Kalamazoo College’s campus is bookended by two community gardens. Walk down Academy Street, starting from the top of the hill at the intersection with Monroe and finishing at the railroad tracks at the bottom, and you will pass both of them, although you wouldn’t know it. Both are tucked away, impossible to find unless you have precise directions. Both are attracting more and more attention as the campus ramps up its efforts at sustainability. And both are growing more dreams than their small plots can hold.

A green garden right on campus

At the top of the hill, in the spacious backyard of an empty, college-owned house, is the plot that hosts the gardening class. As you walk up the driveway and around the tool shed, the noise of the campus fades and the neighboring houses and trees create a bubble of near silence. The garden itself is a flat, seventeen by twenty-eight foot plot partially covered by plastic sheets. Part of the rectangular patch of ground is still grassy, waiting to be cleared for planting. Besides the grass, there’s nothing green in sight at the moment.

To get this week’s session started, instructor Seema Jolly tells the class to check up on the progress of the seeds they planted last week. Students fold back the clear plastic sheets and peer down at the soil. At first glance, there’s not much to see, with the exception of one flourishing row of radish seedlings. Looking closer, the students spot a few tiny sprouts that will grow into beets, turnips, and lettuce. “A lot of gardening is just observation,” Jolly reminds the class. “When you just spend a little time and look at where you planted, you’ll start to see things sprout up.”

This garden is still in its infancy. It was created at the start of spring quarter to host a new gardening physical education course. The idea for a campus community garden came from Farms to K, but a lot of other players are involved, including the PE department, Facilities Management, Sodexo, and the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning. Amelia Katanski and Alison Geist, faculty members involved with Farms to K, pitched the gardening class idea to the PE department and contacted Jolly, a K alum with experience working and teaching in community gardens, to see if she wanted to teach.

Most of the students are seniors and will have graduated before these veggies are ready to come out of the ground, but Jolly says the class isn’t frustrated. “I’ve told [the students] that the PE gardening class is kind of a beginning step to creating a community effort on campus, and so I think framing it in that way makes it a little bit easier for the students to get on board with this, because it’s going to continue after they’re gone. They really are setting the foundation for a much bigger project than just their ten weeks here.”

How big of a project, exactly? And how to create a unified community effort on campus? As word about the new garden started to get around, there was a sudden surge of interest from faculty, staff, and students. Although this widespread enthusiasm looks promising for the garden’s future, there’s a downside: “Everybody’s got their own vision of what they think this garden to be, what it could turn into, and who it would be serving,” Jolly explains. Will the garden continue to be used for a class, or will it evolve into a community garden? Will the food go to the gardening students, to the school cafeteria, or to a food bank? Could the garden eventually generate revenue and become completely self-sustaining? Nothing has been decided.

If this wasn’t complicated enough already, there’s another garden just down the street, with its own tangled roots and its own dreams competing like plants for the sun. Tacked onto the side of the mammoth Markin Racquet Center, the long and narrow seventeen by forty-three foot plot seems smaller than it actually is. The sharp slope of the ground adds to the sensation of compression. While the gardening class’s infant garden is mostly dirt with a few razor-straight rows of seedlings, this garden is thriving, if a bit chaotic-looking. Kale plants line Markin’s brick wall with their raggedy-edged leaves and strawberries carpet the foreground. The plot is partially surrounded by a rickety-looking picket fence, and next to the entrance a hand-painted sign reads “D.I.R.T. Organic Garden.”

D.I.R.T., which stands for Digging In Renewable Turf, is the campus’s student gardening organization. D.I.R.T. has been around since 2004, and Ben Cooper and Tammy Pheuphong have been leaders since 2007. “We don’t really have a lot of formal meetings,” Pheuphong says, and indeed, a list of suggestions left for her by one of the former leaders includes the tip, “Have a party rather than a meeting whenever possible.”

