What Will Bring Me Back

It's an easilyexplainablephysicalprinciple.Really.

I'M ONLY 20 YEARS OLD, AND ALREADY I can tell you what will draw me back to Dartmouth when I'm 40. It's a simple matter of physics.

Classmates will laugh at my use of "simple" and "physics" in the same sentence. Even though I spent countless hours freshman year trying to grasp torque and angular momentum, my exam scores didn't show it, and I vowed never to take another physics course. But now that I look back on my struggles (after all, this is the nostalgia issue), I've begun to see some uses for the science, if only metaphorically.

There is something special about this place that binds me to Dartmouth, an almost physical magnetism that transcends the College's excellence in academics, the beauty of its campus, and the friendships I've made here. (But don't ask me to detect it with an oscilloscope; I still don't know how one works.) I call it the magnet under the Green, this force that almost demands that I be loyal to my College. It makes me feel almost personally responsible for its successes and failures. I often find myself defending Dartmouth's foibles as if they were my own, and celebrating its athletic triumphs as if I were the star player.

For example: last fall, I spent a rainy Saturday with the marching band at Princeton, watching our football team soundly defeat the Tigers and clinch its share of the Ivy League championship. The game, a 23-6 rout, was practically over by halftime, and the remaining fans (who outnumbered Princeton's spectators) huddled together through a driving rainstorm and a ferocious wind until the clock finally ticked down to zero.

Suddenly, with a burst of energy, we band members marched off, and I found myself screaming for joy and congratulating the people around me. We were the champions, and the horrendous weather no longer mattered. We marched, singing "Glory to Dartmouth," through a tunnel beneath the stadium and truly made "the echoes ring for Dartmouth." I understand echoes only a little better than I understand magnets, but the moral is the same no matter where I am, I will always cherish Dartmouth's triumphs and feel responsible for its failures.

I could just as well have been standing on the Green two years earlier, watching my first Dartmouth Night bonfire. In the weeks leading up to the fire, I couldn't believe that a college that prized itself on academic achievement would be stupid enough to ignite a 50 foot high, gasoline-soaked pile of railroad ties. But when I ran around the fire with my classmates, carrying a marching band horn which I thought was melting with each lap, I knew that the bonfire would help draw me back to Dartmouth for years to come. (If you ever care to ask me, I'll gladly attempt to relate the melting of my horn to other parts of Dartmouth's intangible sense of place I got an A in chemistry.)

Then there is one of my favorite spots on campus, the balcony above the clock faces in Baker Tower. I can look across all the way to the White Mountains, while a thousand thoughts rush into my head. Memories like seeing three golden retrievers guard the entrance to the Hopkins Center on a sunny September morning. A conversation with a German professor about my plans for traveling in Europe. A midnight snowball fight in front of Dartmouth Hall. A late night discussion with three friends in my dorm about what education is really for. A research paper turned in after a frantic all nighter in front of my computer (actually, I have several memories of this).

I'm sure that I'll find myself back for Homecoming in 20 or 30 years, searching for the ghosts of my undergraduate years and rediscovering the hidden Dartmouth in my soul. But until I come back, I'll carry a piece of Dartmouth with me. The campus is sure to change between now and then, but I won't have lost the bond between myself and the way I remember my alma mater. Having spent almost four years near the magnet under the Green, I too have been magnetized. That's one physical principle even I understand.

Dartmouth Night was so intense, Jon Douglas was afraid his horn would melt.

Daughter of the woods and hills, Dartmouth, my steren, Rock-boned and wind-blown sibyl of the snows!

"I often findmyselfdefendingDartmouth'sfoibles asif they weremy own."

As one of the magazine's two Whitney Campbell undergraduate interns, music majorJonathan Douglas seemed like a pretty hardnosed, journalistic type of guy until he volunteered to write this essay.