I thought about it a second before answering. "Yes," I said, "I think I do."
I stayed on at the wheel. We drove north out of town on 99W. She punched up more music on Spotify. U2 begins playing.
"Bono may be on my shit list of public figures," I said. "But I like this song a lot."
"That buffalo..." I said, referring to the solitary one galloping along some pleasant ridge in the video.
"Yeah, those buffalo are tricky," she said, almost with preternatural understanding.
We fall into silence of road meditation as music plays. A few cars come by in the other direction every mile.
"You're right," she said. "This is so much better than taking the Interstate."
The evening gives a lush Tolkeinesque glow to the landscape of the valley. The green hills seem to burst with the luscious sensuality of the berries ripening on them. Feeling adventurous, we cut off the main road at Monmouth, on the side road through Independence, where a park goes almost down to the river, and then up again towards the main highway east of Rickreal. The hills look like home now.
The road signs begin to have an eerie familiarity to me, not only in what is written on them, but in their configurations and shapes above the curving asphalt. These are shards of experience long unrevisited in my mind.
On the outskirts of West Salem we glimpse the top outline of downtown across the Willamette. The golden man on capitol dome gleams the afternoon light right back at us, as if he has captured part of the the sun itself.
We cross the arching bridge over the river. The details of downtown--the ragged tops of the old buildings---materialize abruptly in front of us.
"I never used to come this way, from the west," I told Red. "I always came in through the east, through the commercial sprawl, and past the state penitentiary. This way seems so----immediate."
With a smattering of tour guide commentary, I drive straight through downtown and make for campus. As we pass near by capitol, I tell Red about my favorite geographical fact about Salem---the intersection of Church and State.
I park across from campus in front of the law school. The street is dead quiet, sheltered by canopy of trees. The blue sky has deepened in the shade of early approaching evening. The thick air is balmy---so unfamiliar to me, even though all the buildings look almost exactly the same. I was never here this time of year.
As we walk onto campus I began rattling off memories excitedly, as many as I can think of, saying "This is where...this is where..."
We walk past Doney Hall, where I once helped produce the campus newspaper in the basement, first on light tables, then later using Macintoshes. "There was something lost in the transition," I tell Red. I tell her my fantasy about full-size digital light tables.
At the edge of the Quad we stop to stand in front of Collins Hall.
"I came up these steps so many times," I say, as we look up at the building.
The front door is locked so we put our hands up to the glass to look inside. From the names listed on the departmental directory, the physics department has doubled in size to six faculty members. The only familiar name from my day, a woman who came to Salem as the young new faculty member, is now the department chair. Her gray-haired portrait smiles back at me from a glass case just inside the door.
"I took nuclear and particle physics from her," I say proudly. Her class was exceptionally hard, it seemed, since she'd just come from graduate school. Acing one of the midterms had been a pivotal moment in my confidence-building as a proto-scientist.
I point towards the music building across the quad. "Choir every morning at 8 am. It was an awesome way to start the day."
Coming down the sidewalk towards the Mill Stream we hear music. Crossing the bridge we see a party in progress in the concrete plaza in front of the library---the "new" library, as I still call it. The old one was much more amenable to actual study, I tell Red.
The party consists of about a hundred high schoolers. A few of them are (somewhat) dancing to the booming music. A woman wearing an id badge comes down the sidewalk walking past us. I stop her to inquire what's going on in the library plaza. "Summer music camp," she tells us.
Standing beside the University Center, the "main building" of campus, I bemoan the removal of the grand steps that once led up to the second floor exterior. Now to enter one slithers in through the basement. The Bistro there is still in operation---one of the first real Salem coffeeshops, before the Northwest coffee culture really took flight. It is shuttered for the summer, but I can tell the furniture and layout inside are almost the same as 1986.
The rows of student mailboxes are unchanged. My old box number comes back to my memory, out of the blue. I locate it and touch it for good luck.
We explore the upper two stories of the University Center, both of them radically altered. On the third floor, the old campus radio studio where I was once a DJ has moved across the hall. The television lounge where I watched Monday Night Football on the big screen projection television is now the Women's Center, with a sign featuring interlocked Venus symbols.
Down on the second floor, I peek into the dark windows of the Cat Cavern, which takes up much of the floor. I can see the long rows of cafeteria tables. It looks almost the same. "
"The things that began in there..." I mutter to myself outloud. Among them was my first encounter with Prof. Maurice Stewart, who had been assigned as my faculty adviser when I was a transfer student.
Such a quirky man, I had thought to myself, upon meeting him. I think I'll take his physics class, just for fun.
We leave the main building through the south basement entrance. We are at the south edge of campus, I tell Red. I point out the buildings of sorority row across the street. The Greek letters on them, as well as the exteriors. seem unaltered. The building on the east end was my first dorm, I tell Red. The sorority in it had recently been dechartered before I arrived.
We cross the street to get a closer look. As we stand in front of my old residence hall, the opening chords of Michael Jackson's song "Thriller" fill the air from summer music camp party. I mount the steps and entertain Red by doing the famous zombie dance from the song's video. She gets a big laugh of it, as I prance back and forth, raising my hands in the claw like motion of the dancers.
I yell in towards the direction of the music, in the mock raspy tone of a codger, "Get your own damn generational music!"
No comments:
Post a Comment