"And damned if it didn't snow," Beverage recalls. "Not just a little snow, a real blizzard. Family cars stuck in the parking lot and all that."
A blizzard three weeks after the official beginning of spring, irrefutable evidence of how long Maine winters can last, is not the sort of thing that shows up in admissions viewbooks. It was almost enough to make the perpetually cheerful dean glum. But when families arrive, the show must go on. So the admissions staff turned up the thermostat, helped push the snow-bound cars and borrowed enough L.L. Bean boots to outfit the students' families for their campus tours. Everywhere the visitors went they got the same warm reception--small kindnesses and a spirit of cooperation that have become trademarks of Colby's campus climate.
"Adversity can really bring people together. They saw the sense of community that was fostered by all this," said Beverage. "All five of those kids enrolled here."
Talk to long-term Maine residents and their enthusiasm for the pleasures of winter is likely to be tempered by specific details--the sun setting at 4 p.m. in December or the way the wind sends spray from a snowblower back in your face and down your neck. They may take pride in the severity of Maine winter, but once the novelty wears off it becomes a test of endurance: chipping ice off windshields in February, figuring out where to pile the snow in March and nursing dashed hopes when that odd April blizzard blows in. They like winter, they will tell you, but . . .
Students are less ambivalent. They embrace the season with seemingly universal affection, and the winter they wish for is the old-fashioned kind. Winter with shoulders on it.
There is some self-selection at work. Students who hate winter don't generally apply to Maine colleges. And, suggested Amanda Bligh '97, those who can't cope, transfer. But no complaints?
Maybe that's just part of getting psyched up for Maine's longest season. Maybe, as the counseling staff suggests, self-conscious students fear complaining would be perceived as a sign of vulnerability. Maybe it's because students on campus don't have to shovel sidewalks or plow driveways and can live well insulated from the elements if they want to, complete with a heated field house. And maybe they'll all be singing a different tune when they return from spring break and find the baseball team in that field house, practicing for another season postponed until the snow melts.
Winter's arrival is a celebratory event for students. Every year the first snow triggers a primordial delight that most students trace to childhood memories. "This weekend there were hundreds of people outside playing around and sliding after the first snow," said Peter Downing '99 following the first legitimate accumulation on November 16. Snow-football and snow-Frisbee games materialized on the mall. A student from Florida raced outside with a video camera--and pointed it straight up. And the communications office waited for President Bill Cotter's ritual visit, when he bounds up the steps two at a time to make sure there will be a photographer out to capture the magic that snow works on an already gorgeous campus.
"One thing you can expect here is that you are going to have winter," said Donaldson Koons, emeritus Dana Professor of Geology, who came to Colby 50 winters ago and is the unofficial custodian of meteorological trivia. "There's not a damn thing you can do about it."
That, it turns out, is a major reason why many students choose to attend Colby. "In San Diego there are two kinds of weather--hot and hotter," said Miguel Leff '98, who came to Maine from Mexico City and now calls southern California home. "Winter is my favorite season here. I visited Colby in March in a year when there was tons of snow, and I loved it. But I never knew it was going to be this good. I'm saying no to a very attractive January internship with a bank in New York this year because I don't want to miss January here."
