During our year-late reunion in June, I walked around campus. The old paths hadn’t changed, and I could have followed them blindfolded.

Some of those routes so often retraced in my dreams could not be followed, though, and I’d pull up short in surprise, blocked by buildings that hadn’t been there 50 years ago.

Just as changed from the class of 1971 were the students I met. They didn’t look like we did—and not just because they were young women or seemed smart and serious. It was disorienting to listen to Veronica, one of our student helpers, talk about her research on Bengali vowel phonemes using DARLA, the Dartmouth Linguistic Automation tool. Had the map on my phone sent me to the wrong campus?

Nevertheless, much was unchanged. From the middle of the Green, the 360-degree panorama was an almost perfect replica of the view I saw in September 1967. Only the new, flourishing sugar maples and the new Hood Museum were different.

The Sanborn Library and Baker’s Tower Room still felt like the same places where I nodded off with open books in my lap. So did it seem to one of my classmates, who snored energetically from an armchair in a Sanborn alcove.

But behind Baker, where the class tent was, nothing was the same. Elm Street no longer exists, buried under the expanded library. Bradley-Gerry’s ugly shower tiles, the Kiewit bunker, and the Dragon tomb—all gone.

Looking out from the class tent north of the library, the vistas were unfamiliar. Only the junk and broken-down bikes rusting in the weeds strewn with uncollected black plastic garbage bags behind a still-filthy Phi Tau house looked unchanged.

Inside our reunion tent, however, plenty of changes also revealed themselves.

No one said, “Far out, man!” Classmates texted me on their phones: “Where are you?” and “See you at Lou’s at 9:30.” Boys who once repeated fatuous lines such as, “Don’t trust anyone over 30” in all seriousness now spoke like wise elders. There was no mention of Woodstock or Richard Nixon; no keg and not a whiff of dope smoke. (There was Mickey Stuart’s cigar.) We scrolled through our phones to show photos of grandchildren birthday parties—and donned reading glasses to admire them. The glorious long hair of June 1971 was now mostly white and short—or gone. (Except for Jack Burnett’s.) Our name tags in that 36-point font were a big help.

Even so, after the handshakes and hugs, there was the miracle of recognition. I recognized one old friend by the shape of his smile. The mischief sparkling in the eye of another partner in crime was as good as a photo ID. Many of our stories were old yarns. The talk among us felt like resumptions of conversations interrupted long ago.

Still, after all these years of being away and all the changes, it felt like coming home.

It was a three-day, emotional whipsaw: at one moment traveling among strangers in a foreign land, and in the next moment, in the bosom of a family.

At one moment, the campus and classmates all looked completely different. A second later, both the place and the people were just what they’d always been. It was a three-day, emotional whipsaw: at one moment traveling among strangers in a foreign land, and in the next moment, in the bosom of a family.

Only fossils stay the same, and the College is as much a living being as we are. It would be astonishing if it remained the same after 50 years. Just as we love classmates who are no longer girls and boys, we love an evolving Dartmouth, not a Dartmouth Museum of Ancient History.

I’d wanted to revisit Dartmouth Hall, where I spent so many memorable hours, but it was closed and surrounded with orange construction barriers. From the steps of Thornton I could see that the chalkboards and desks bolted to the floors of the hall’s classrooms were gone. The iconic exterior is the same, while everything inside, from the heating system to room layouts, is new.

Even the Orozco murals were different. A 2012 restoration removed 80 years of cigarette smoke deposits from their surface (mea culpa!) and delivered state-of-the-art lighting to enhance colors more vivid than I remembered.

When we marched down East Wheelock to the Baker lawn for Commencement 51 years ago, 215 70-year-olds and their families of the class of 1921 were present to celebrate their 50th reunion. The old codgers, some of whom had fought in World War I, were shocked by our music, hair, bizarre clothes, even the architecture of the still-new Hop, our majors in newfangled topics such film studies, a new president who was not an alum, and, of course, coeducation. Many of them were not pleased with us or the College. Little did I imagine that sunny morning as we walked toward the end of our college days in a fog of illegal smoke that, 51 years later, part of me would experience a similar shock at the changes.

How can things change and still be the same?

It’s a perennial question evoked long ago in the Ship of Theseus paradox. Was the ship whose broken planks were replaced one by one through many decades, until not a single piece of the original vessel remained, still the Ship of Theseus—or something else?

Although I’m not who I used to be, I remember enough about my past selves to be the same person. My friends are great memory aids, which is one of the main reasons we go to reunions. In those happy recollections and bittersweet recognitions, we stood in the gap between who we used to be and who we are now.

Our class is like the Ship of Theseus, the worse for wear now, missing pieces and much repaired, but still the ship we’re rowing together toward a distant and inevitable port.

What a privilege and pleasure to be aboard this ship, one that will stop and bring aboard any shipwrecked sailors clutching a broken plank out there in the wine-dark sea.

Once you’re dried out, you’ll discover, as I did when classmates pulled me choking and half-drowned over the gunwale several years ago, that you’ve always had a seat and an oar with your name on it aboard that always-changing ship.

Dan Clouse studied Spanish literature at Dartmouth and in grad school. In his teaching career, he taught Spanish at several schools and colleges.