Chasing Ghosts
Remembering moments buried for twenty years
I didn’t go to Charlottesville to visit the place where I spent four year of college.
I went to attend a photo festival. For years I had tried to attend Look3, but never made it. This year I got there and caught up with friends, saw inspiring work, and met other photographers and editors. That was reason enough. The fact that it had been sixteen years since I had last explored the town where it was held made me anxious.
After my friends graduated college I felt like there was little reason to return. The town is consistently ranked as one of the best small cities to live in. As with my undergraduates, I had seen little of it and didn’t see much reason.
Working my way around spots I had known brought up memories I had forgotten.
Once home of UVA’s football field, I stopped at Lambeth Field because I always thought that the colonnade was lovely and an interesting interpretation of the neoclassical architecture that is dominant on campus. Now restored, was crumbly one night in late Fall 1995. I remember getting dumped that night, but I don’t remember if that was the last time I saw her before she dropped out of school for a year or not.
Every fall before classes got too intense there were trips to seek out cooling water — tubing on the James, jumping into quarries in Louisa County, or, as here, soaking in the Rivanna river, or seeking body-surfing rapids in the Shenandoah.
The fraternity house where I lived for two years looks much how I remember it. They have renovated and made it more functional, but at its heart the life is the same.
The guy who lived here apologized when I introduced myself and said that they had had a party a few nights earlier.
It did make me wonder how lasting the issues that came to a head and became the focus of the nation’s news cycles last winter were being taken.
I passed by the Madison Bowl on the way to classes most days for three years. After particularly big storms, drainage failed and the field became ripe for mud-staining ball games. There were stories from years earlier, when kegs ringed the space and was then ended, eliciting the line “Uh-oh, no beer, Cavalier” in REM’s “End of the World as We Know It.”
Sounds apocryphal to me.
I spent four hours a week practicing, rehearsing, singing for seven semesters of college in the basement of Old Cabell Hall. Music became my therapy for whatever was going on outside the room. Where some people use exercise or meditation or bourbon to calm their thoughts. Making music seemed to do the trick for the most part. There was plenty of drama inside and three directors in my four years there, but good music and good people. The building was locked and under renovation when I stopped by, but I stole a peek though a basement window.
Twenty years ago I lived in this room, and lived in the room across the hall one year earlier. It was sun drenched and airy in a wonderful way and one of the few single rooms in a house full of doubles. It was the first time I truly had a space of my own with an unprecedented amount of privacy. Out the window was a flat roof to sit and watch thunderstorms roll in or sit in the sunshine and try and convince the other guys to listen to The Feelies over the Dave Matthews Band.
Gone now is the loft to crawl up to and escape the noise from whatever party was going on downstairs. It was here I learned to focus my frustrations and seek a path of my own, knowing it was mine alone. Others’ disapproval was inevitable but meant less than my pursuing the path of my own choosing.
To fly. I always thought the statue of Icarus, a memorial to James Rogers McConnell, was both goofy and fantastic. He died after being shot down in World War I while flying for the French Air Force in 1917, before the U.S. joined the war. He stands there perched and ready for flight, always ready for that first flap towards the sky.
I received my diploma on the stairs of Brooks Hall. My advisors and Saturday Archaeology lab sections were inside. I had at least two classes at the top of stairs so steep they seemed to give a reason for safety codes. It was built to house the “natural sciences” and housed skeletons and features the names of Naturalists and writers from over the centuries from Pliny and Aristotle to Audubon and Agassiz. I always loved how the dark brick and Mansard roof stood apart from the surrounding campus. One night, when the building was covered in scaffolding, a couple of us climbed to the roof. There was no spectacular view, but we could say that we’d been there.
I learned to cook in this tiny kitchen. In the ‘20s they put a roof on an alley. In the ‘40s or later, Earl Hamner, Jr. wrote Spencer’s Mountain in a booth, a story of the Depression in the nearby mountains that became the TV show “The Waltons.” In 1996 I cooked in the kitchen and carried spent fryer oil across the parking lot to common collection barrels wondering what sort of ecological disaster would befall the area if I spilled the dark and smelly oil and coated the lot with the mess.
The college-aged servers are still there. The college-aged cooks are not. Seems like a good business move.
Moormans Rock in Crozet was my first home boulder and site of the first fall that ever scared me. Did I land on sketchy ground when I tried it again 18 years later? Let’s not talk about it.
Climbing became my obsession in my last year of college and the years following. It was a place to try new things and find my limits, a place to introduce daring friends to something they had only imagined just a short drive from town.
I do own a hat.
