You can go anywhere on a snow day at Duke. That old burnt-green landscaping melts into shades of white and gray--streaks of brown sand a mere ambulatory suggestion--the no-longer-roped-off distinctions of Path and No Path falling to the whim of a few venturous boots. Today holds the possibility--that grand, overlooked possibility--of walking straight down the grass from Crowell to the main quad, not deigning to choose left or right. Today sends you scrambling to find a new way up the chapel steps, the stone fixtures frozen into a slick ramp emptying on the icy blacktop. Suddenly even old ossified James B. Duke, his cigar's burning embers bearing little grains of ice, wears the countenance of a man ready to get up and go. After all, every once in a blue moon, even a WEL freezes over.
A game of snow football ripples with anticipation outside West Union. The teams--four on four--line up on opposite sides of the makeshift field, and someone punts. The ball comes flying through the air, landing in one of the guy's arms with a dampened thud. Then comes the charge. "Oh yeah, way to fall," someone shouts. "Where did Siegel come from? I've never seen this kind of 'athletic ability' before." The sneer quotes fly. A guy on a bike rides by while someone else chats on a cell. "Hey, what the hell is going on over there?" asks one of the linemen. His fingertip points up toward Kilgo, where six students stand on the staircase, half-naked, shivering. Four males--all in boxers and sandals--two females, one wearing a green bikini top and pink bottom, the other donning what looks like a black sports bra. Everyone's laughing, and a seventh (clothed) brandishes a camera. Nearby, a group congregated outside Craven shouts up to a girl poking out of a third floor window. "You're gonna get cold!" she yells, teasing. "Aw, shut up! Shut up!" they return. She giggles. "I wanna get some food!"
This is a Duke that rarely shows its face. You can go out at six in the morning after a Friday night and find an abandoned campus, but it's not the same--there's no drunken stumbling today, no alcohol-induced stupor, no impending sense of dread and regret. Same thing Sunday morning right before church. Lingering in the wind today--where all the frantic third-year pre-meds, all the assistant professors of economics racing for tenure, all the overworked Alpine employees, all the garbagemen and research assistants and fencers and neurobiologists and history TAs aren't--there rests a sense of peace, of purity. No one is here who isn't present, and the omnipresent stench of overachievement and sloth and exhaustion--that elixir we call the University--for a single, glorious day, escapes.
Everything feels joyfully quaint, slightly askew--reveling in its own simplicity. Slushing past the Kilgo entrance, that ironic Jolly Roger pirate flag that's been out since August stares down the quad, impervious to all. A tall blonde girl and the guy with her walk out of a House J door and stop for a moment. "We're really not doing anything snow-related," Emma tells me. "We're hanging up these flamingo lights in my room, but we need to get Scotch tape, which is in his room." Someone's knocked the trash can tops off nearby, and one of the three plastic Dole bottles weighing down a poster has fallen to the ground, half-frozen, with a silver string wrapped around its neck like a misguided office tie.
Emma and the guy, tape in hand, pass by again on the way to WilRec. Crowell is practically empty, just a girl in green shorts talking to someone else in sweatpants. The flag by the Ambler tennis courts--which are, for perhaps the first time, unlocked and open, welcoming anyone crazy enough to play--still flies, wrapping itself, wholly tranquil, around the pole, a frozen grommet clanging gently against the metal.
K-ville remains equally silent. A lone figure, clad in green jacket and hat, knocks snow off the open-air shelter he has provided for a chair. Most of the tents remain upright; two or three have been felled, poles popping out under the weight of the frozen white. A table has been fully overturned, and chairs throughout the village lie on their side.
Then the chill hits, in one of those forgettable, clichéd January ways--a gust of snowy wind blows cold, or a cloud passes in front of the sun, maybe--and it's time to head back. My pen sticks to the page now, barely able to make a mark while a gaggle heads out of the closing gym, hands red with incipient frostbite. A few insane joggers head past, and two guys help push a car stuck in the slush. Someone else warms his hands on a closed steam valve.
An hour later, Duke administration breaks the news that classes will be canceled again tomorrow. IMs fly back and forth one more time; mindless screaming fills the halls one more time; whoops of joy and fist-pumping, all one more time.
And so one day becomes two.
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