As the incomparable Donna Summers once said, "and so you're back from outer space," and so I am, at least back at Dartmouth from terms so different from here I may as well have been on the newly derecognized Pluto. Poor Pluto, one negligent plutonian social chair forgets to register a keg and bam, you lose your letters, your house and now your planet.Hooray for the S.L.I (Space Life Initiative). But enough mourning Zete, I mean Pluto, this article is supposed to talk about me and my return to the Big Green.
About three weeks ago I began the epic journey back to Dartmouth from a remote Great Lakes trading post called It's-Just-North-of-Chicago, otherwise known as Milwaukee. As I was driving mile after mile over uncharted regions of suburban Ohio, I couldn't help but think back on another traveler who had made a similar trek into the wilderness two hundred and thirty years ago, Eleazar Wheelock. Eleazar (or E-LazeR as we like to call him) was, of course, Dartmouth's mythical founder.
According to legend, Eleazer and his twin brother Elaezer were born to Puritans along the banks of the Connecticut and there abandoned by parents who left for Ye-Olde-Vermont, where they could live the life of Nudist Puritans they had always dreamed of. Fortunately the infant sons were soon found by a she-wolf and her six pups., and the maternal canid benevolently offered to nurse the two newborns at her pap. Eleazer, thrown into a fit of Puritan outrage at the use of the word pap, throttled the she-wolf and quick-sixed the wolf pups. In the process, he domed his brother who sank into the river and became Gilman Island. His rage satiated, Eleazer proceeded to fund a glorious institution along the river's banks with the goal of teaching young men the secrets of life and mixed drinks; Psi U. As the fame of Psi U grew, many, but not that many, flocked to study at the master's alter. Soon a College sprang up around it.
And that is how Dartmouth came to be.
I was mulling over this lore as I was crossing the mighty plains of Indiana and reflecting on my own mythical journey back to Dartmouth, which is what this article is about after all.
Last March I left Dartmouth for the first time in seven terms. I returned to my native Wisconsin and worked in a surgery unit, specifically the orthopedics core of the largest hospitals in the state. Though the job was intense, the hardest part of all was adapting to life outside of Dartmouth. My first night home was spent in a ditch. After hours of fruitlessly waving my ID in front of the locked door, I finally gave up and passed where I stood. Or my first night "out" where I was rudely thrown "out" of the bar for breaking the handles off of the ping-pong paddles.
Things improved, but just as I began to regain my feet I packed up and left for Ireland to study at Trinity College. There I learned that there is no such thing as "light" beer in Ireland and that dating girls involves more than taking them to porch crawlers once a week. With time, though, I became as familiar with the streets of Dublin as the Baker stacks. Just as I was really starting to feel at home, it was time to cross another ocean to land in Korea. I learned many things in Korea. For instance the faerie language invented by two dark-haired girls sitting behind me in freshmen physics had somehow become very popular overseas. Also, that there are 20 ways to eat oxtail, 400 to consume pickled cabbage and thousands of ways to serve tea, none of which will appear on a DDS menu.
Now Korea I never got the hang of, so it was with a slight sigh of relief that I boarded the last of fourteen flights that would take me home and soon on to Dartmouth. Days later I was safely in the secret H-Coo compound pulling my pirate boots on and inspecting the stripe shaved down my head. I reviewed the dance to a nearly-convicted pedophile's smash hit from almost thirty years ago and smiled. No matter how weird the rest of the world got, there was always Dartmouth to come home to, at least for one more year.
