1:23 a.m. The front of Worner Student Center. Black hoodies, ski Buffs pulled over mouths, and faces tilted conspicuously down and away from security cameras. My guerilla potato planting, formerly a solo operation, has recruited a small army. As a team we have become efficient, our procedure refined to the surgical precision of a McDonald’s assembly line. My ambition has grown with our efficiency, and now we find ourselves planting seed potatoes in the flower boxes lining the front of Worner—a long-time goal of mine. The first guerilla planter digs quick 4 inch by 4 inch by 6 inch holes spaced a foot apart with a Home Depot hand trowel. The second carefully places two to three cubed potato pieces into each hole. The third follows the procession covering the pieces and smoothing out the dirt, sealing in both the potatoes and our secret.
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When I arrived at The Colorado College during the setting sun of the Obama Administration, I had committed myself to hating it. The Colorado College had not been my first choice. I had applied early decision to Middlebury College, I wanted to be a Feb Start, and I was going to ski down the Middlebury Ski Bowl in full cap and gown to grab my diploma in December 2019. I was rejected—and thank God I was, because I would have hated it anyways (or maybe I just tell myself that).
I rejected higher education right back, deferring my enrollment in order to take a “gap year” (pause to roll your eyes). Upon arriving to The Colorado College in August 2016, I quickly learned that no one gave a shit that I took a “gap year,” and that acting like a haughty bitch on my first-year orientation trip would not help me make friends. I was under the impression that being an entire year older than my classmates made me far superior: they, who had only just graduated high school, could not possibly comport themselves with the level of maturity that I now possessed. These children had only just taken the ACT and were excited by the options in Rastall (Given that I now regularly stand outside Rastall at 12:15 begging for swipes, I must say it has grown on me. Also, to all the underclassman that pretend they do not even see me when I ask for swipes: rude), while I had managed to do my own laundry and cooking for a year.
I was completely unaware that I was dripping with privilege, and entered every interaction with a snarky superiority. Unsurprisingly, I sulked around The Colorado College entirely by myself. In my defense, I was busy—my First Year Experience course was a West in Time, I enrolled in Calculus 3rd Block and Chemistry 4th Block, and my roommate and I disagreed on things, to put it mildly (she never quite figured out the whole sock on the door handle thing, and instead deferred to the unspoken sexile).
In summary, I, like many freshmen—I mean first-years—was initially unhappy upon entering college. But operating with an engorged ego, I sought some existential explanation for my restless disgruntlement with the college experience. While it is true that I struggled socially, I also had a crippling issue with the institution that was The Colorado College, which stemmed from my not-so-cute, semi-unjustified problem with all forms of authority.
Governed by my own self-righteously indignant moral code and fueled by a youth saturated with “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” I sought an outlet in some form of covert institutional sabotage. Despite frequently assuring anyone who would listen that I was going to drop out at the end of the next block, I needed an undertaking that would not result in expulsion.
Enter the full bags of abandoned potatoes that I noticed starting to crop up in the communal kitchens of dorms across campus. The average college student is pretty inclined towards a “more is better” mentality for everything from White Claw consumption to the unnecessary purchase of twenty-pound bags of potatoes with their parents’ Costco membership. But unlike a case of White Claws, the average college student almost always fails to consume the entirety of their potatoes. Many a bag of seemingly past-their-prime potatoes were being thrown out of the communal kitchens of dorms by exasperated Sodexo employees. Lacking friends, desiring a subversive cause, and possessing some knowledge of potato cultivation from a stint on a farm during my “gap year” (I, too, am cringing), I started planting these potatoes around campus.
The true genius of the potato is that all one needs to plant a potato, is a potato. They are aggressive rooting vegetables and prolific in their regenerative properties. Once a crop of potatoes has taken to a patch of soil, it is impressively self-reliant and will continue to propagate un-aided by the hands of a guerilla gardener. Before potatoes are shoveled into a red box and served, sizzling, through a takeout window, they exist as rough, light brown ovoids with dimples on their skin. Those dark dimples are called eyes, and it is from these eyes that the potato sprouts in its insentient efforts to reproduce. If left uneaten in a semi-lit environment within a temperature range of 60-70ºF (conditions commonly found in the average Colorado College dorm), a potato’s eyes will begin to sprout.
