills, vibrantly alive, conscious of the value of life itself. Maybe this was the theme for a New Year's editorial.
Well, so much for that. The editorial was never written, for three or four hours later the cold we had been fighting all weekend took hold with a vengeance. We are writing these notes on a pad of paper while propped up in bed. Within reach is a box of Kleenex and three kinds of pills. In the background, calling the plays, is a doctor who is not at all impressed by our relayed telephone messages to "break this thing up quick, Doc, I've got to get back to work."
Every time we try to capture that New Year's inspiration someone sticks a thermometer in our mouth or says that it is time to take a nap. But that idea keeps coming back, that faith in the value of life. , . .
There is a Dartmouth ballad which concludes:
And if I have a son. Sir, I'll tell you what he'll do . . . He'll yell to hell with Harvard Like his daddy used to do.
The thought may not be profound, but it catches a little of that faith in the future, of the feeling of being part of a continuing tradition. It has something to do with the still white cold of the Hanover winter, and the fellowship of the open fire that we sensed last weekend. But there is more to it than that.
Perhaps the answer lies hidden in the thoughts of an expectant mother, aware of the continuity of life and glad for her part in it as she sings Auld Lang Syne on New Year's Eve together with her husband and their friends and the children who will make up the world of tomorrow.
But they are her thoughts, and tonight, sitting up in bed with a ballpoint pen in one hand and a Kleenex in the other, we think we can sense their meaning but we feel utterly inadequate to put them down on paper.
The Milford Cabinet January 7, 1965
