Stern College for Women - Kochaviah Yearbook (New York, NY)

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stroyed from time to time by stones, tiny white mushrooms, or the dead branches of trees long since rotted through. I wondered as I spied brightness ahead and was pleased to see a small lake coming into view. It was wild, exotic looking with vines hanging across the clearing, here and there even dropping into the water. Spiders wove delicate blankets of lace, or devoured gnats that were caught in them. Water ougs skated across the dark, stagnant water or admired their reflections in its sur- face. Bees kissed the virgin water lillies or flirted with brilliant red buds on the bank. Leaves floated along, were slowly saturated, and sank. I watched this graceful play from my vantage point on the bank many times after that day, charmed by the exotic atmosphere, unconscious of the biting insects, usually alone and relishing my aloneness. The summer ended, and I said good-bye to my quiet cove. Summers came and summers went until one year my parents felt that my brothers and I were ready to attend a summer camp. There I met a counselor who had a car that he would let me borrow from time to time; I took advantage of the opportunity. One wet, foggy day I was riding up to the top of Big Mount Pocono on a seldom used road when I saw a sight unforgettable. I stopped and left the car, for the dark, moist air blocked my vision. As I stood there, the waves of fog engulfing me, I felt an eerie sensation overcome me. Before me stretched a lake whose limits were shrouded. The water looked like a sheet of steel whose edges had been cut in an irregular, odd pattern and from out of it lazily drifted a mysterious mist. I gazed at the mist dissolving into the heavy air around it and the full beauty of the scene struck me. There was about it the air of sullen fantasie which engulfs Dozmary Pool, in which dwells the Lady of the Lake and her lake maidens. I felt the scene creep into my veins and I knew in my heart that I would return to see it again. My second visit to the lake revealed a vision of unalloyed magnificence. The day had in it a golden warmth which seemed to enter into everything it touched. The surface of the water was smooth, as if nature had frozen it that it might better serve to mirror the vernal calm which engulfed it. Only the jumping of a frog or the paddling of several ducks disturbed the surface. Surrounding the lake was a swath of lush, velvet green. Much of the lake ' s warmth and friendliness exuded from that verdant border and without it the lake would have resembled many others in the region. Beyond the grass was a low stone wall intended to keep the waters in their bed when spring floods came. Past the wall was a rustic forest path surrounded, on one side heavily, and on the other side sparsely, by the wild vegetation of our northern country. An atmosphere of inviting friendliness pervaded. How different the same body of water seemed these two times. Oh, how I wanted to return and learn of its other moods. But all too soon the summer was over and I returned home again. 1 have grown older — mentally, physically, emotionally. The time arrived for me to leave home to obtain greater maturity and knowledge. I departed and now 1 am here once again in my beloved North. Even now, when 1 think of home, one of my firsts thoughts is of the ocean, turbulent or peaceful in turns, and 1 try to compensate by going to the Hudson River to watch the sky. the water, the boats on it. The river is wide and a great expanse surrounds it. Whether gray, blue, or green, it is a com- mercial river and makes no effort to hide the fact. No puny delicacy for it. Everything is big, powerful. The big sightseeing boats carrying gaping tourists: the bigger cargo boars carrying cotton to far off countries; the grand yachts Willi their rowdy, card- playing, horse-betting owners and their dignified stifi captains; the gigantic ocean liners, their rails lined with travelers waving adieu to relatives on the piers; the great bridges that span it, all doing homage to the George Washington Bridge. And the sky, like a roof of blue, SO very far and high. I feel small and insignificant next to the grandeur that surrounds me; u is a good feeling. 1 watch the water running, swirling in eddies, but going — going, and I realize thai here before me is a symbol ..I lit. 1 1- i lift develops quickly m there it runs in circles, confused, dizzy. Over there, see. ii rights itself again and continues along us normal paths. And so on through etemitj

