The cousins had a romp in New Hampshire this weekend that will live on in family memory for a long, long time. My niece Evvy graduated from Dartmouth on Sunday in a raging blaze of keg parties, song, high fives, tears, and wide expanses of perfect green lawn — the green, green, green lawns of June and of youth at its happiest. There were brass bands, buckets and pails-ful of iced lattes for the hung over, sore feet from tromping up and down campus endlessly in our best summer sandals, and a Saturday-morning pickup tennis match on the courts down East Wheelock Street.
Teddy, Nettie, and I made Evvy’s grad weekend a much-needed mini-vacation. Teddy joined the travel party reluctantly, voicing a preference for staying home alone to loll about the house, but by the time he and his cousin Ellis (both 16) rolled back to our accommodations ‘round midnight on Friday, having attended an actual frat party at the frat that inspired “Animal House,” he was ready to laconically admit that he was possibly having fun.
We stayed in a Dartmouth College dorm, which seemed like a brilliant idea to me; what fun to stay directly on campus and soak in the atmosphere. The kids were sour about it on the drive up: Could we not stay in a hotel?
When we pulled up to the reception tent on Friday afternoon to collect our room keys, we found the class of 1976 — the first class at Dartmouth to admit women — gathered en masse under the big marquee for their 50th reunion, all wearing lanyards, matching straw hats, and outfits with various creative touches of Dartmouth forest-green. The Dartmouth aesthetic — its particular image within the Ivy League — may be old-fashioned, smacking of the Eisenhower era in its preference for flat-front chinos and Scottish-plaid picnic blankets on game day, but it is really strong, branding-wise and mood-wise. Dartmouth is dripping with tradition and Ivy League “aura,” as the kids say. The entire town of Hanover is burnished with the glow of worn brass doorknobs and English ivy, bell towers shining in the perfect New Hampshire sky overhead. We admired the look: dark-green sweaters with big “D”s knitted into the front, green-and-white-striped dresses, endless varieties of green hats — including, notably, some very funny freshman beanies and green-felt Robin Hood caps saved as holy relics and worn by the most ancient and wizened alumni in attendance — and green bandannas worn by Labrador retrievers with their pink tongues hanging out in the heat.
Our room assignments turned out to be in Gile Hall, one of a long row of old, brick dormitories on the west side of the big, main green where the commencement ceremony would be held. Gile was built in 1927 but felt even older, with the stairwell steps made of heavy gray-black stone, heavy wooden doors and window trim, white-and-black vintage tiles in our en-suite bathroom, and whitewashed, worn brick walls in the hallways. There was no air-conditioning and I had to make a run to CVS to buy a window fan, or we wouldn’t have been able to sleep. We kept the windows open and all weekend long were serenaded by the exuberant noise of the graduating class: whoops, packs of kids singing, girls shrieking, boys bellowing for their friends, e-bikes roaring up and down, trombones practicing, trucks unloading catering equipment. . . .
Dartmouth has a reputation as a party school and, well, they’re not kidding! We went to three parties on Saturday alone (six parties, total, over the weekend) and there was either a bar-service trailer-truck or a conglomeration of kegs and coolers at each of them. I kept cornering students and asking them if I might get to see Keggy — Dartmouth’s faux-mascot, a satire mascot in the form of a beer keg — during grad weekend, but, sadly, no one had seen him lately.
Again and again, the current-day Dartmouth culture reminded me of the belated glimpse of the 1950s Ivy League that I caught when I was very young and attended my dad’s Dartmouth reunions in the 1970s. When I was little, we drove up to Hanover in our big International Travelall truck (green, come to think of it) for annual football-game trips — the quintessential tailgate weekend, with orange and crimson leaves rustling to the ground and Scotch eggs in the picnic hamper. On one of these homecoming trips, when I was perhaps 11 or 12, my father snuck us all into the basement of his old fraternity on a Sunday morning, while the brothers slept it off upstairs, to show us what a frat was like. This was in the late 1970s, but I can still feel the grip the sticky floor, coated heavily with half-dried beer, had on the soles of my sneakers. I can still smell the powerful stench of generational hops. There was a jukebox in the basement of my dad’s old frat and I strolled over to it — my sneakers going shtick, shtick with each step — and punched a button, and “Take the Money and Run” by Steve Miller Band blared out at full volume, shattering the silence of the slumbering house. We ran.
Singing was heard in every direction, all graduation weekend, morning, noon, and all night. Tradition. We were marinated in tradition like cherries in brandy. I can remember a Dartmouth a capella group singing “Help Me, Rhonda” by the Beach Boys that weekend when I accidentally woke the brothers of my father’s fraternity, and thinking, at 12, that they were the cutest, most handsome young men I’d ever seen. My niece Evvy sang with her own a capella group, the Subtleties (or “Subs”), on Saturday — somehow wedging a performance into her crammed round of goodbyes and dawn rituals. She brought down the freaking house with her solo on “Shake It Off.” The entire audience cried big, fat tears when the Subs ended the show with “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac.
The sun shone perfectly and the grass was dry on Sunday as the graduates marched in their regalia up Wheelock Street and down the green to take their seats to hear the speeches and throw their mortarboards into the air. They wore not just the classic long, flowing robes but satin sashes — blue, red, yellow, all colors — commemorating their membership in various clubs or Greek organizations, as well as long tassels twisted and knotted (purple, gold, orange, black) to demarcate I’m not sure what old-school arcana or private membership. Many of them carried wooden walking sticks carved with the symbols of their secret societies. I saw griffons, dragons, swans, cobras, a Sphinx, a compass . . .
By 2 in the afternoon on Sunday, Nettie and Teddy and I had eaten a final sandwich and climbed back in our car to roll back down through Massachusetts and Connecticut to catch the ferry home.
Before we took off, we stopped back at Evvy’s apartment — in a townhouse row on West Wheelock — to offer her the use of the trunk of our Honda. She had not yet packed up all her boxes and bags of memories and we thought maybe she might need space in our car for assistance in the grand decampment. There had been a rager at her townhouse complex the night before, and as we pulled into the parking area behind the house, our wheels crunched over plastic Solo cups. There were hundreds of beer and cooler cans and tiny bottles of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky strewn all over the backyard.
“We were the biggest party in town last night,” Evvy said, opening the door to us. “We were tause.” (“Tause,” as I learned from Nettie this spring, means “top house.” Generally, it refers to the top Greek house on a college campus, but Evvy was using the term jokingly.) She had huge mascara rings under her big, lovely brown eyes: “I’ve been crying,” she said. She hadn’t slept since Friday night.