This article is written in collaboration by two Washington and Lee students, LeAnna Baker and Elizabeth Barr, in reflection upon their impending ‘exit from’ or ‘return to’ Lexington, respectively.
On our first days as Washington and Lee students, we all stood in line in front of Washington Hall, awkwardly mingling with our new classmates as we awaited our turn to add our signature to the Honor Book below that of each student who preceded us. Every one of us can recall this experience: nervous and excited, we participated in a decades-old tradition that marks our entrance into the next four years of our lives. Before our first classes began, we made this powerful gesture – a commitment to uphold the culture that so many generations of students before us have shaped. In doing so, we legitimized our membership in the Washington and Lee community.
If you’ve ever worn Washington and Lee merch off campus, you know that anyone who has any connection to the university will proudly tell you so – and they will likely reflect longingly on their days partaking in the customs central to student life. It isn’t just a love for the institution that motivates this passion for Washington and Lee, it is also the profound connection between every student who has opted into our shared way of doing.
Our campus is one abounding in tradition. University Ambassadors love to proclaim the uniqueness of the decades-long tradition of saying “hey” to whomever you pass on campus. Any student could describe to you the campus-wide force that is the collective anticipation of Mock Convention. Decades of memories of previous Fancy Dresses lie in Leyburn’s yearbook archives. While such traditions are certainly central to the character of our community – and are valuable additions to a campus brochure – there seems to be something more to the foundation of our shared enthusiasm for our university than what can be observed in its most marketable traditions. This “something” can be found in the seemingly normal, everyday routines of the university’s students.
We are united not just by large, institutionally sanctioned tradition, but also by the ordinary actions of our synchronized routines and by the ways we show up for each other day after day. While our campus’s “capital-T” Traditions play a significant role in illustrating the student experience to outsiders, the heart of what it is to be a student at Washington and Lee is defined by more than a particular set of grand experiences, events or practices. We partake in traditions founded in accumulation – in the amassing of moments, days and experiences encountered on a daily basis.
We crowd into third-year living rooms, sit for hours in the Mattingly study room chatting about course content and stop to donate to a friend’s cause at an Elrod Commons table on the way to class. These seemingly mundane actions of our daily lives are performed, repeated and ritualized across years of students, building the culture we know so well, brick by brick. Our ordinary routines shape our memories of college life and set the stage for the culture encountered by future students.
Each time we join the student section at a friend’s home track meet, bring someone else their Coop order or avoid the Graham Lees center columns without a second thought, we enshrine ourselves in a shared culture. Through repeated participation in a routine so often mindlessly performed, we consecrate the ordinary — sanctifying our customs and practices into a ritualized order. Silently and gradually, we take part in the continual project of forming our campus into the type of place that we want to spend our four years.
Nothing is quite as ordinary as the natural world that we inhabit at Washington and Lee. In her memoir, “Hold Still,” photographer and lifelong Lexington resident Sally Mann characterizes her Rockbridge County farm as an ever-present, dependable oasis. Writing of its constancy, she describes the Shenandoah Valley’s rolling hills as “glowing steadily in the unreliable, teasingly labile shadow of memory.” For Mann, the scenery that we are so lucky to find ourselves surrounded by holds on to the memories that our minds might let go of.
As time passes, memories fade and classes of students leave behind the university’s familiarity for novel worlds, the environment that encompasses and surrounds daily life on Washington and Lee’s campus is unchanged. Even after students depart, the ancient crests of the Blue Ridge Mountains remain the ever-present backdrop to college lives, bearing witness to every walk across the James River footbridge, late-night study session in Leyburn and conversation in the Tea House that unfolds in the valley below. As time passes, the Maury River’s gentle current will continue to offer students a space for both impromptu spring term fun and BIO-111 macroinvertebrate inspection. The colonnade’s photogenic oaks will remain relentlessly generous, offering the gift of shade to whoever happens to sit beneath their canopy of branches. The campus garden will go on nourishing students in body and spirit – producing both locally grown produce and the unquantifiable harvest of life-giving friendship.
The consistency of Lexington’s surroundings binds us not only to each other but perhaps to the various versions of ourselves that lived in its company. Washington and Lee’s campus meets us at a transitory period of our lives, providing a hospitable environment for inevitable flourishing and expansion. We depart irrevocably changed by the place and people that constitute it. Yet the campus itself – its characteristically red bricks, sprawling green colonnade, and dependable sunsets of orange and pink – remains unchanged. Lexington’s local world situates each of us within a history that far exceeds the four short years that we spend as its inhabitants, tying us to a community that smiled, cried, laughed and cheered beneath and amongst the same mountains, streams and trees that we do today. These ordinary components of the place are its most faithful bookkeepers, quietly marking the histories of decades of students who have existed and grown in this space just as we have.
The memorial, community-building capacity of Lexington’s immutable landscape is not unlike the ordinary actions of our daily lives: each retains the memories of our time as students. Our preserved rituals and the natural environments that hold them don’t conclude when our time in Lexington does. Rather, they become the territory of future students. When graduation arrives and we move on to new places, we entrust the culture we’ve built to coming generations of students, just as it was entrusted to us.
On that inevitable day in May, we leave behind the comfortable routines that we knew so well and are left only with the anticipatory hope that one day, we will return. And with that return will come an onslaught of memories – of what happened here, of who we were when it happened, of the many versions of us that walked across Cadaver Bridge, spontaneously tried out a new hike with the Outing Club, sat outside on the Hillel porch on an unusually sunny morning or laughed with a cherished faculty mentor in a welcoming Tucker office.
Looking back on years past, it’s easy to reminisce on how things used to be, but the consistency with which we show up for each other persists. We mold our tradition to serve what we need in the moment, and our distinct culture exists as evidence of every single one of us choosing to do so every day. When we signed our names as eager, bright-eyed first-years, we made a commitment that is not to be taken for granted. We don’t clock out. We go out of our way for each other. We pour years of our lives into the edification of something bigger than ourselves. As a reward, we reap the benefits of a community that will do the same for us.
We end this reflection in gratitude to each of you reading this: what we share is no small feat.
