Down the Tubes

Given the dangers, it makes sense to end Tubestock. But I sure enjoyed it while it lasted.

DARTMOUTH TRADITIONS NEVEREND quietly. On a campus steeped in customs and culture, erasure of anything embedded in the "Dartmouth experience" doesn't happen without a fight. With the passage of new Hanover and New Hampshire legislation aimed at curtailing Tubestock, the summer term's annual tradition of alcohol-soaked revelry on the Connecticut River appears to be dying a slow and painful death, or at least undergoing a facelift that will render it unrecognizable.

Tubestock began by accident in 1987, when Norwich, Vermont, resident Richard Ackerboom '80 suggested that the band rehearsing in his basement instead set up and play on the deck facing the Connecticut River. The resulting impromptu concert evolved into a full-scale event that gained immediate popularity among Dartmouth students, emerging as the sophomore summer equivalent of Green Key Weekend. The sight of hundreds of seminaked undergraduates congregating on rafts and floating down the river on black inner tubes has become commonplace, and the College turns a semi-blind eye while students gleefully exploit legal loopholes to avoid hassles from local police.

Six years after my departure from Hanover and with more than $100,000 of legal education now cemented in my brain, I read about the Tubestock controversy and nearly spew my part-skim latte. How could such a liability circus have lasted nearly two decades? A mob of inebriated college students frolicking in an interstate waterway, treating drinking laws like lukewarm suggestions, fighting the current in nothing but tire-liner inner tubes and rafts made of planks strapped to floating kegs, littering the river with stockpiles of floating debris? I mentally tick off the legal terms—strict liability, trespass, assumption of risk, negligence per se, not to mention comparative negligence and impleading of multiple defendants. It's a veritable legal maelstrom, a law school issue-spotting bonanza inhabiting the dreams, not to mention final exam questions, of torts professors everywhere.

Throw a few jurisdiction issues into the Cuisinart and you've got a liability smoothie. Some quick state law research reveals that the Connecticut River, unlike most interstate waterway borders, is not jurisdictionally split down the middle, but rather governed entirely by the state of New Hampshire. How sweetly the jingling of deep pockets would fill the ears of eager plaintiffs' lawyers. Not to mention the lack of insurance; the illegal alcohol consumption alone would be enough to make any agent tumble from his ergonomic chair in fits of laughter before stamping a red DENIED on the necessary forms, leaving the jugulars of both the College and the town of Hanover exposed to liability.

Town officials cite last summers drowning of a Tuck Bridge Program student as the event's final blow. While the tragedy was unrelated to Tubestock, it could be presented in court as evidence of a known preexisting hazardous condition. And Lord knows it would have been, had a Dartmouth student perished at the hands of the keg-standing gods. Consider the thousands of parents mortgaging their spleens to send their beloved children to an Ivy League school. How many of them would gladly have speeddialed their attorneys upon hearing that Annie or Trevor had been paralyzed for life in a freak inner-tubing accident?

Gulping my overpriced coffee, I shake my head, visions of seven-figure settlements, contingency fees and grinning lawyers dancing in my mind. Here in my living room it's easy to dismiss Tubestock as a lawsuit breeding ground, the equivalent of tossing a truckload of Beverly Hills toddlers into a sandbox filled with razor blades 10 minutes before carpool. The fact that the College never created, sanctioned or condoned the event would have been a minor detail, easily dispatched by a skillful attorney. The administration may as well have started coating Home Plate brownies with E.coli for a simpler but equally effective means of hemorrhaging the endowment with settlements and legal fees.

But after a minute or so a remarkable thing happens: The implanted cynicism fades, replaced by a wistful nostalgia, and I lapse into a narcosis, mentally replaying one of the most memorable days of my Dartmouth experience. The relaxed camaraderie of sophomore summer, the treasured free rein on a near-empty campus, those few perfect days during Hanover's three-month hiatus from polar temperatures and arctic misery. For one afternoon we abandoned the confinement of adult rules and became captains of our own destiny, immersing ourselves in the languid beauty of our surroundings. Bodies of water, sharp objects and abundant alcohol aside, on that day we were completely safe, sequestered from the chaos of the modern world lurking outside our tiny New Hampshire haven.

Even now, firmly embedded in the mire of adulthood, I'll jog down the West Side Highway along the sewage-frothed Hudson and flash back to that afternoon, lolling down the untarnished Connecticut River, my legs splayed over the side of a black inner tube, laughing with friends as we thrashed and cavorted in a watery Utopia. Using twine and sodden bungee cords, we linked our tubes and tied them to a flimsy but proudly homemade raft, forming an effective beer-passing assembly line. By stripping to our bathing suits (or less), we broke down all social defenses, not to mention created a means of determining which male classmates had successfully battled the summer's alcohol calories with daily workouts and creatine shakes. (Alas, if only some of them had kept up all that exercise in the years after graduation.)

Safety risks aside, Tubestock was a unique event, a celebration of bacchanalian excess merged with condoned public nudity, creating a harmony rarely witnessed in such a large group. Raise the topic with alumni who experienced it and you'll incite glassy eyes and war stories. Dropping my sorority houses checking account ATM card in the river, only to have it recovered and returned the next morning by a philanthropic diver; my roommate twisting her ankle on a raft and stumbling to shore in a pool of giggles, only to be whisked to Dick's House by Safety & Security (then considered the Gestapo, despite their status as kindly authority figures who spent hours a day enduring the antics of substance-addled college students). I'll browse the Class Notes and see that this or that classmate recently completed a joint M.D./Ph.D. programs at Harvard and plans to found new research divisions of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and recall the way his genitals flopped in the breeze as he leapt naked from the AD raft.

Both the state of New Hampshire and town of Hanover have taken measures to squeeze Tubestock from existence. Following a June public hearing, the Hanover selectboard unanimously approved revision of two ordinances aimed at curtailing any large gathering on the river. The first allows the Hanover police to fine any person possessing open alcohol containers on all public property, expanded to include the water itself. The second requires large congregations on the river to apply for and receive event permits from the town. Violation of either ordinance is punishable by fines that few college kids can afford to ignore. The Greek Leadership Council launched a last-ditch effort to save the event, though its likelihood of success dwindled in the face of increasing opposition —including the acts by town leaders. The administration stepped in to help create a new, alternative, land-based event, Fieldstock, which was scheduled for August 12.

Be it a legal time bomb or celebration of youthful vitality, Tubestock has been carved into the Dartmouth tablets, providing at best a day of glorious carousal and at worst a skull-crumpling hangover for thousands of undergrads during the past 19 years. In these its final hours, I say remember the rapture of those days on the river, the settings natural beauty, the freedom inherent in an adult-free arcadia, and let the risk-averse, Cassandra cynicism of jaded maturity be damned.

Dead in the Water Sophomore summer's waterborne revelry (here in2003) is coming to an end.

MELISSA LAFSKY is a lawyer-tumed-writerand author of the legal-world blog Opinionistas. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and lives in Manhattan.