If you give a Duke student a hurricane day, he’s going to ask for the whole week off.
In the days leading up to Florence’s arrival, hundreds of students fled campus. They packed up cars to drive home and bought expensive plane tickets to New York City, hoping to enjoy their newfound five-day weekend as only those with options can. But most of Duke did not leave. They stayed, hoping that their Central Campus apartments wouldn’t be flooded or that their car would get washed out of the Blue Zone and down the street. Students, faculty, administrators, and staff decided to remain, hoping that they had made the right choice.
What were they doing? How were they spending Hurricane Florence? Through lashing winds and blinding rain I trekked across campus, in search of the answers.
This column is for them; the ones who stayed behind.
My first stop was McClendon Tower. In Bella Union I found a group of students huddled together, drinking coffee and typing furiously on their laptops. One of them, a young man in an obnoxiously yellow P-Waves shirt named Jason McBeachyBoi, explained that they were filling out the application to become Line Monitors.
Ah, the Line Monitors, Duke’s very own Stanford Prison Experiment come to life. The punchline to the old joke, “What happens when you take a group of students, give them the power to brutalize other students, dress them up in blue jackets and remove all adult supervision?” Apparently the application was extended by one week because the Line Monitors felt that they hadn’t attracted enough power-hungry and vindictive students to the cause.
I asked McBeachyBoi why he wanted to become a Line Monitor, given their reputation. “Doesn’t it bother you,” I asked, “That fraternities get kicked off campus all the time, but Line Monitors are never called out for what is essentially institutionalized hazing?” McBeachyBoi responded that as a P-Waves staff member, Wayne Manor resident, and local boardshorts-wearing Penny-boarder, he thought the Line Monitors were, “pretty decent guys,” who obviously weren’t responsible for the “drunken shenanigans” of a few “fratty bois.” He shooed me away so he could finish the application.
My next stop was West Union. Despite the Category-something Hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas, all 14 restaurants were open. Welcome to Duke, where Student Health isn’t open but every single food option on campus is considered “essential services.” Looking for a staff member’s perspective on Florence, I stepped into the Il Forno pizza line. When I got to the front, a kindly woman in a floppy chef’s hat and a sharp red uniform asked me what I wanted.
“No, ma’am,” I fired back. “What do you want?” She was taken aback for a moment, but soon a change came over her. There was a faraway look in her eyes, and she gazed longingly up at the swirling clouds.
“I want to be respected,” she said, in barely a whisper. “I want to own my own restaurant in a two-story brick building on Main Street. Where I know the customers by name and they know mine. I want someone, someday, to ask me what kind of pizza I want. That night, I’d fall asleep in the apartment above my shop, the delicious aromas of crust and sauce lulling me to sleep, and in that moment I’d know what it’s like to feel truly free.” She sighed.
“West Union is not a box,” she murmured. “It’s a cage. A great gilded cage, where all of us are on display. Of course we aren’t closed for the hurricane; the show must go on.”
I left her there, her hands still covered in flour, pizza dough slowly sagging to the counter.
My final stop was the Bryan Center. Typically bustling during the school year, with all the students gone the silence was deafening. I ventured down to the Loop, then farther down, to the bar. A single student sat at the counter, a glass of some local IPA in one hand. His eyes were glued to the television, where the Weather Channel was running spaghetti model projections on Florence with the caption, “Where will she strike next?” As images of flooded streets and battered houses filled the screen, the young man took a long sip of his beer. I asked him what he was doing down here, drinking without any company during the height of the storm.
“I’m getting hurricane drunk,” he said, without turning his eyes from the television.
We sat in companionable silence for some time, watching the Weather Channel and listening to the sound of the rain. Because sometimes getting hurricane drunk is the best you can do.
Monday, Monday could not reach Hurricane Florence for comment on this column. Which sucks because they stood on the Chapel roof for about an hour shouting into the storm, waiting for a response. Monday Monday's conclusion? Florence is powerful, rainy and awfully rude.
P.S. These columns are always written a few days before publication, so it’s entirely possible that over the weekend Florence discovered our Gothicc Memes Page, became enraged at our lack of respect for her fury, and swung back around to destroy Durham. That being said, hopefully by the time you pick up a copy of today’s paper Florence has been run out of town by our witty use of Facebook’s events calendar.
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