The source of the noise was a member of my first-year seminar, but no more than an acquaintance.  She was sporting a bright pink bikini, a ski helmet, goggles and the furriest boots I had seen since arriving at Midd as a first-year not more than two months before.  It had already been a non-descript week night, the kind where Chinese homework, 5:00 dinner and astronomy lab all mesh together to form one long block of time capable of sufficiently making me exhausted to the point where it was not hard to want to pass out for a good week.  So yes, it was my gut and not my common sense that responded to the voice instead of tuning it out.

I soon learned that she was from Southern California, San Diego specifically.  And the raucous she was causing was because although she had gone on a couple ski trips with her parents, if she hadn’t been able to trust what others had told her then she must have been in disbelief when snow started to fall from the sky. 

What made her decide to change into her present outfit is another story.  But what made me decide to join her, well that’s a question we can talk a little about.

In a short time I found myself running around outside in my new friends company, also dressed in similar attire that one might associate more with the beach than Battell Beach.  I suppose that even for me the first snow of the year was an exciting occasion.  As a first-year I was extremely excited to try out skiing for the first time in decent conditions and I had already heard about the type of place Middlebury turns into when the white stuff first arrives.  For lack of a better (and less cheesy) description, it was magical and liberating, and perhaps a little foolish, but for all the right reasons.

And it’s because of this that three years later I found myself running through McCardell Bicentennial Hall wearing very little clothing while announcing to others who are much more hard-working than I am that the first snow of the year had indeed arrived.  It’s the fourth and last time my friend Lizz and I will partake in the tradition and despite the fact that it may seem strange, while making a fool of myself I couldn’t help but feel pretty sentimental. 

There is no doubt in my mind that I am going to have an extremely difficult time saying goodbye to this place.  And perhaps the reason why I am stressing about it now is that everyone around me is applying for jobs, talking about next year and focusing primarily on something they call the “real world.” 

While this is good and all, I can’t help but focus on the present situation and how it is often the stroke of luck (and our ability to trust our gut reaction) that leads us to do great things.  Lizz and I have been incredibly close friends since and had I not decided to be a little crazy, who knows if we would even know each other.

But that’s what I love about Middlebury and how I am going to have such a hard time leaving.  It’s the nonsensical decisions we make and the lessons we learn from them.  It’s the opportunities we have to, in a sense, live a little.  It’s the wind whipping in your face as the first flakes fall around you.

In the fall of 2006, my first year at Middlebury, a group of us got together on Sunday mornings to combat the ill-effects of a Saturday night by putting on rather haughty clothing and our best British accents as we competed in a rousing round of croquet.  Soon we began to brainstorm about other ways to ensure that we could drag ourselves out of bed before 11:00 and before long, under the leadership of Xander Manshel, we found ourselves with capes on our backs, brooms between our legs and running around Battell Beach chasing our hallmate cross country runner/wrestler Rainey Johnson dressed in yellow. 

All of it generated some buzz, albeit not all positive, but much of it merely dismissing the concept as something “freshmen” do.  Our first World Cup event was later that fall when as a member of the “Falmouth Falcons” our team captured the first trophy (made suggestively out of empty purchases from the liquor store) after a sensational snitch grab by the seeker turned commissioner, Alex Benepe.

The rest, as they say, is history.  This week’s past event included 14 different colleges as far flung as Lousiana State University, the University of Washington and even McGill.  Although I personally have tried to distance myself from the scene a little bit (merely out of respect that I am past my time), our suite agreed to host 11 LSU students for Saturday and Sunday nights.  I actually had no idea what to expect out of them, and probably shouldn’t have been surprised when I found them to be kind, fun-loving and endearing.  They themselves were blown away by Middlebury.  All they did was talk about the breathtaking colors, the quaintness of the town and how friendly everybody was.  Of course we were not without our cultural differences, the best of which was when they knocked on my door at 7:30 A.M. Sunday morning, dressed in their Sunday best, asking me where the nearest Catholic church was in town.  So to say the event wasn’t out of the ordinary certainly is a mischaracterization. 

And there is so much to say about it, because it truly does represent some of the best of Middlebury’s creative minds, organizational prowess and sheer sense of fun.  These things are easy enough to tell.  I guess what made me so happy about the event was the way in which I saw the community getting involved.

One of things that first troubled me about Middlebury was that before coming here I had been warned that at times the town-gown relations had been strained in the past.  Because of this, I love going to hockey games and seeing kids that I’ve met at Mary Hogan Elementary wearing the jersey of my really good friend who is the starting goalie, worshipping him like a professional.  I love going to events like Midd-mayhem, an all-campus picnic with rides, games and music, where on a beautiful spring day everybody is outside just enjoying each other’s company. 

That, I think, is what I find so awesome about the Quidditch World Cup.  I saw everyone from my adviser to Provost Tim Spears to the people who I see at Steve’s Park Diner every Friday morning.  It was an event that was about Middlebury, the town and not the college.  It’s easy to lose sight of where we are and for me at least it is such a wonderful thing to both be a part of and also share such a wonderful place with guests from all over the country. 