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A not-so-brief interlude into the history of potatoes: the potato, Solanum tuberosum, is native to the Andes and was cultivated by the Inca in modern day Peru as early as 8,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. Spanish colonizers brought the potato back to Europe, and it is thought to have been introduced to Ireland within the last twenty years of the 16th century. I myself was distraught when I learned that potatoes were not a blessing bestowed upon the Irish by the leprechaun gods, but instead yet another cornerstone of Western European culture exploited from the New World.
Adapted to the high elevations of the Andes, the potato can survive both harsh and variable growing conditions. Its environmental versatility enabled it to survive the cloudy, wet, and temporal extremes of the Irish climate. Unlike cereals, the potato does not easily rot above ground, and its comparatively nutritious composition added much-needed vitamin content to the European diet. Potatoes were at peak performance by the end of the 1700s in Ireland, feeding livestock and comprising the entirety of the peasant population’s diet, even gracing the noble dishes of the elite.
Speaking of the elite, the women’s soccer field was a prime destination for potato planting. The field formerly had an employee, Daryl, whose job it was to ensure the pitch remained in a pristine vegetated state. In order to do so, he was authorized to use any means necessary to remove students who strayed too far from the Preserve Hill onto the field. The temptation here—fueled by a resentment regarding my own lack of a college soccer career—was far too great to resist, and my first cohort of potatoes proudly germinates beneath the field’s center circle. Or at least, it did. The guarded grass field was replaced this fall with turf made of an organic blend of coconut and cork, which lacks the carcinogens of traditional recycled car tire turf. Regardless of the eco-rating, turf fields are not hospitable environments for even the hardiest potato.
The potato gets a lot of flak because of the potato blight, but let us not blame the potato for its agricultural mismanagement. As the 18th century rolled into the 19th, the integrity of individual potato strains was violated through unintentional but nonetheless irresponsibly promiscuous crossbreeding, which resulted in the less-than-desirable Lumper potato. This watery pigmy root was nutritionally deficient in comparison to its refined relatives, the Cup, Black, and Apple strains. However, the Lumper potato was better able to cope with inadequate growing soil, and its significantly higher production rate made the Lumper’s overall lackluster taste palatable, if not forgettable.
The Potato Blight, caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, was first recorded in the United States and spread into Canada during the early 1840s. Phytophthora infestans appears as black splotches on a plant’s stems and leaves, and eventually results in fuzzy fungal growth that causes a potato to rot into stinky inedible mush. The blight hopped the pond during the unusually wet, cool, and windy summer of 1845. The Lumper potato, our favorite rooting scapegoat, was supposedly more susceptible to the blight than other potato strains, and since Ireland had essentially slipped into a Lumper monoculture the blight decimated Ireland’s potato crop. Potato harvests in the summers of 1846 and 1848 were destroyed by the blight, launching Ireland into a full-blown famine. Those that could emigrate did, and thank God for that, because their plight went on to fuel overly violent early 2000s movies with archetypal plots, like “Gangs of New York,” a fantastic film starring a stormy Leonardo DiCaprio.
Disease follows famine. Irish hospitals became horrendously twisted versions of Hospice while prisons became sanctuaries due to the consistent meals provided to inmates. The exact death toll associated with the “Great Irish Famine” is unknown, but based upon censuses and predicted population growth rates, the estimated net change of the Irish population (including emigration) is roughly two and a half million people. Meaning, in the decade of 1840 to 1850, over two million Irish were lost from this small, cloudy island.
Potatoes have now been proudly absorbed into the canon of American heritage. Idaho is the single largest producer of potatoes in the United States and McDonald’s is the single largest purchaser of potatoes. American grown, American purchased, American consumed, and American weight gained. The Russet potato type was developed in 1872, and the Russet Burbank variety in particular is responsible for the sprouting of the Idaho potato industry. The Canela Russet is highly rated for its storage potential, and it is superb when baked.
