JUNE 3, 2026 – (Cont.) Toward the end of our senior year at Bowdoin, I engaged in some nonsense of my own, albeit in league with Jeff Oppenheim, on whom by that stage I’d exerted a corruptive influence, though by no means irredeemably so. Jeff continued to act as an older, wiser brother exercising superior judgment—in most instances. Toward the very end of the reunion, while the two of us were walking from the parking lot back to the Coles Tower to join our spouses for the “farewell brunch,” Jeff said—for the first time during the entire reunion—“Remember when . . .” I did, though we were both better off not remembering.
For the first time between us during the reunion, I then said, “Remember when . . .”
Before Jeff could respond, I started reminiscing about an incident that was one of the dumbest things I did during my entire k through college education. Jeff’s recollection of it wasn’t as sharp as mine, principally because I’d owned both the idea and execution, while Jeff’s role was the only halfway smart thing about the whole idiotic and potentially deadly caper.
Just before the dumb idea entered my skull, Jeff and I and at least one or both of our other suitemates on the ninth floor of the Coles Tower[1] had been tossing water balloons out our open windows onto the walkways below. It was a nice warm sunny spring day—late in the afternoon but still an hour or so before the adjoining dining hall opened for supper. We’d been in class or studying for most of the day and were simply “letting off steam,” as my mother would’ve called it—though I have no doubt she would’ve roundly condemned what was about to unfold.
When our limited supply of balloons ran out (I have no idea where they’d come from in the first place), we thought it would be fun to see what would happen when we dropped large paper cups filled with water. Next up were other innocuous containers—again, filled with water. Being competitive students at a competitive school, naturally, we eventually turned this goofball entertainment into a competition: Who among us could make the biggest splash.
It was at that juncture that the really dumb idea came to mind: To win the competition (indubitably), I decided to fill to the brim, the suite’s large metal five-gallon-capacity-waste-basket and drop that straight down on the brick-and-mortar plaza surrounding the base of the tower. For purposes of the competition—thus far involving strictly conventional “ordnance”—I pictured the H2O equivalent of an atomic bomb. I filled the wastebasket in the shower, then with water slopping over the edges, I carried it into my room and set it on the broad window ledge.
It was at this point when I turned smart enough to know how dumb I was. I knew from basic math and physics that five gallons of water weighed 40 pounds, that each floor of the tower was around 10 feet high, which meant my window ledge was around 90 feet above the terrace; that the rate of acceleration is nine meters per second squared, and that a meter is worth slightly over three feet. Knowing the essential parameters, I didn’t run the calculation, but I did know that if I dropped the bucket of water straight down, when the “bomb” hit, it would . . . well, make quite a splash, to say the very least.
When Jeff saw what I was up to, he, in his “older, wiser brother with superior judgment” capacity, knew what to do. If you’re thinking he attempted to prevent a second Hiroshima, you’re wrong. But to his considerable credit, he said, “Wait! Let me go down to make sure no one gets killed.”
I was just about to suggest that he do so.
A few minutes later, Jeff appeared on the ground below and shouted up to establish aural, as well as visual contact. “Hold on,” he said, “while I make sure no one comes close to the drop zone.” I kept the water bomb securely on the ledge. The last person I wanted to kill accidentally was my good friend Jeff.
“All clear?” I shouted.
“Not yet—some people are coming this way. Hold on!”
I waited and watched below. A few seconds later, I saw a few students pass by the plaza and out of sight toward the entrance to the building.
“Clear now?”
“No! Wait! Not yet!”
I waited and watched again.
“Now clear?”
“Yes,” shouted Jeff. “You have about a minute.”
“Good. Now you get out of the way!”
“Damn right!”
I watched Jeff scamper away to what appeared to be a safe distance with extra margin to boot. As I struggled to lift the “bomb” off the ledge and out over the side of the building, I heard Jeff warning people away. After taking a quick look below, I let go of the water-filled wastebasket.
For the record, at nine meters per second squared, an object dropped from 90 feet off the ground takes about four seconds to land.
The “detonation” was so loud, it set off a whole blast of verbal reactions that a person back in the day might have heard from cavemen the first time they saw a mammoth crashing to earth four seconds after the over-sized mammal was driven off the edge of a 90-foot high cliff.
My fellow competitors and I dashed down the stairwell—nine floors—to check out the detonation site. What we found was a very large splash area and parts of the wastebasket transformed into large, curved pieces of shrapnel rocking back and forth some distance away on the plaza. But what made the deepest and most lasting impression—if you will pardon the upcoming pun—was the actual impression of the bricks and mortar on the round, metal, still-intact bottom of the wastebasket. It reminded me of the awful and eerie shadows of victims cast on the sides of buildings at near ground-zero in Hiroshima. In that moment just a couple of weeks before college graduation, I realized how utterly stupid, not just plain dumb, I’d just proved myself to be.
Back to the reunion, though . . . After my brief recollection of the “water bomb,” as we continued our walk toward the “departure brunch,” Jeff reminisced about a more pleasant and far smarter “escapade.”
“Remember the paper airplanes we threw off the top of the Senior Center?”
“You mean balsawood airplanes?” I said. But then I remembered: we’d started with paper airplanes launched from our suite before we hatched the idea of staging a competition featuring balsawood planes. We put up a few signs advertising the “event,” then arranged for access to the outside balcony on the top (16th) floor. The idea was for each contestant to wind up the propeller attached to a rubber band stretching to the tail, then tossing the plane into the wild blue yonder. Surprise, surprise, whoever owned the plane that flew the farthest won the contest. We supplied the planes at a price point that produced a modest profit, which, of course, was off the books.
We had a surprising number of takers. I remember feeling a twinge of nostalgia as I watched classmates, especially, celebrating in such a whimsical fashion, the end of what we’d been told were “the best four years of our lives.”
In returning to the main topic at hand—our 50th college class reunion—I must take the reader past one more extra-curricular episode from our undergraduate days; a complex caper orchestrated, again, by Jeff Oppenheim and me; a terror campaign of such notoriety, in fact, it made the front page of the New York Times and the end-note to the CBS Evening News anchored by Walter Cronkite. Since I’d alerted the CBS affiliate in Portland the day before the capstone event of our operations and nearly knocked over the affiliate’s photo-journalist the next day as I jumped out of the car to make the “hit,” I didn’t learn of the New York Times angle until the reunion—a full 51 years after the incident giving rise to such prominent media coverage. It’s not that I’d been in hiding or living under an alias through the intervening half-century. The reality is simply that life got in the way of my knowing until my all-star but understated classmate Tom DeMaria gave me the lowdown five days ago. (Cont.)
Subscribe to this blog and received notifications of new posts by email.
© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1]“Senior Center” back in our day, reflecting its primary status as the residence for members of the senior class (mostly).