From something we did to wake ourselves up on Sunday mornings to a community-uniting event.  I suppose that if we look at it this way it’s not hard to appreciate a bunch of kids waddling around on brooms, chasing after a golden snitch, but also perhaps something even more significant to the rest of us. 

P.S.  Check out this video 7 Days Vermont did if you are interested in a more technical description of Quidditch! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kfoEf-R3qY&fmt=18

For one, I returned to find a Middlebury College that physically in many ways did not resemble the home I had stored in my brain as a reminder of my roots. A new building had come to life, a construction site that magically had become a center of liberal-arts life. In that building, a room where time appeared to be playing a joke on itself as first-year fiddled with their new iPods and Blackberries under the watchful eyes of Julian Abernethy (a reference I hope you alumni get).

But while time had brought on the birth of the new, time had caught up to those who tried to outrun it. A dining hall, familiar to all those who are proud to call themselves Middlebury graduates, fell to the chopping block, or as Matthew Biette, head of Dining Services, might say: to the tools of the plastic surgeon. However in its place students now go to a dining hall able to restore its legacy as the provider of all things delicious (read: fried), given of course that enough care has been taken to restore its rightful personality at the same time that it caters to students not looking to gain the “freshman 50.” Indeed for someone who has completely lost their sense of time it is easy get lost when trying to appreciate the death of old things that felt new and the birth of new things that feel old. Not to mention as a senior it is difficult to imagine planning for years that have ones in the tens column.

To be a little less cryptic, the campus has undergone a huge amount of change, even in the short time that I was gone. Proctor, long a safe haven to many is now open to no one (albeit temporarily) and the school is now sporting a shiny new center for environmental studies (Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest) and a renovated center for humanities (old Starr Library now called the Axinn Center).  For those that try to have a sense of time passing on this campus, with so many changes going on its certainly a little unsettling.

Although, because I am learning to face this time crunch I also have come to appreciate all that time has given me just by ignoring it. Perhaps what I have learned the most is in no way do things here move linearly. Time has a way of skipping ahead of itself and even doubling back on its progress in order to catch up to where it needs to be. What I mean is that as a senior I am capable of watching the clock all the way to 0, I have so much more control over how I let time dictate my life that by losing a sense of time things rely on me getting them done and not the passing of minutes.

And it is with that sense of knowing one’s own control, in which I am often happy to tell people that although I would have wanted to let the death of time happen, I feel the need to spare it; at least for just a little longer. At the very least till I decide time and I have come to an agreement on how it’ll treat me and how I’ll treat it.

That I even think of myself right now “here” at Middlebury underscores how Middlebury is more than just a beautiful campus and cozy dorm room looking out at the Green Mountains in Vermont or even a discrete time period of a time. At this moment, I am in Hangzhou, China, spending my winter and spring terms at the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School in China. Though thousands of miles from Middlebury, Vermont, I feel no less a part of the Middlebury campus, and no less close to my friends spread over the globe, much the same way Midd alums are. No doubt being away from Vermont makes me especially appreciative of how for alumni the Middlebury experience can stay with you long after graduation.

Being here in Hangzhou is also a ready reminder of the tremendous influence Middlebury has already had on my life, after only two and one half years. I came to Middlebury with no knowledge of the language of Chinese. Now, I am travelling around China completely conversant in Mandarin and enjoying each and every day of my time here. This summer, I hope to work at the Olympics but also recently received a Midd grant to do environmental research during the summer here for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which will use both my Mandarin and the knowledge I gained this past fall of geographic information systems (GIS) in my geography class (tough, but amazing!). Yes, the classes at Middlebury are demanding (Chinese summer school was brutal!), but the returns are spectacular.

While studying abroad, I’ve also come to appreciate even better the uniqueness of the academic and social environment that Midd provides. Where else do you find undergraduates with limitless opportunities to study with world-famous academics? Where else do you regularly witness and participate in legitimate debates occurring between professors and students, with both sides fairly questioning each other’s reasoning? Certainly not here in China, where to question a teacher on a matter of principle is not just unruly, but, for some, may be the end of an academic career.

Middlebury is a wonderfully different and in ways that I am only now beginning to appreciate. It is the kind of place where, as a first-year, a tenured professor of 25 years came to my dorm to make sure I was alright after I had missed class that day (and thankfully this student was actually in his dorm room sick!). It is the kind of place where I can for the first time belong to a rock band that brings together students of completely different backgrounds and aspirations, but who share a common love of creating music together late at night when the studying is over. And it is the kind of place where, again as first-years, a group of students can spontaneously create a new campus sport (Quidditch) that has since spread throughout the campus and even reached other schools, allowing for Midd to hose the first “World Cup” of Quidditch this past fall (my roommate, a cross-country runner, serves as “the Snitch”).

Midd is the kind of place that can and does change lives, as it already has my own. And, I expect, is the kind of place that continues to influence the lives of a lot of amazing alumni long after graduate.

That’s special.