Think Snow.
Eschewing precipitation inducing aboriginal dances and scientific cloud-seeding for a test of mind over matter, the slogan-loving managers of New Hampshire's balance-of-payments campaign spread the word: Think Snow. This, of course, has been much more popular than last year's ultra-negative Help Stamp Out Summer. Even those Dartmouth students who live in ski boots from December through April wouldn't subscribe to THAT. But ThinkSnow in its positive, individualistic, pure white sincerity appealed to idealistic young minds.
Naturally there were skeptics. Why would anyone want to think about snow when there was so much else more worthy of such talented concentration? Evolution and ethnography, Diderot and Dostoevsky, motivation and microbiology, and so on. They chuckled into their hot chocolates when December's early-think white cover flowed downstream on a wet Christmas. They smiled knowingly as students who left Hanover happily seeing as well as thinking snow in mid-December looked sadly about at the barren brown sketches as they unloaded new skis from car racks on January 4.
Undaunted, the true believers thought even harder. Ski hill operators who were beginning to think red ink as the snowshy holidays passed began to doubt the power of positive thought. But now the happy ending! Almost as if to demonstrate how rich will be the reward for determined intellectual effort - something good Dartmouth students already knew - the snow came. First five inches, then fifteen more. White gold!
With the pole for the Winter Carnival statue already upright at center campus, the Think Snow people pulled off their little feat just in time. It's reported that they provided snow for the rest of the Eastern seaboard too - even in the urban areas where thinking snow is akin to profanity. But in Hanover, that was another world away. Like Vietnam. And Birmingham. And Santo Domingo. Tows at the Golf Course, Oak Hill, and the Skiway pulled. Ski recreation class instructors exhorted. Instructors frowned about missing faces at afternoon classes and labs. As January waned, even the skeptics were now waxing.
