On Ghosts, and the Haunting of College Campuses.

This evening, for the first time since it closed for good, I returned to The Campus Formerly Known As Cascade College.  My current employer is renting space there for commuter classes.  Sooner or later, it was inevitable that I would get invited over there to teach a room full of students how to use their library's electronic resources....

I've written before about my alma mater and former employer, and the diversely intense emotions I have toward that now-extinct institution.  I've been avoiding the place, to be honest; the good memories and the bad are painful in different ways.  But now my number was up: time to go back.  I could've pawned this responsibility off on someone else from my department, but no, that seemed wrong somehow.  No use trying to escape the inescapable; might as well get it over with.  I recently spoke to a fellow Cascade alumna who had a similar experience, going back to teach a class there last year.  She told me she cried.  I wondered if I would, too.

"We meet in S207," the instructor chirped over the phone, "the very newest classroom in the building!  You just go right up the stairs by the entrance, and it's the first door on the right."

First door on the right.  The back door into the library, leading into a musty little room full of periodical stacks, with a couple of cubicle-sized offices at the back, one of which I occupied for nearly a decade.  Yes, I know that door.

It's been a heck of a week, even without this, a week that has demanded pretty much all I had to give.  So when the time to get myself over there drew near, I was fighting weariness and panic at once.  I prefer it when they fight each other, so I left just late enough that I had to zoom to get there on time.  No time to think!  Find a place to put the car and get yourself in there!

It wasn't that door, after all; it was the next one over, the segment of the library that held the Curriculum Lab for the last few years of its existence.  And I didn't cry.  I told the students I was a little disoriented because I used to work there, but now the room was completely different and the doors had changed walls (once I pointed this out, they noticed the old doorways in the cinderblock).  I didn't tell them it made me feel like the ghost in my first NaNoWriMo novel.  I told them that, before the room was part of a library, it was part of a men's dorm ("If these walls could talk... we definitely wouldn't want to hear the stories, har har").

I gave my presentation with the spotless new screen and the bright new projector, and then I left, and I walked around the building looking in doors.  The old IT office had mirrored glass, so I couldn't see inside.  The computer lab was still there, but the door was closed, so I don't know if it still smells the same.  I could see one more classroom in the former library (the Reference room, that once had study tables with drawers everyone signed on the sly).   A couple of classrooms were open downstairs, too, all with extra-bright fluorescent lighting and stark white-painted cinderblock.

I went out into the courtyard, which has a new paved area, benches, and of course that weird fountain-henge-thing.  It was dark, and pouring rain.  The old Student Center was dim and mostly empty, with a couple of tables (pool? ping-pong?) along the walls.  I know it was remodeled long before the school closed, but part of me was still sort of puzzled that it wasn't the old brick cavern I remember.  Memories in this place have such thin strata that it's hard to look at any one thing without thinking of several other things it's been.

There were adolescent boys doing basketball drills in the gym lobby.  This made me grin; the echoing slam and screech and the sweaty reek of the gym never change.  I sort of wanted someone to ask, Excuse me, are you lost? so I could reply, Oh, no, I know exactly where I am.  But no one did.

Heading back toward the parking lot, I looked up to see lights on in the room over the gym entrance, in that weird leaky room where most of the library stacks used to live.  I tiptoed up the fire escape to peek in the window and saw... beds!?  And one of the beds had someone sitting straight up in it with an alarmed expression!  Oops! I started to beat a hasty retreat before realizing it was a CPR dummy.  Shuffling over to peer toward the other side of the room, I caught a glimpse of a student at a desk.  Not wanting to alarm any real people, I ceased my surveillance and continued toward the parking lot.

But right there at the edge of the parking lot was scaffolding.  Scaffolding that, even though the bottom segment had been removed for the night, even though it was still raining, even though I was wearing nice work clothes and a skirt... would've been a cinch to climb.  And I've never been on top of the Ad Building!

I stood there for quite some time thinking about this.  What a great story this would make! I thought. I will probably never get another chance!  If it hadn't been for the cars still arriving in the parking lot, and the scaffolding's prominent and well-lit location, I might not have been able to talk myself out of it.  If I hadn't been there in a professional capacity, I might not have bothered to talk myself out of it.  But it was and I was and I did.  Talk myself out of it, I mean.

In that moment, though, I fell into a memory hole, right back down through the strata to a time when Sanders Hall was the Ad Building, and things were meant to be climbed.  And I left the campus in a pretty good mood, after all.