With the exception of the time my friend Sally and I accidentally drove a four-wheeler off a cliff in Lake City, Colorado we managed to throw ourselves off and remain mostly unharmed, but the ATV ended up at the bottom of the mountain, crushed like a beer can I have never been more afraid for my life than during the story I am about to tell you.
The van was white, a Sprinter van, with the windows blacked by cardboard and duck tape. Bad sign. There were no seats, just an awkward couch and a dirty futon on the floor. Bad sign number 2. I stood there in the parking lot of the ABCDs, contemplating getting in the van and silently freaking the fuck out.
This was Memorial Day weekend of my sophomore year.
I looked at Sally, as usual, my partner in crime. "We're going to have so much fun!" she said. I looked at Ursula and Daisy, our other two companions. Terrified.
"Either that or bleed to death in a ditch in Mexico," Daisy said.
"Seriously guys, I've got to finish this paper," I was saying
So of course we all climbed into the back of the terrorist van and let some older, grizzled men shut the door. Sally said they were Heorots? Alums. Whatever.
It was dark, and hot. We lay on the futon, clutching each other, laughing nervously and trying to pretend like we were not worried that we had been kidnapped, or sold into slavery.
The van rumbled out of the parking lot and off to we had no idea where. Because the windows were blacked, we could have been going anywhere. Sally seemed to remember that our destination was in the Berkshires. A few terrifying hours later the door opened and we crawled into the blazing sunlight in the parking lot of a McDonalds.
"Oh my god."
What were we high on, that made us take this leap of faith? Lilacs, and Gertrude Stein, and thesis-writing I walked straight from the 1902 room into that van. We were just so desperate to get out of Hanover, even if it meant being kidnapped. Luckily, though, we did not end up as human nuggets in a dumpster behind McDonalds. We were told to clamber back inside the terror-van, and after another couple of seemingly endless hours, our cocoon came to a stop again.
The door opened, and we spilled out onto the lush lawn of a lake house in the hills of Massachusetts. The lake was gleaming, and we could hear the sounds of a party going.
We stumbled down the lawn, and there it was: Paradise. Pong, and tables and tables of bottles of liquor, and kielbasas grilling, and a green expanse of grass leading down to the sandy shore of a peaceful lake.
Of course, none of us besides Sally had ever met anyone at this party, or even been invited hence our arrival by hook or by crook in the back of a strange van. Needless to say, we paraded straight to the bar and introduced ourselves to the whiskey.
It was one of the greatest vikes of my life. We ran their table, we drank their drank, we crushed their kielbasas. We swam in their lake and basked on their dock and danced on their porch and played pong with margaritas starting at 9:30 the next morning. Vike, vike, vike.
I don't remember a single name from the weekend and doubt any of them remember mine. Supposedly everyone at the party had gone to Dartmouth at one point or another, but I don't think we even bothered with cordial conversations. They were older, much older, talking about business schools and I-banking; and we were drunker, much drunker, and dancing by ourselves on the dock.
As it is now that same time of year again, I've been thinking about that crazy, wonderful weekend. With graduation approaching, I think a lot of us feel kind of the same way: on the one hand, ready or even desperate to get out of Hanover; and on the other hand, afraid that we are being sold into slavery.
The answer as always if you ask me, is to vike. I've written about this before and, it's probably the closest thing I have to life philosophy: viking, as a verb.
Viking is not merely about taking advantage of people, or the world. It's about taking risks. It's about taking the situation into your own hands, and making it what you want. It's about doing, instead of being done to.
Sure, life after Dartmouth might resemble a dirty mattress in the back of a dark van but you've got to get in, and go for it. On the other side might be a lake house, or Manhattan, or who knows. Whatever it is, you will have to make it what you want it to be, or take from it what you want to take.
Life after Dartmouth is a leap of faith. We're entering a world we might not be able to control, taking risks that might end up bring real mistakes. But we can't hold on to our past, or this place, any more than we can see our future, or afford to play it safe.
Sometimes you just have to hold your breath and go. Sometimes it's okay to have the windows blacked, to have no rearview and no plan except to make it work: just the windshield and a way forward. Sometimes it's okay just to have somebody with their foot on the gas, and you holding your breath, and no one looking back.
