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Early that morning, my friends and I left our hometown near Boston and drove 90 miles to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We played Ke$ha and Pitbull to get in the mood, clutching Dunkin coffees to fight the pre-sunrise exhaustion, shouldering green sweatshirts and handles of vodka. Every March since the 1990s, UMass Amherst students have organized an unsanctioned Saint Patrick’s Day celebration colloquially known as Blarney, usually hosted during the weekend before spring break. What started as a seasonal promotional campaign by local bars has morphed into a blowout that draws in thousands of partygoers annually.
We walk to the freshman quad at eight and meet up with friends. Inside the dorms there is noise and warmth, girls putting on eyeliner in between shots, pregamers spilling seltzers on desks and bed sheets. The communal bathrooms stink of beer. A drunk girl asks me if Cornell does Saint Patrick’s day darties, and I say yes but probably a little less than UMass.
“Are people strange there? Are they insanely rich?”
I tell her yes. It’s very different from public high school.
“I am studying finance,” she tells me, “because I want to get very rich.” I tell her I hope it will work out.
She starts doing handstands in the hallway. The RA arrives and we flee in different directions; I don’t see her again.
CREDIT: JONAH VAN DER LINDEN
In the dorm lobby, we meet two students from UMass Boston. One of them tells us that he had issues getting off work for the day, since he works thirty hours a week at Trader Joe’s and they don’t like him dropping shifts. My friend asks, “How the hell do you manage that with school?”
He doesn’t have an answer; he tells us, dispassionately, with a boredom that doesn’t match our enthusiasm, “I like the employee discount.” He has a 4.9 GPA and is saving up to transfer to Northeastern next year.
His friend’s mother drove him here and she offers to bring us all to the darty. We cram into her five-seater, balancing open cans over tangled limbs, taking shooters in the trunk.
Over the past decade, UMass Amherst has vigorously attempted to stifle Saint Patrick’s Day partying. Over 70 students were arrested at a Blarney rager that made national news in 2014. Since the administration has been unable to stamp out the event as a whole, the current compromise is a party that sputters feebly in a grassy courtyard blocked in by brick apartments. There is a single entry point that is monitored by a dozen cops, who stare at you dead-eyed as you stumble past in a guise of sobriety.
CREDIT: JONAH VAN DER LINDEN / COLLEGETOWN
UMass has advanced their strategy in recent years by sponsoring free events to pull students off campus during Blarney weekend. This year, they gave out Hamilton tickets and sponsored ski trips to the Berkshires. As an extra draw for on-campus hold-outs, UMass hosted Trixie Mattel and Katya to perform from noon to 3 p.m., during peak darty hours. This strategy is not effective in preventing guests from invading campus and playing fast and loose with UMass’ party school reputation, so UMass shutters their dorms and dining halls to guests during Blarney weekend, creating crowds of shambling, starving teenagers that route the campus like zombie herds.
These measures have created a Blarney that is dead on arrival. The Blarney courtyard is a trampled, stagnant destination. There are no bathrooms in the area so partiers queue in droves to pee in bushes. The cops ensure that the music is quiet and the alcohol is invisible. The party is grimy and lifeless.
Cornell hosts a blowout that is more traditional and complete. Borgs—which stands for Black Out Rage Gallons, and are banned at Umass—are the central accessory of the Cornell darty, heavy and conspicuous, rattling with violent mixtures of sugar, water, and vodka. The party fans out across Linden Ave and seeps into Collegetown, 7/11 saturated with green bodies, dense lines forming for the Oishii Bowl bathrooms. At 2 p.m., there is a ginger run and porch roofs buckle under the weight of drunk onlookers. In comparison, Blarney is strangled and culturally sterile, a field and several thousand drunk kids and a mythic reputation that slouches uncomfortably against reality.
Unfortunately, it is a beautiful day in Amherst and the sky is swallowing these drunk bodies into blue light. Strangers are passing around green body glitter and family-sized boxes of Lucky Charms. Someone nearby is playing the bagpipes. The girls are wearing full faces of makeup like they are having a night out in Ibiza, rather than this small Massachusetts commonwealth. We put people on our shoulders and take photos against the bright sky, green shirts and blue jeans and white shoes caked with mud. At 1 p.m., we leave the party as aimless as we found it.
The afternoon that follows is long and cold. I am in another stranger’s house at 2 p.m.—the apartment of a friend’s sister—and her drunk roommate kicks us out after we eat her Cheez-Its in a compulsive fit of starvation. I lose my debit card. We migrate past shuttered frat houses, dining halls fragrant with forbidden food, massive overcast concrete dorms that pillar up and across the blue sky. I take a nap in the AirBnB and wake up at 6 p.m. to the clamor of beer cans hitting the ground in a failed shotgunning attempt. My friends prop up blow dryers on White Claws and prepare to go out.
Blarney had initially emerged as a campaign by local pubs to make money off of college students before spring break. Bars opened their doors shortly after sunrise to sell green beers and Irish food. The town of Amherst has long since banned these early openings, but nightfall heralds a weary mass migration across downtown. We end up on the side of the highway by a building the size of a shipping container, fighting for a space in line against dozens of teenagers in the pitiless cold. One girl snaps at my friend when he accidentally steps behind the bar door. He apologizes. “We don’t go here,” he admits.
“I can tell,” she says. I wonder what she means.
We are homogenous with this crowd, girls shivering in the Boston uniform of black tank, blue jeans, guys wearing Celtic jerseys, crucifix necklaces, Irish redheads and Italian brunettes. We hail from a Catholic hometown 20 miles south of Boston. Most of us were accepted to UMass Amherst, and there is an adjacent reality where Blarney is my party and I am sneering at outsiders from Boston or Ithaca in front of this dingy bar.
At 11 p.m., I call a Lyft back to the AirBnB. The driver, whose name is Edson, asks me if I believe in God, and I say I believe enough. He looks at me, my green shirt and muddy shoes, beer-stained jeans, face and fingertips red from the bitter cold.
“I think God wanted us to meet right now,” he says, resolutely.
Blarney owes its origin to a religious festival in honor of the missionary Saint Patrick, who found God while working as an enslaved shepherd in his late teens. Tonight, I am a pagan in 5th-century Ireland, and Edson is intent on saving my soul. He talks to me for twenty minutes. I wonder how many times he has had this conversation today.
Blarney today is a secular appropriation of Irish Catholicism and a crumbling artifact of a state school’s party culture. Just as Bostonians refashioned Saint Patrick from his pious background, so too do elite university students observe and repurpose the party rituals that are born and eventually smothered in the streets of state schools. Borgs are crude and cheap agents of college student partying, popularized at schools like Penn State; the darty format has been used at large SEC schools as a substitute for game day drinking in the spring semester. Ivy League students awkwardly refashion these traditions for smaller crowds of rich kids hungering for a legitimate blowout.
I wore a green Yankees sweatshirt to the Linden Ave darty and no one cared because everyone there was from New York. No apparel could possibly be more offensive to the Boston Saint Patrick’s Day convention—but I am a Cornell student and my Yankees sweatshirt is a part of my world here in Ithaca. The school throws a good enough party on these dangerously steep roads, with a ginger run without enough gingers, gallon jugs named “Ithaca is borges.” We are keeping something alive.
Blarney at UMass Amherst is a disaster and a phenomenon, a muddy, self-imploding starburst: Bostonian herds shuffling across wet ground, smolderingly drunk in sub-zero temperatures. Next year, Blarney will herald another flurry of arrests and hospitalizations, beckoning again to a new crop of pilgrim college students, who will stumble towards the future draped in green plastic jewelry and leprechaun hats.