Making Mississippi (and Bowdoin) Home

Talk of the Quad: Biking in India: More Than Just Point A to Point B

My primary mode of transportation around the chaotic, traffic-choked Indian metropolis I am calling home this semester is a retro-looking yellow fixed-gear bicycle with a big basket in the front, the kind of upright job the kids ride around in “Stand By Me” or “Now and Then.”
I almost look like I’ve made a wrong turn out of my 1960’s suburban cul-de-sac, except for the decidedly not-nostalgic helmet I bought the first day I took the thing out on the roads. This was not entirely my own decision—when I told my mother I was going to be biking, she asked if I had a helmet. When I said I didn’t, and that athough bikes are ubiquitous here, protective headgear is not, she wondered whether I wouldn’t feel very stupid if I ever sustained an injury I could have prevented but didn’t because I was worried about standing out. (Her point was well taken, since in Pune, as a white woman wearing jeans and standing a good few inches above at least half the people I pass by, I’ve already pretty much lost the battle of not standing out. So I wear the helmet and endure feeling like a complete dork, and repeat the mantra, “better to be uncool and sentient, than cool and vegetative,” while I’m en route.)
Along with Vespa-type scooters and motorcycles, bicycles are definitely one of the popular ways to get around in Pune. On a bicycle you can cut through the gaps between cars and trucks to the front of a line of traffic, or successfully run red lights—as long as no cars are coming perpendicularly to you.

Talk of the Quad: The Bowdoin mystique

I visited Bowdoin for the first time in February 2011 and stayed in one of the hotels at the desperate end of Pleasant Street, right off of Route 295. To the 17-year-old me who had grown up in a beach suburb of Los Angeles, the opposite corner of the nation was more naturally grim than I had expected. Its buildings seemed to abide the weather with an aged melancholy, as if past generations had fought nature and settled for a stalemate that still held. I remember standing in the deserted and windy stretch of restaurants near the College feeling like Brunswick was a literal ghost town.
When I arrived, I had no sense of what New England life was like in any season. I’m not sure I was even aware of Dunkin’ Donuts, let alone Tim Horton’s. My only frame of reference came from school. I was taking AP U.S. History and American Lit, and junior year academic overdrive shoved a heap of historical associations to the front of my mind. Didn’t James Bowdoin put down Shay’s Rebellion? I’d commit suicide too if I was Ethan Frome and I was this cold all the time. Just focus on the tour, geez.
The character that kept popping up was Nathaniel Hawthorne, Class of 1825, whose stories I had recently been reading. It was all so novel—I connected the towers, shadows and lamp-lit walks of the College with the eerie townscapes of his fiction. The dark outlines of the Pines gave off the same foreboding as the forest that swallowed up Goodman Brown, and the severity of colonial houses seemed to hide unknown evils behind closed doors.

Talk of the Quad

Making Mississippi (and Bowdoin) Home

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Carolyn Veilleux

Staff Writer

April 4, 2013

As the college application process concludes for high school seniors, newly admitted students are faced with the decision to enroll—or not—at Bowdoin next fall. As a current first year, this seems like a distant memory, though it reminds me of what convinced me that Bowdoin was for me.

Comparable to many other NESCAC schools, Bowdoin offers a multitude of resources, rigorous academics and a picturesque campus. While I heavily considered these factors, what ultimately drew me to Bowdoin was how I instantly felt at home; after all, the first line of the Offer of the College is “To be at home in all lands and ages.” Perhaps I’m still in the honeymoon phase of my time here, but Bowdoin has definitely become a home for me in the last seven months. This became far clearer upon return from an Alternative Spring Break trip to Pontotoc Valley, Miss.

Prior to the trip, the student leaders assigned the reading, “Have faith in understanding,” an Orient article written by Steve Kolowich in 2006 about his experiences on the trip. Kolowich acknowledged the preconceptions he had prior to his arrival in the South, which were comparable to my group’s collective thoughts about “red states, religious yahoos, ‘values’ voters, country bumpkins carousing around in pickup flatbeds with their shotguns and hounds, stopping periodically to participate in a hootenanny and/or elect Bush.”

Collectively, everyone on the trip had little experience in the “cultural South;” we were taken aback upon arrival in Pontotoc, a town in northern Mississippi filled with a litany of Baptist churches—we spent the week in By Faith Baptist Church—and vacated shops.

I really didn’t know any of the students I was about to spend the next week with working for Habitat for Humanity. I was wary of how we would come together as a group and I feared awkwardness with the other students on the trip—we were thrown into this situation far outside of the comfortable “Bowdoin bubble.” However, the group positively adapted to the different lifestyle where, for example, prayer was obligatory before and after most activities.

I recall that my initial reasons for participating in ASB were to fulfill the mission of the Common Good outside of the Brunswick community, while having an opportunity to explore the South by enjoying the cuisine, walking through Memphis, and conversing with locals. While I did learn how to install blinds, caulk a bathroom, and prepare a house for flooring installation, I came away with much more than just construction tips.

I intended to help make a home in Mississippi for an unknown family (the trip was aptly named “Making Mississippi Home”); however, I inadvertently made Bowdoin feel more like home. This is due in part to forging a connection with 11 random classmates and coming to understand that many others at the College share my goals, interests and beliefs. I came away from ASB with a rekindled passion to be an involved member not only of the Bowdoin community, but also of whatever community I may find myself in.

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