The D.I.R.T. gardeners are laid back but hard working. Saturday mornings, Cooper and Pheuphong rally as many students as they can and head to the garden, rain or shine, to do tough physical labor. For the two seniors, it’s the combination of devotion and flexibility that has allowed them to hone their gardening skills and double D.I.R.T. membership during their three years as leaders: they are always experimenting with new methods and refining their techniques, whether it’s changing the organization’s promotional tactics or comparing different ways of preventing soil erosion. This spring they’re trying square foot planting: dividing a section of the plot into squares, each square being devoted to a specific plant, in order to see whether the plants will thrive so close to one another. Pheuphong explains that it takes about a year to figure out whether a project like this is going to work, which means that the garden is in a constant state of revision. Sometimes a project results in failure. “Gardening’s not instant gratification,” says Pheuphong.

With all the experimentation going on, it’s hard to measure the long-term impact of the D.I.R.T. garden. Although it is relatively established compared to the gardening class’s garden, it raises many of the same questions. The D.I.R.T. organization still hasn’t quite figured out what to do with the produce from the garden. Currently, the food is up for grabs: anyone on campus can share in the harvest. But a lot of the crops go to waste over the summer when the students are gone. Some ideas include donating the food to a food bank, or selling it at the local farmer’s market.

Plans for the garden’s future are also in a sketchy phase. Much of the decision-making will be left to Trace Redmond, a first-year student who will be taking over D.I.R.T. leadership after Cooper and Pheuphong graduate in June. In Redmond’s ideal vision, the garden would function more like a city community garden in which various groups would each have a plot. For starters, he wants to get the Living-Learning houses involved by giving each house its own plot, but that would mean expanding the garden or starting smaller gardens next to the houses themselves.

For now, though, there are only the two gardens, one at each end of the campus, bracketing something larger than life between their modest plots. There is a charge behind each, a community that wants to see its ideals of sustainability realized in the form of an abundance of fruits and vegetables. If this kind of cornucopia is the goal, then the campus’s gardens are coming up short. The gardening class’s garden hasn’t gotten much out of the ground yet, and the D.I.R.T. garden hasn’t decided what to do with the food it’s producing. So how do we assess their impact? Maybe it’s the human growth, not the vegetable. The networks that are created, the knowledge that is passed along, the passions that are born.

Trace Redmond, working in the garden

For example, Ben Cooper will participate in a summer internship at Sleeping Bear Dunes, where he will learn about ecosystems and monitor the Piping Plover, an endangered species of bird. Trace Redmond wants to travel to Oregon to study the vascular system of redwood trees. As a K student, Seema Jolly got involved in D.I.R.T., which led her to an internship with Fair Food Matters, and from there to a position as a Garden Manager with a Utah non-profit called The Youth Garden Project. Now she’s back at K, showing students how to pull up weeds and thin radishes.

At the D.I.R.T. workday on Saturday, Ben Cooper hooks up the sprinkler while Trace Redmond hammers away at the leaning picket fence. For now, the other volunteers are trying to stay out of the sprinkler’s range, but they will soon break up the moist soil where the square foot plots have been marked with a grid of twine, ready for planting. Maybe the project will be a bust. But for the moment, the gardeners are soaking up the spring sunshine and pressing their fingers into the dirt to make trenches for the seeds. As Tina, a D.I.R.T. participant, puts it, “To have a project, to have a space where you feel like you’ve carved out a little area of something good and clean, I think it can just be really satisfying.”

Listening becomes difficult once campus life resumes and the adjective ‘college student’ overpowers any other words that can begin to describe who I am during ¾ of the year.  What I mean to say is when the fall classes start, so do the complaints, and I can stand to listen to the complaining for maybe a second.  Then my head explodes.

A complaint is not a criticism.  It offers no potential solution from the complainer to adjust any displeasure.  It does not incite a second party to discuss and formulate a solution to a problem.  Instead, complaints are abruptly presented, sometimes vulgar or harsh, and responses either further the depth of the complaint, or shoot it down completely with a mix of humor and annoyance.  And that is something college students love to do (or so I’ve come to understand).

