The Colby Echo

Issue date: 3/2/07 Section: Opinions

Imagine embarking on a four year version of COOT. You're thrown in with a group of random individuals and you are expected to get along, so you do. You brave the elements and the hardships that come to you in turn, and during these times you watch each other and learn more about each other than you ever could have by simply talking or sitting at a table. And then, of course, there are the night times spent warming your bones and watching faces glow in front of bonfires. After the first year, you have a sense of who everyone in your group is. After four-years, you have become each other in subtle, delicate ways. Your individuality is not gone, but your edges are blurred gently where you intersect everyone else.

My high school experience was a four year COOT trip. With a graduation class of 67, everyone in my grade had a personal relationship with every other person within the grade, and then some. I knew the quirks and nuances of every classmate: what would make them smile, make them angry and make them cry. Living in southern New Hampshire, we were not diverse in many ways. We were at least 80 percent white, and though we were not totally economically uniform, there were no vast differences between most peoples' situations. Why, then, did it feel so rich with culture and with diversity? To put it simply: we were forced to overlap. With only 67 kids, it was necessary to put aside any differences we had and form friendships based on openness and compassion as opposed to similarities. My best friends from high school are some of the most amazing people I will ever know and they've changed me deeper than I knew people could. What chills me most, though, is that had I been in a larger school, I would have never been friends with any a single one of them.

The fiction writer in a black trench coat who tried and fails to speak Latin, the handsome Broadway-bound actor who performed my favorite songs on my birthday, the compassionate and sweet equestrian and star athlete who makes a killer peanut butter brownie cake, the goofy boy in a sweater vest that idolizes Rivers Cuomo and records songs on his own computer, the valedictorian who is not above reading Cosmo magazine and who is addicted to Diet Coke, and the curly haired boy who is exceptional at literally everything he does and who cries when he finishes books that he loves. These are my best friends, the people I trust with my life, and honestly...we don't have all that much in common. We were forced to be friends, really, by the size of our school, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

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