A Dorm Is Not a Home
HOUSING has been a problem for as long as I've been a student. At first the problem was simple. There were too many students and too few beds. The solution, for a while, was simply to jam more students into available space. Single rooms became doubles and doubles became triples.
Suddenly everything became more complicated. Where were the women going to go? What dorms would be all-female? What dorms would be coed? What floors and what rooms of the coed dorms would be female, and what would happen to the previous male occupants of those rooms?
Short-term solutions were always worked out for most of the immediate problems. Sooner or later everyone had a room and a bed. The larger problem, the alleged effect of all the disruption on the nature and quality of the Dartmouth Experience, remains unresolved. Everyone is worried about the fact that the guy who lived upstairs fall term and used to play his stereo full volume at midnight was replaced by someone winter term who lifted weights at 6 a.m., or that every term there are unfamiliar faces in the bathroom. Big deal.
I found a solution, for myself anyway, two years ago. I moved out of the dorms altogether. There's no way I'd ever move back. I'm not saying I don't like dorm life - not at all. They're nice places to live when you're a freshman, and if you're a slow learner as I was, even when you're a sophomore. A dorm is a very educational environment. You learn how to drink and how to go without sleep and how to take care of athlete's foot. I made some lasting friendships and I'll never forget the people I lived with.
I started out with two roommates first term of my. freshman year. It was what you might call a valuable mix of differing viewpoints. One of these guys was a religious fanatic and the other was a dope dealer. During the first week the Jesus Freak began praying for me and the doper tried to grow marijuana plants under the study lamp on my desk. I spent a lot of time falling asleep in the easy chairs up in the Tower Room of Baker Library.
The fundamentalist and I formed an alliance - we really did like each other despite the fact that he was going to heaven and I was going to hell - and suggested to Mr. X that he transfer his horticultural activities and the headquarters of his sales organization somewhere else. Maybe even move out of the room altogether. His strategy was to invite the other members of the mafia to a two-day party held in our room, as a sort of suggestion to us that we move out. Negotiations seemed to be deadlocked, so an outside mediator was called in, the dean of freshman, and an accord was reached. The young entrepreneur moved out.
Our next roommate was a genius. I believe he possessed our class's highest grade-point average and largest accumulation of citations for academic achievement. He also possessed a generous dose of eccentricity. He was affectionately known by the residents of the dorm as the Mystery Man.
Weeks at a time would pass between sightings of his dark form scurrying into the computer center or a side door of Baker Library. He would rise at 5 a.m., a couple of hours after we had gone to bed, and slink off to work the earliest morning shift at Thayer Dining Hall. He carried four courses - advanced chemistry, calculus, computer science, and physics - and spent the remainder of the day in a secluded and dark corner of the deeper rescesses of the library stacks. Who knows what he did there?
Whenever I did see him in the room, he was either reading Camus, Sartre, or Marx, staring into space with a wild glare in his eyes, or throwing lighted matches into my wastebasket. He was a pyromaniac. He once set our rug on fire - on purpose. I liked him though. We would talk for hours at these times of confrontation, usually about the morality or immorality of suicide, he affirming absolutely that it was the only meaningful philosophical question. I was never quite so sure.
Spring term the Mystery Man decided to try a novel experiment. He wanted to see, in the interest of science, how long he could go without taking a shower or washing his clothes. He nearly succeeded in going the entire term. Unfortunately, one night someone dumped a wastebasket full of water on him from a balcony when he was divining for water with two twisted coat-hangers in front of the dorm.
I left Dartmouth for a spell after my freshman year. During part of that time I lived in a general store, a fire station, and a tent. None of these arrangements proved to be wholly satisfactory on a long-term basis. I returned to Mother Dartmouth the following year and moved into another dorm, this time with a roommate of my own choosing.
Living in a two-room double, we each had our own bedroom and some degree of privacy. My 9 x 12 bedroom was slightly cramped, however, by the addition of a 6 x 8 water bed. We both had similar interests. Neither of us wanted to pay the price of a Thayer meal contract. We resolved to go on a vegetarian diet and cook all our meals in the room. We cooked over a gasoline camp stove (absolutely against dorm regulations) and hung my styrofoam ice chest out the window for refrigeration. After the receipt of a very threatening note from Buildings and Grounds (they didn't like the looks of my ice chest hanging there), we hid an unlicensed refrigerator in the closet and dined on zucchini and eggplant in bliss, doing our dishes afterwards in the bathroom.
My roommate ended up buying some land and building a cabin in Vermont. Four friends, two ducks, a dog, and a goat happily spent the following year there. (The ducks weren't entirely happy as they were eaten by a fox). The lack of plumbing, electricity, heat, and a car only meant that one wore a down parka that winter while eating breakfast, showered in the gym, studied in the library, and hitchhiked back and forth. It seemed, somehow, much better than the dorm.
This year there has been some progress. We have plumbing (an outhouse anyway), electricity, a wood stove, and a car. Instead of a new roommate I have a fiancee - a situation which promises to add a greater degree of unity and cohesiveness than might otherwise be anticipated in one's interdormitory relationships. I have no desire to move back - no, not even into one of those fabled three-room doubles on the "Gold Coast" with a living room and a bath.