However, it was with the Mercury Russet that I launched my potato crusades. The Mercury Russet matures incredibly quickly, requires only a short growing season, and is diverse in its suitability to both the culinary arts of baking and frying. For these reasons, but also because it was readily available in most dorm kitchens, it is my preferred potato strain to grow in the semi-arid high elevation environment of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
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A potato is ready to be planted once its eyes are pierced by tenacious sprouts. It should then be chopped into golf ball sized pieces with at least one sprouting eye on each piece. Make smooth cuts with a knife that has been sterilized in bleach between potatoes in order to limit inter-potato disease transmission.
The pieces can then be placed out on your favorite newspaper to not read, like The Catalyst, for no longer than seven days. This gives the potato pieces time to develop calluses over their circumcised edges, which prevent rot once they have been planted. This step is not absolutely necessary, but since it takes at least seven days to finish any menial unassigned task anyway, it is an effortless way to increase the health and size of one’s yields.
On the topic of health: The Colorado College Emergency Medical Service (CCEMS) is a student EMT squad that provides medical aid to The Colorado College community. They have a pretty neat siren-less minivan (fondly named Lucille) that is used to quickly respond to emergencies. I enlisted CCEMS’s help on several inside jobs where Lucille’s speedy transportation doubled both the range and overall yield of a standard night of potato planting. My planter-in-crime and I squeezed into Lucille’s girthy trunk with a shovel, a bag of prime Mercury Russets, and a yellow backboard. Thank you for your service, CCEMS.
I can only imagine that Campus Safety does not frequently check their security footage (or maybe they do, but actually just have bigger things to fry than potatoes). If they did check their footage, specifically from a Saturday night in Block 7 of 2018, they would find a scene pulled straight from a bad crime movie: Lucille slams to a halt on the curb. Hooded hooligans dive out as she takes off to circle the block. With a practiced hustle, our criminals frantically shovel chunks of dirt from in-between the tufts of grass planted around the well-lit facade of Cornerstone Arts Center. Hefting a large bag of spuds, the ruffians just finish covering their implants with soil before Lucille hurtles back around the corner. They dive into the getaway car and peel out at a crisp thirty miles per hour.
By the start of my sophomore year in the fall of 2017, but before the potato planting had become a seamless inside operation, the Charles L. Tutt Library had finally been completed. After inhaling a dreadful gaseous cocktail of what I can only hope are not mutagens wafting from the construction site, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take this grandiose eco-building to achieve carbon neutrality, given its construction footprint. But families visiting for Parents’ Weekend deserved to see where their tuition dollars were going without having to walk an inconvenient distance, so the school constructed a most beautiful—and most temporary—parking lot on the north side of the Charles L. Tutt Library (where The Academic Walk is now located).
The Parents’ Weekend parking lot had the darkest of asphalt and the sunniest of parking lines. It is a shame that skate culture had not yet found its way to The Colorado College at this point, for I assume many an elbow could have been abraded on this fine, smooth surface. Alas, the elbows of the skate community will have to bleed themselves elsewhere, because this parking lot was immediately ripped out following the conclusion of Parents’ Weekend. The Academic Walk was installed in the parking lot’s place and lined with non-native iridescent sod.
But before the cement was lain, potatoes were planted—five pounds of diced Mercury Russets at 4:45 on the following Tuesday morning, to be exact. Did I know these potatoes were to be drowned in molten cement? Of course I did, but the planting was in defiance of the absurdity that was constructing a parking lot solely for the duration of a busy weekend. The school was likely doing its best to balance the Colorado Springs Municipal Code that caps the size of parking lots, its historically tenuous relationship with the Old North End Homeowners Association, and the general feeling among the student body that there is not enough parking. These tensions are reflected in the price of on-campus parking passes which are an egregious $100 a semester for students. The average price of a five-pound bag of Mercury Russet potatoes is $2.50. The average price of a rogue potato planting at 4:45 a.m.: priceless.