College students love, love, love to complain.  They enjoy expressing their woes of vigilantly working late into the night, ignoring drooping eyelids and feigning consciousness.  They love to complain about their struggles with the faculty.  They complain about a ‘B’ average or a weekend with nothing to do but drink and play videogames.  “I’ve got three exams this week and a ten page paper due tomorrow morning.  I haven’t studied at all and I got as far as the second page of the paper last night with the help of Red Bull and Adderall.  Life sucks.”  Well, yes it does, for someone who can afford to attend college, live with peers you call friends, keep busy, and prepare for a money-making career (if the economy isn’t in the toilet by graduation).

Now I realize I sound like I’m complaining.  Maybe I am.  In fact, I’m complaining about complaining and I apologize.  But everyone complains from time to time, and it’s OK to take in small doses.  I guess it can be seen as a way to commiserate with others who may feel similar woes.

So let me bring to light a complaint I’ve had that I’m sure most students and ex-students have shared.  I hate the question, “What are you doing this summer?”

Everyone asks this question with positive or caring sentiments.  Friends and family are curious with the life of a budding student and they wish to stay abreast of all the classes, internships, and beer pong the student experiences.  For those sentiments, I am grateful knowing, at the very least, someone is interested in my life.

But it’s a hard question to respond to.  Besides the repetition of reciting the same few answers again and again, there exists some unspoken pressure to sound interesting.  If your summer isn’t up to par with the rest of the students’, you’re S.O.L.  No internship?  No summer job?  No exotic vacation?  Sorry dude.  Good luck finding a job!

As I sit here writing this article, with no obvious prospect of summer employment or an extravagant way to occupy my time, I realize it’s not so bad.  Why should I get a sympathetic ‘sorry’ for an open summer?  Do I constantly need a rapid intake of work to feel productive?  Of course not!

Though I’m not getting paid, I still work for myself.  I write, play music, attempt to cook, mow a lawn here or there, keep busy with friends, attend weddings; the list goes on.  It’s not obvious experience for career building like an internship or a job with a steady income, but it keeps my mind healthy.  I get to tune the skills that keep me excited and open to other possibilities.  I’m only bored if I choose to be.  Not all work consists of text books and pay checks.  If I view any work as worthy of my time, it is worthy of my time.

Back in December, students here at Kalamazoo College participated in the Core Alcohol and Drug Survey in an attempt to diagnose the alcohol, drugs, and sex students here participate in.  Since there is no indication that anything has changed between then and now, an evaluation of the data allows a relevant diagnosis of the more  nefarious aspects of K social culture and what this says about us as students.

Alcohol and drug consumption within a college demographic is essentially a litmus test for a healthy college community. By getting an advanced education, people in college–while extremely fortunate–are doing an unbelievable amount of good for not just themselves, but their community and the world as a whole.  Principles appreciated in the college academic setting follow graduates throughout their lives, dictating motives of social responsibility and societal contribution.  But, as my father says, “Work hard, play hard,” which, the more I think about it, is sadistically a uniquely American school of thought.  As we progress through college, we (hopefully) learn the wisdoms of how to handle the pressures of academic life.  When encountering adversity, the malleable college student transitions from phases of “freaking out” in their underclassman years to fazes of “there’s some s**t I gotta git done” as they come closer to graduation.  We need to relax.  When we respect our educations, we are able to understand that things are going to be OK.  As a sailor once suggested, “Everything in moderation.” Or, some things in moderation.

For the survey to put the binge drinking quota at five drinks seems a little low, with 48% of students claiming to have “binged” in the previous two weeks.  A 750 ml bottle of wine contains about five five-ounce servings, and a bottle of red hardly seems like reproachable opulence, considering the 55% of respondents reporting that friends would “disapprove” of an incident of bingeing. The most common reasons K students drink are to “break the ice” (81%), to “enhance social activity” (76.2%), to “give people something to talk about” (76.1%), and “to give people something to do” (76.9%).  All this is quite ironic when considering that only 55.9% of respondents claim to have “engaged in sexual intercourse within the past year.” Of course the real number is much lower, probably around 37% or less, according to an informal and unauthorized social survey conducted by Kosmo staff since the release of the Core Survey.  For the apparent lack of “things to do” and the apparent success rate of “ice breakers,” one wonders where all that social energy is channeled.  Indeed, 19.4% of the polled had used alcohol the last time they had sex, an almost identical figure to the 18.3% of respondents who consider alcohol to “make men sexier.”

