I began laughing the moment I opened the thin, innocent-looking envelope. Someone, or perhaps more than one person, had anonymously mailed me a photo of an inside joke from my DOC Trip, scrawling various one-liners on the outside of the envelope. A melange of memories accompanied the photo -- not showering for five days, awkward moments from living in the wilderness, and how five days in the New Hampshire-Vermont forests transformed a group of nine strangers into a family unit.
"Family?" I asked myself, clutching my photo, wandering around the Hop. When did I begin thinking of nine people who I never met before, in a place I never set foot in as my new family? I spent the first night of my DOC Trip crying in my sleeping bag, bitterly wishing I had never signed up to spend my first days as a college student in the middle of nowhere -- miles and miles away from my real parents.
The wood walls of the cabin around me lacked the photo collages of my suburban Kansas bedroom. I had developed little rapport with the people sleeping around me through a few formulaic exchanges, and, not suprisingly, our early conversations fell somewhere between blatantly awkward and glaringly absent.
Like Emily Johnson ("At Home In Hanover," Oct. 6), I quickly drew the line between my old and new homes. As I longed for the memories, people and friendships enshrined in my photo collage at home, the strangers whom I was forced to coexist with on my DOC trip made the bareness of the cabin walls around me painfully obvious.
Somehow the line between my old and new family blurred during the five days in the wilderness as we nicknamed our Trip leaders "Mom" and "Dad." Between cooking, hiking and getting to know each other through conversation, I began to draw parallels between my family life in Kansas and my new makeshift family unit in New Hampshire.
Trip expectations for my cooking mirrored my parents' goals -- no fires, no deaths, quasi-edible food equal success. The hiking trip dialogues resembled car talk on my family road trips to Disneyland: various chimes of "Are we there yet?," increasingly exasperated replies of "Not yet" from "Mom" and "Dad," and, finally, various word games designed to entertain and distract the trippee "children."
The familial theme continued when I returned to Hanover. While portions of my Trip family still live near me, my family unit expanded to include dorm mates.
In the dorm, I bonded with my floormates as we butchered our laundry together -- putting detergent in the bleach slot and mistaking the dryer for the washer. Consequently, I gained a sense of family with my floormates as we shared giggles after a dormmate shrunk his bedsheets to a small swatch of fabric.
Cooking in my dorm was another reminder of expectations from home. Group 'schombbing to the Hop was even reminiscent of family road trips with more siblings, random bits of conversation, and, of course, the occasional "Are we there yet?"
Despite these parallels between my old and new families, I didn't officially link them until, coincidentally, my parents mailed an album full of childhood memories, leaving empty slots for photos of my Dartmouth family. I added group photos from my Trip between snapshots of my nine-year-old self, gleefully placing rabbit years on my parents' heads at Disneyland. Snapshots of scenic views seen on the trail went between road-trip highlights. Each photo in my album represents a snapshot of the family I love or the family I have come to love at Dartmouth. Empty spaces remain for future additons.
I deliberately excluded the Trip photo that appeared in my Hinman Box from my album, opting to hang it up instead as part of the new photo collage that I'm assembling on the wall of my dorm room.