Planting potatoes does not require a shovel, but the experience is significantly improved if you use one. Many spades can be found in the backyard garden shed of Old Synergy house which in my experience, has never been locked. Like the blatantly unsanitary nature of their kitchen and bathrooms, this is something that the residents of Old Synergy have yet to recognize as a potential issue. That being said, the entirety of the potato crusades would have been severely limited if not for the shovels in Old Synergy’s unlocked backyard garden shed, and I implore all current and future democratically elected residents of Old Synergy to not lock said shed. I have consistently planted potatoes in Old Synergy’s garden beds for the past three years as a small form of repayment. While I have been the primary consumer of these potatoes, the residents of Old Synergy could also eat the benefits if they would stop digging up my sprouts to plant egregious quantities of fennel. Anyway, once a shovel has been procured, it is important that it is used to plant potatoes at least two weeks before the last killing frost, which is anytime between January 17th and June 24th in Colorado. Alternatively, one can test the temperature of their soil (which should be between 45ºF and 55ºF for optimal potato germination) with any common metal-tipped thermometer inserted several inches into the soil repeatedly for a few consecutive days to ensure the consistency of your measurements. The end of 6th and beginning of 7th block is also a decently safe temporal zone.
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During the 2017 to 2018 academic year, The Colorado College stripped the name Slocum from what is now South Hall after allegations of sexual misconduct against William F. Slocum came to light. At the time of Slocum’s presidency, hundreds of stories were circulated regarding his sexual misconducts, but only twenty-two affidavits were ever officially received. The 26 members of The Colorado College Board of Trustees unanimously voted to remove Slocum’s name from what many consider to be the nicest dorm on campus (although it lacks the loose party culture of Loomis and the apogee of the sophomore housing experience that is the lofted fourth-floor Mathias dingle). The rather large portrait of William F. Slocum that was formerly drilled into the Wasatch Sandstone walls of Palmer Hall—locally sourced from the Red Rocks Open Space Quarry—was not removed until well after Slocum’s name had been stripped from South Hall. Before the portrait was removed, I spiked 22 Purple Majesty potatoes into the gardens outside Palmer Hall in my own small protest.
The Colorado College Board of Trustees rescinded the honors bestowed upon William F. Slocum by the college in 1917. However, in a statement published on The Colorado College website, the board states that in an effort to be, “Consistent with our mission and values, the college should neither ignore his accomplishments nor his disturbing flaws.” So instead of releasing Slocum into the shit brown waters of Monument Creek, the portrait has been placed in a “non-public repository on campus.” The face of former school president William F. Slocum is now buried somewhere among The Colorado College’s other dirty secrets.
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The summer before my junior year I was employed by The Colorado College Grounds Crew. Although only the male student employees were ever allowed to operate the power tools, this was a great on-campus job with extremely flexible hours. Moreover, I had finessed the school into paying me to inundate their grounds with potatoes. Actually, I was being paid to weed, but every weed I removed was replaced with a potato, and Operation Potato saw its most successful quarter yet. Grounds Crew also gave me access to a golf cart that, like Lucille, accelerated the whole planting process. Better yet, the golf cart was an unquestionable entry pass to any location on campus, like Dean Edmund’s backyard.
I was exposed to many sneaky nice spots on campus while working for the Grounds Crew. A truly precious corner of campus is the German Language House garden. There is a delightful koi pond, a garden house designated for sophomore pre-games, and the most fertile, well-weeded soil I have found on campus. Although I was abroad the following fall and thus unable to personally indulge in the yields of this prolific summer, the small army of guerrilla gardeners I had recruited to help me were rewarded with a bountiful autumn harvest.
Diced potato pieces should be planted in holes approximately four inches deep hole and situated such that the eyes are facing the sky. The Colorado State University Center for Horticulture suggests you plant only one potato dice per hole. But I will tell you that two or three potato pieces per hole has worked just as well, and the decision to do so did not require a masters in Horticulture (I am a matriculating grandfathered-in Bachelors of Arts in Integrated Environmental Science major, so obviously I know what I’m talking about). Potatoes are most successful when ensured a consistent water supply, which again, is challenging in Colorado. However, The Colorado College’s persistent desire to be awarded the same prestige as the New England Small Colleges Athletic Conference (NESCAC) categorization of the academic liberal elite—a desire that is both slightly embarrassing and vaguely reminiscent of an excluded middle sibling—has led to an ensured irrigated water supply to most locations on The Colorado College’s campus.