The largest disparity between K students and our national counterparts came in the categories of academic persistence.  While 22% of a  reference group  of 71,189 students from 148 institutions reported having “performed poorly on a test or important project” due to their alcohol or drug use, only 11% of K students admitted a similar fate.  Furthermore, 30.1% of the aggregated poll “missed a class” due to substance use, more than double the rate of 14.6% found here at K.  Yet the hangover rate at K was higher than the national average–65.2% versus 62.5%–indicating more academic fortitude in the face of typical college party culture.

K also digressed from the national average in our consumption of illicit drugs and marijuana.  When considering “Lifetime Prevalence,” K students consume cocaine (3.8%), sedatives (3.8%), and opiates (1.3%) at less than half the rate of the national average, while matching our fellow Americans in hallucinogens (8.3%), and beating them out in marijuana (52.2% at K versus 45.3% nationally).   No K respondents predicted steroids to have “lifetime prevalence.”

With 74% of underaged K students claiming to have consumed alcohol while at college, the Core Survey brings into question the pragmatism of an “abstinence” oriented campus alcohol policy.  While the school is legally obligated to a “21 means 21″ stance on alcohol consumption, everyone knows this is like a squirrel asking a semi truck to “please desist” before being run over,  as effective as posting a “1 m.p.h.” speed limit sign on I-94 W, and as futile as requesting a hold on further tuition hikes while inflation plays catch-up.  It is silly that the drinking age in the United States is 21 years of age.  While 18 is too european, 19 years would theoretically keep alcohol buyers out of high schools, while in effect allowing students to moderate their own consumption while at college.  Consuming large amounts of alcohol is often a social construction.  Indeed, 67.7% of K respondents “believe the social atmosphere on campus promotes alcohol use,” while 83.2% of students consider “drinking… central in the social [lives] of male students.”  Correspondingly, 49% of K students have “felt pressure to drink or use drugs.”

A drinking age of 21 makes alcohol consumption “something to be desired” for many undergrads, increasing its appeal as a “forbidden fruit.”  Similar to “Alter Boy Syndrome,” where it is the very sheltering of a youth that makes an exploration into the Dionysian so enticing, it is obvious that the very existence of the law is all the encouragement we students need to break it.  Everything about college is a heightened experience intended to mimic the lives and careers it theoretically prepares us to have.  We work hard, worry hard, dream hard, love hard, drink hard, play hard, cry hard, and laugh hard.  For many of us, college really is the first opportunity to live a life that does not involve being home at 7:30 for mommy’s dinner.  It is human nature to take exploration to the extreme, and extreme is the nature of exploration itself.  I see people fall-down drunk at Saturday night parties, covered in their own spittle and viscera who, five or ten years from now are going to be family men and women with respectable jobs contributing to the livelihoods of their fellow man.  Sunday morning, they will pull themselves out of a bed, scrub the slovenly grime off their wretched bodies, drink plenty of water, and prepare for Monday’s class.

It is important to acknowledge that alcohol and drug use is not without its risks.  Alcohol was present in  83% of reported “physical violence,” 100% of “theft involving force or threat of force,” and 50% of “forced sexual touching or unwanted sexual intercourse.”  We’ve all seen someone too drunk, and can name people who’s behavior we feel has changed due to drug use, evident in the  12.9% of K respondents who think they “might have a drinking or other drug problem,” a figure higher than the 10.8% from the national sample.

Like all sins, however, drinking and drug use has its time and place.  Jack Kerouac lived by the mantra of “try never get drunk outside your own house,” or someone else’s house, or a bar… Obviously to live life like a writer who died of a combination of depression and kidney failure would be both unwise and extremely cliché, but Kerouac had a point. When it comes to substance use, don’t allow one part of your life to interfere with another, and when I look around, I think we here at Kalamazoo College are doing just fine.  While any community has its exceptions, by and large, alcohol and drugs seem to provide a seasoning that compliments the already tantalizing academic and social entrée served up here at Kalamazoo.