Editor's Note: This week, we asked The Mirror's DDS Detective to take a break from her usual food-detecting and explain what, as a '13, she expects from Winter Carnival. Her conclusion? It cannot be done.
Three months ago, I donned a jersey and green face paint, ran around the bonfire an embarrassingly few number of times and um "forgot" to touch the fire.
About a month before that, I hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail while wearing Donald Duck sunglasses and a faux-fur turban, ate more coconut granola bars than I would care to admit and was educated about sustainability to the tune of Lady GaGa's "Poker Face" by a '10 dressed as a beer can.
Needless to say, my first two experiences with Dartmouth traditions were not at all what I expected so, naturally, I am eager yet absolutely terrified for what Winter Carnival has in store.
As freshmen, we aren't given much information. Sure, I have heard something about a Polar Bear Swim, a famous movie and a Colosseum snow sculpture. But in all honesty, I do not know what I will need to prepare myself for during this purportedly epic weekend.
Some of my friends know exactly what they are doing during Carnival. My ski patroller friend will be at the Skiway, helping run the competitions. My swimmer friend told me that it is tradition for the whole team to plunge into Occom Pond for the Polar Bear Swim. Even my sister, an '11, mentioned how busy Winter Carnival will be for her a capella group. (Insert shameless plug for the Rocks here).
But what about those of us who do not have a predetermined role in Winter Carnival? What is a food-detecting journalist like myself to do?
An attempt at Googling my problems away by searching "Dartmouth Winter Carnival" yielded an article in The D titled "Three arrests made over Dartmouth Winter Carnival," a rather official-looking report called "A Rager's Guide to Winter Carnival" in The Dartmouth Independent and a multimedia clip of Dartmouth students attempting to jump over a line of kegs on ice skates all of which honestly scared me more than excited me for the weekend ahead.
A few interrogatory blitzes to upperclassmen and some Wikipedia articles later, I knew the origins of the tradition, the past five Carnival themes and the IMDB rating (a respectable 6.5) for the 1939 movie, "Winter Carnival." Yet I still felt utterly unenlightened about what is supposed to be one of the most exciting weekends at Dartmouth.
And then it hit me.
If you Google "Dartmouth Outing Club First-Year Trips," you will be directed to the DOC's web site, where you will find a very brief description of Trips, a packing list and some words of reassurance to wary parents. Similarly, searching "Dartmouth Homecoming" will lead you to a Wikipedia page containing a long-winded history of Dartmouth Bonfires dating back to 1895. In actuality, there is a huge disconnect between what an Internet search tells you about these traditions and what they really are. I would not call Trips a time to "find your place and passion," as the DOC web site suggests, and running around a huge fire while being taunted by upperclassmen was hardly a history lesson. They do not post on the Internet that your lasagna dinner will be accompanied by a musical or that Homecoming is so much more than a football game.
In other words, there is something special about these traditions that cannot be captured in words or pictures, or even upperclassmen's stories of drunken debauchery it's just something I have to experience.
Going into Carnival, it is hard to deny my apprehensions. I don't know if I will pull the world's greatest human dogsled, I'm not all sure what a "Drag Ball" constitutes and any attempt of mine to jump over anything in skates would have probably landed me in Dick's House faster than you can say "keg stand." But instead of fretting over the prospect of going into cardiac arrest from swimming in near-freezing waters, I have decided to just embrace it all and roll with the things that come my way whatever they might be.