In aspiring to the NESCAC beacon of prestige, many students feel The Colorado College has lost some of its quirky character. Perhaps a desire to be defined as the liberal arts Harvard of the West (a title also claimed by both the University of Michigan and Stanford University), has resulted in the hike in average test scores of students admitted to The Colorado College. In addition, the drop in the college’s acceptance rate has left this upperclassman feeling that I would not be accepted had I been applying this fall. But test scores and acceptance rates are metrics easily used to quantify excellence in the competitive market of private colleges. It is increasingly expensive to run an institution like The Colorado College. The population that can afford the tuition continues to shrink while the demands of students as consumers are ever expanding. Colleges compete over the quality of the services they provide (IT, boutique meal plans, a new library, a climbing gym, ect.) in order to attract students that want these services, that can get into the school, and that can afford to pay for them.
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In an attempt to avoid making this piece a one-sided rage manifesto and to gain a bit of much needed perspective on the matter of higher education, I sought out “The Man.” In an interview I conducted, a member of the Board of Trustees stated, “CC’s endowment is large, and it is healthy and if managed correctly, will continue to provide for the students of the future. But we are starting to see colleges within our peer group and within our endowment level start to really struggle to both enroll students and to pay the bills at the end of every year. That’s really scary and it means that CC has to keep playing this quality fight, has to keep adding amenities in the hopes that we can attract a more selective group of students every year.” An amenities war.
The Colorado College plays this game in order to survive. But in doing so, it has allowed a student’s selectivity to be increasingly defined by quantifiable measurements such as test scores. Does this method of quantifying filter out potentially excellent applicants whose intellect and worth are not expressed through test scores? Certainly, it does, and maybe this is partially responsible for the recession of the school’s historically unique culture. The administration and admissions team of The Colorado College are not unaware of this, but culture changes slowly and in ways that are not necessarily measurable. That said, The Colorado College admission process, while test optional, is not need blind.
The above-mentioned trustee joined the board this 2019-2020 academic year. “Watching and sitting in on and listening and participating in the board meetings has really showed me that the people in that room are thinking about the future of CC 25, 50, 100 years down the road. Which is not necessarily something the average student thinks about.” The board absolutely considers the day-to-day experience of its students when making decisions, but it also operates on a much longer time frame with a larger body of responsibilities associated with running an academic institution. My favorite trustee continued to explain that, “It’s difficult as a student to go through with advocating for change that you’re not going to see, but that’s really what it takes to make long term change in the institution— stepping outside of your four year perspective and saying ‘what’s good for CC students generally, not just me, not just my class here, not just the people who are on this campus at the same time as me?’”
“I’ve heard whisperings,” the trustee responded when I asked if they had heard about students planting potatoes around the school. “As a board member I find it pretty frustrating. I understand that people are mad at CC, I get that, for a lot of really valid reasons. But there are so many people, faculty, administrators, staff, etc. that would answer those questions if students figured out how to phrase them and who to ask. Doing that leg work is important and it’s an important life skill to learn about affecting change in the future.”
The seemingly absurd aspects of this school and the decisions it makes often have reasonable justifications that were reached through the efforts of people that genuinely want the best for the college now and in the future. That is not to say that some of the school’s actions aren’t absurd or that the school’s culture hasn’t changed, but there are probably better ways to address one’s problems with The Colorado College than to plant them in an act of Resistance De Potato. I had a desire to be a productive, if mischievous, member of The Colorado College community. Not so productive as to actually join the Colorado College Student Government Association, or to attend any of the office hours President Tiefenthaler hosts every block, or to ask why The Colorado College makes the decisions it does, but still a desire to be constructive. That is an attitude the school continues to select for in its admitted students. The different ways that these students express this sentiment is what will make The Colorado College unique and continue to push it to evolve.
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During Block 2 of my senior year, The Inn, an asbestos-filled-former-motel-gone-dorm, was razed to make way for the Edward J. Robson Arena. The arena will house The Colorado College Men’s Ice Hockey Team, but until the projected opening date of 2021, the hockey team will be forced to continue toughing it out in the Broadmoor World Arena. For now, the city block where the arena will preside is a fresh expanse of unattended dirt (PSA: anything grown in these soils will undoubtedly be laced with the sins of students past and should absolutely not be consumed). With a bag of sprouting fingerling potatoes strapped to my bike, I stop by Old Synergy on my way to the future home of The Colorado College Ice Tigers. Old Synergy had never locked their garden shed in the past and I hope for the sake of my potatoes that they will not start doing so now.
Excessive Issue | January 2020