Waking the Dead

It's not that hard to find Josh Marks '96 at football games. He is the one with the bagpipes over his shoulder and a kilt wrapped around his waist.

It is similarly easy to hear Marks on any given afternoon as you amble past the old cemetery outside of Thayer. The droning of the Great Highland Bagpipes—an instrument originally designed for military uses—tends to carry. "Quite far, in fact.

"It's deafening," Marks said. "That's why I generally practice in large open areas like the graveyard, the Bema, or the riverfront."

It is that eerie, dignified sound that originally drew Marks to the pipes at age nine. He is now trying to arrange his Dartmouth Plan to allow him to spend his winter and spring as a transfer student at the University College of Dublin, Ireland—where, he hopes, he can polish his piping.