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believably close to Ronnie ' s. She held her breath, while the world stopped and she waited, conscious only of the tense- ness in her ears. But it was Ronnie who stuck out his hand firmly to ward them off, and then promptly bent his head again, as the girls ' boat drew up along-side the boys ' . Their unconcealed flirtation was directed to win Ronnie now. None of it, however evoked any response from him. They were acting disgracefully to Amy ' s mind, under these conditions. For the boys utterly ignored their pointed comments, acting as if they weren ' t there at all. Amy would hive immediately rowed away at such a re- ception if she could have. But these girls weren ' t to be outdone so easily. Such tactlessness! Their coy remarks clearly begged Ronnie for an answer. Not a stir from Ronie ' s stolid face, though. He remained unruffled. Amy ' s heart was playing leap frog within her all the while. She urgently yearned to say something clever. But what? Tell the girls to go off? She fidgeted uneasily, suddenly self-conscious and ashamed of the girls. How could she show Ronnie somerhing of herself? By now Ronnie evinced impatience. He looked menacingly, first to the right, then to the left, picked up his oars, and started to row toward the girls. That was enough. The girls fled like tats from a chasing hound, not because they were afraid, but because they realized it wasn ' t worth the trouble. No use to flirt with a stone wall. But Amy was burning red inside of her. She warched like a spectator, as if this were a play in which she had no part. Never had anything seemed so un- real to her. This meeting was everything really. She ought to have said something to impress him here. This was her chance and she had bungled horribly. This was more than a quick smile, or a passing conversation in the halls of school . . . A deep feeling of loneliness slowly crept through her. Her life was so dull: school, homework, house chores, sleep, girlfriends, gossip, school again, and so on in an endless round. No time for all the things she dreamed of. Where was that excitement she read about in books, saw in the movies? Where the thrills.- ' Would they ever come to her? And the fast widening expanse of water between the boats reflected its own an- swer in the gentle lilt of a thousand little waves dancing in the sunlight. on bodies of water by RENAH MESCHELOFF Bodies of water, even like people, are subject to moods, and each mood is de- pendent on the surroundings, colors, size. In my home, Miami Beach, the artificial, superficial, hypocritical city of the South, the ocean is real, genuine and it speaks to me of gayness, relaxation, calm. The golden sands reflect the sun whose beams dance on the shore, now blind-bold and now, as a cloudlet passes before the mother light, shy-soft. The ocean roars at the shore and finding it unfrightened, comes to caress its whiteness, bubbling and frothing in joy; soothing, musical to the ear and mind. People walk together and talk together, laughing in the heat; dipping their toes in the cooling water; pushing, splashing, swimming, diving like a school of porpoises; bouncing, bobbing among the rollicking waves. One summer the family unanimously decided to spend our summer in the Northern countryside. We rented a bungalow in a popular section of Upstate New York and moved in. Being infected with a spirit of adventure, 1 set our to explore my new surroundings. A green forest stretched otit behind our cabin and several entrances to its depths teased me until I could no longer resist entering this green mansion . My path was carpeted with soft, damp leaves whose continuity was de-

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the sea serpent ' s own story BY PEARL KIDANSKV From the Sea Serpent ' s eye a tear ran down his foreleg and he brushed it away gently with his right dorsal fin. So you do believe me? he asked. Certainly, said the newspaper man. Why shouldn ' t I? The monster shook his head. The incorrigible skepticism of the Human Race, he said. Think of what Christopher Columbus endured before he met Ferdinand and Isabella. Think of what they did to Robert Fulton until he succeeded in sailing his steamboat up the Hudson. Think of Galileo. When I first bobbed up the Scottish lake, it was the same old harsh, unbelieving world that I had met so many times before. The more conservative London newspapers referred to me editorially as extravagant nonsense. Try to think of even nonsense being extravagant in Scotland. You do believe in me, honestly? The reporter took out a cigarette and lit it in the blue flame issuing from his companion ' s nostrils. My dear Lusus Naturae, nowdays everything is credible. I have written millions of words about new scientific discoveries that would make the hair stand on end. I have written about infinite space curling up into a strictly finite rubber ball. I have described a universe a billion years old, composed of rocks five billion years old. I know all about time which moves backward. After all this, do you imagine it puzzles me to have you show up simultaneously in Scotland, Yucatan, the Shannon River and Bering Strait? Almost any day I expect you to be reported from the Volga River. To what do we owe your latest reappearance on so many fronts at once? The Sea Serpent stared straight ahead of him, her, or it. Do you know, he declared, I almost didn ' t show up at all. I had, to put it quite plainly, grown sick of the same weary round. To what purpose this recurrent parade in the public eye — in 1817, and in 1839, and in 1859, and in 1897, and so on? Like a tireless Business Cycle. Why sure, the reporter interrupted. There was a picture of you in the New York Times the other day as seen by a navigating officer in the Caribbean, all dips and curves. You looked exactly like the roller coaster at Coney Island. But pardon me, you were saying. I was saying that I grew tired of it all. People were fast ceasing to believe in me and I was beginning to lose credence in myself. After all, my time was spent. I belonged in the ooze of the Eocene, not in the full blaze of the Twentieth century civilization. And then all at once it came to me how foolish I was.