When we applied to Bowdoin, about a third of us wrote about intellectual engagement. Another third, our commitment to the common good. The last group, myself included, wrote about connection to place.
This past Saturday, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, stumbled out of bed into fleece-lined leggings and fleece-lined flannel and drove with three friends out to Morse Mountain. As we walked down the dirt path and the darkness thinned to a grey morning light filtering through the leaves, it didn’t feel like 6 a.m., but like a moment out of time. Over the white spread of sandy beach, the unpredicted heavy clouds parted right as the sun floated to fullness. We watched tiny birds scampering in the waves, looking for nibbles of food. I swam, and the water was warmer than the air. As we walked back with salted skin, the mosquitoes bit us to distraction and connection to place was palpable. It itched and it tingled, it was tired eyes and exhilaration.
A Morse Mountain sunrise is only one way to understand place (though a way I definitely recommend). Place is an undeniable and essentially unavoidable commonality. All Bowdoin students share the four corners of the quad, the walk to Hannaford and the 4 p.m. winter sunsets. But what makes all Bowdoin students different is the ways they explore, experience, relate and connect to their physical location.
Places absorb negative and positive attributes and hold the collective experiences of all people who have passed through them and taken photos or just taken in the view. Some students avoid Hatch because they find the atmosphere depressingly dreary. Others linger, walking past the Edwards playground, remembering a first kiss. Some students will never step into Baxter Basement, or the Women’s Resource Center; for others, those spaces will become emblematic of their college experience. Some students will return to Bowdoin for every reunion, others will graduate and never look back to Maine.
We talk about safe spaces and unsafe spaces; quiet spaces and party spaces; private spaces and public spaces; spaces that we feel belong to us and spaces that we feel excluded from. Place usually stands for physical location, while space implies our inhabitation or reaction to that place. I want to write about connections to the places we share as Bowdoin students, on campus and in the surrounding Maine area, and how our common places can become very different spaces.
I feel a physical love for Maine’s natural beauty, for the seashore, for the pines and the patterns of birds flying overhead. But that beauty, like Bowdoin and Brunswick, does not exist in a vacuum. Beyond Bowdoin experiences, I want to take the time to learn the story of the places I inhabit as a four-year resident in Maine. History informs the present and places hold history beyond any time limit I could impose as a student or writer.
Bowdoin promises a deep connection to place—where does that promise take us? From Smith Union to Morse Mountain, the places around me have been engaging students and locals alike for years. Now is the time to look around a little more closely, to think twice about the past and to continue exploring what no one can walk away from: the place in which they live.