By eat I mean pizza, which was phenomenal as always. Elizabeth is really the best pizza cook a co-op could wish for and she is passing on her skills to my friend Peter, who will hopefully be our pizza cook next semester! During dinner, Truman and I struck up a halting dialogue in Spanish and then (in English) talked about his gap year, which he spent working, traveling and volunteering in Latin America, and about my brief forays south. Truman said his Spanish was "horrible," but we both kept up our end of a simple conversation. Hopefully we'll get more chances to practice next semester.
We skipped the drinking bit, except for cider, and headed out to make merry. The plan was to make our (that is, the Usual Suspects') way down to the Arb and explore the inside of the utility building there, which -- rumor had it -- some careless worker had left open. The north entrance of the Arb is maybe a fifteen-minute walk from our back door. We took almost an hour to get there.
Do you remember the epic snowball fights of your childhood? Memory inflates them to heroic proportions, but the nostalgia is not unfounded. Sneak attacks, shifting alliances, mad chases recorded faithfully in the snow. Bold stand-offs at high noon, just us and the tumbleweed ...
Anyway: we began the night with an ambush. Whit, Peter and I biked down from Keep to meet Brenna and Sam at the library, and had a mini-fight of our own before our journey even began. Whitman slipped on the ice, but wasn't hurt. A few minutes later, I called to Peter to be careful, only to look around in time to see him windmill and hit the concrete. Parents, no fear: he was fine too. Anyway, we stockpiled snowballs to ambush Brenna and Sam, but were a shade too visible to pull it off. Next time.
At first it was everyone for themself. (Yes. I know. I'm not wrong, just a decade or two ahead of the linguistic curve.) Brenna, by mutual agreement, was more or less left alone; the rest of us darted around the field, zigzagging south. Eventually the typical alliances formed and Peter and I (with Brenna as an allied noncombatant) worked together to get Whit and Sam, who couldn't decide whether they were fighting us or each other. Eventually the war lost momentum as our hands grew numb. I had my warm gloves -- the ones we bought with snowball fights in mind, Mom -- but I was the only one. Anyway, we got tired of keeping five or ten feet between us and checking over both shoulders for lurking Obies. We walked on peacefully, with a minimum of squabbling, and Whitman apologized for accidentally making my face bleed. Unlike last time, this one was not my fault, and he didn't end up with a bruised face, so I think we're even.
The door to the utility building opened without effort. Brenna and I were each reasonably sure that, given the creepy-yet-believable setting and the quirky-yet-relatable cast, we'd get silently picked off from the back of the group and dragged somewhere to be eaten. So we stayed near the front.
We turned out not to need the flashlights we'd all forgotten to bring, since the light switches almost all worked. In fact, the whole experience was a little anticlimactic. There were pipes, parts of pipes, fifty-year-old Oberlin parking notices, and a second-floor door leading into thin air with a shipping hook over it. We knew it would, though, so nobody got startled and tumbled to their death. The one exciting part of the building was the back room on the first floor. The light switch didn't work and three of us picked our way carefully over an undulating floor to the next door. Whitman kept saying, "There's something weird about this floor ..." but in my boots I couldn't feel it.
We turned out not to need the flashlights we'd all forgotten to bring, since the light switches almost all worked. In fact, the whole experience was a little anticlimactic. There were pipes, parts of pipes, fifty-year-old Oberlin parking notices, and a second-floor door leading into thin air with a shipping hook over it. We knew it would, though, so nobody got startled and tumbled to their death. The one exciting part of the building was the back room on the first floor. The light switch didn't work and three of us picked our way carefully over an undulating floor to the next door. Whitman kept saying, "There's something weird about this floor ..." but in my boots I couldn't feel it.
My cell phone light went dim for a second and when I pressed a button, it illuminated a huge hole in the floor. Turns out we'd been tramping on buckling plywood over a four-foot drop. But we stuck to the sturdy parts as we left, and we were fine.
We decided to go in a little farther into the Arb before heading back. The hill built up to hold the Arboretum pond turned out to be the perfect setting for a silly game of King of the Mountain. Our alliances more or less held, although Peter and I grappled once or twice, and Whit and Sam kept skidding down the slope, wrestling. Eventually we worked our way to where the snow at the bottom met a winding little creek. Don't worry. Nobody pushed anybody after that.
After more snowy wanderings and quiet contemplation, we went back to Keep for cider and warm baked bread. Also, arrowroot mixed with water and microwaved! It isn't terribly edible, but it amused us literally for hours. We wandered into the lounge in search of people to sit uncomfortably close to with our bizarre-looking gel. Nobody was there, so we sat uncomfortably close to each other instead, and played with the goo until it turned scaly and flaked off.
To finish off the evening, Peter and I went to see OSteel, the Oberlin college steel drum band. We only caught a couple of songs, but they were ridiculously good. On the way back to Keep, Peter remembered that the three of us had left our bikes at the library. We didn't want to just leave Whitman's there, so we tried to ride back with his locked bike between us, to no avail. It was lucky we had to walk -- we met Whitman about halfway home going a way we wouldn't have biked. (The possibility of missing him had amused us enough to factor it into our decision to be nice and take it for him, but he hardly ever carries his cell phone, so it might not have been as funny as it seemed at first.)
I didn't want the night to be over yet. It was positively balmy, and the roads were clear. Merely biking to the library hadn't been nearly enough for me, and Peter and Whitman felt the same way. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to go at just before midnight that requires more than a two-minute bike ride from Tappan Square. So we struck due west, heading for nothing, simply because I hadn't been before. And yes, when I suggested it, both Peter and Whit said, "Go West, young man ..." and I finished, "and grow with the country!"
We rode until Lorain met College Street about a mile away. Rather than continue on into the cornfields, however -- you can see on Google maps, there's nothing after that -- we turned onto W College and rode back, racing, just a little exultant. We reached our own front porch just as Finney's clock chimed midnight, which means it was 11:58.
After more fun with arrow-gel (a rather weak pun of ours on aerogel) and some tasty granola, we headed upstairs. And then I wrote about half of this entry before turning in and sleeping a long, satisfying sleep.
I hope you enjoyed this update. Due to my imminent finals, I am not going to be updating this week, although I might upload pictures if I take any good ones. Expect funny faces, animals and icicles.
Peary: You're making good progress - you may be ready for the steam tunnels of Yale soon - Amundsen
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