Here's Looking At It

And more winter

Pity the freshman from Peachtree Street. The booklet that Dartmouth sends to applicants shows a few pretty scenes of the snow-covered campus but doesn't say a word about temperature. Nothing about life - or the lack of it - during the January freeze, not even the crunch of benumbed feet on snow at 30, maybe 35 below. The effect can be chilling.

Adrian Bouchard, who migrated south to Dartmouth 40 years ago, took most of these photographs. He has scores and scores of wintertime pictures in his files, and, except for skiers, they are mostly empty of peo- ple. The reasons are clear enough: Photographers like to take pictures of unsullied snow and most people are inclined to stay inside where it's warm.

But there are contrasts. The quiet, haunting quality of the tracery outside Reed Hall (left) and a gray, cheerless view of Main Street. Or the dreamy solitude of the Connecticut near the boathouse and the view across the Green as opposed to the noisy geyser issuing from a snowblower near Hopkins Center. As far as the eye is concerned, walking through the College Grant (following pages) is a happier time than trudging into the ice age from Parkhurst or McNutt.

And lest we forget, Eleazar Wheelock was as ill-prepared for January in Hanover as the freshman from Peachtree Street. In December of 1770 he wrote, "I find ye winters here much more pleasant than in Connecticut. ... I can hardly say I have been cold." A few weeks later, in January, he had to decide what to do about the corpse of a settler found frozen on the roadside.