Out Of The Woods

My fellow freshman trippees were either rich, crazy or both. What was I doing here?

THE FIRST DAY OF MY LIFE AS A Dartmouth student began with a freshman trip, a hike up the impressive cliffs of North Kinsman Mountain. We had all recently graduated from high school, so it was natural that the talk in the group inevitably turned to our senior years and graduation, and the gifts associated with it. As our discussion shifted from the mundane to the monetary, all 14 of our ears pricked up when one new freshman exclaimed, "My father gave me a Porsche 944 for graduation." Stunned by the size of such a gift, I didn't know what to say. After a moment's pause, another hiker replied with complete sincerity, "Oh,you got one, too?"

I felt my heart sink, and a lump arose in my throat. As the son of fiercely middle-class parents, I didn't even have a car, much less a top-end German sports model. I was only 15 minutes into my Dartmouth experience, and a clear message was beginning to sink in: I didn't belong here.

Our trip continued on, and the second day dawned cool and rainy. Drenched to the core, we slogged through the mud to our shelter and began to set up camp. Since I had enjoyed the relatively dry comforts of the shelter the previous night, I was consigned to sleep under what our leaders laughingly called a "tarp," which was nothing more than a clear sheet of grubby plastic precariously suspended a foot from the ground. As we lay there in the dark, in the unceasing deluge, one of our two female trippers posed a curious question to the seven of us: "Did you know that there is a 12th of God in a can of Coke?"

Her question of theology was greeted with mute silence from the rest of us. I suppose most of us hadn't really pondered the ecclesiastical leanings of food products, so there wasn't much to say. To our dismay, she continued. "Did you know that there is also a 12th of God in a sandwich? And just think, if you get all the 12ths together during a large lunch, you'd have—a manifestation!"

Timed with this last exclamation, she thrust her hands out into the darkness, crashing into the plastic tarp and sending rivulets ofwater cascading around us. As we all slowly inched away from our volcanic tripmate, I took stock of my situation again, which had taken a decided turn for the worst. My newfound classmates were not just the super-rich, they were also the super-crazy. It was starting to look like I would never fit in.

Feeling forlorn and out of place, I spent the final day of hiking mostly silent, imagining myself as the squarest of pegs (and one in terrible need of a shower). Yet, as we descended Mt. Moosilauke to the Ravine Lodge, I began to look beyond the specifics and view us as a cohesive whole. As a group, we wolfed down eggs that were dyed a hideous shade of green, we all pretended that we actually knew the Salty Dog Rag and we all dozed quietly as a storyteller began our Doc Benton tale with a lengthy treatise on plate tectonics. Though we had a diverse array of backgrounds, it was through our shared experiences on our trip that we were gradually forged into a community that was indelibly Dartmouth.

On our final night, as President David McLaughlin '54 welcomed us warmly into the Dartmouth family, my spirits began to soar with an egalitarianism fostered by both the woods and the Hanover experience. I wasn't the son of a famous sports agent, nor was I a graduate of Exeter, but I knew that I had traits and qualities that I could contribute to my new family. At that moment, surrounded by my new classmates in front of a roaring fire, I knew that I had found my new home. I knew that I belonged.

J. MARK RIDDELL, M.D., is a resident inanesthesiology at Massachusetts GeneralHospital in Boston.