[#265, 266 Essay]

From Tico to Titanic: Automotive Ebb and Flow on Campus

“Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when

he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of

water have run through it without sticking.”

 Oliver Wendell Holmes

Memories and university campuses are interesting studies in tidal ebb and flow. Because of the nature of the cycle of one’s college days, there is a periodic cleansing of memory every four years as each group of freshmen eventually make their collective exits into “the real world.” Except for professors, a few lingering graduate students and, of course, the true guardians of memory on campus, the old women selling tangerines and donuts and the shoe repairman tucked under the White Library stairs, much is forgotten. Each new group of freshmen arrives, believing that what they now see is what has always been.

When I first came to the CNU campus on a blazing hot August day back in 1996, I felt right away the quality of the university campus as a cool, green sanctuary of calm in a bustling and incredibly noisy society. I relished my first exploratory walks around the campus, particularly to the agricultural area where fat sheep grazed and crops waved in the wind. The only grating sound on campus was the angry buzz of the occasional Chinese Restaurant delivery boy’s motorbike, skidding around a corner as if all the laws of gravity somehow did not apply to it.

Cars were rare in those days. I remember how one of my male students bought a clunky little red Tico and became one of the most popular guys around, as everyone proceeded to bum rides and favors from him. Even a male student with a bicycle that had a rack in the back to sit on had “an edge” in finding a girl. Few cars whizzed past dousing you with muddy water from puddles and being honked at was a shock because it almost never happened. One seldom noticed cars on campus, except perhaps those mysterious, quiet, darkened vehicles parked in the shadows under the trees during the Chusok and Solal holidays.

Then, things began to change. I think I noticed first because of two things: slowly, quiet areas on campus where young couples used to sit on benches under trellises of leafy vines were bulldozed under and expanses of hot macadam took their place. The other thing was the beeping sound of automatic car door locks, which suddenly began to fill the parking lots near buildings. Awakened by these two novelties, I looked around to see roads being widened, campus security guards blowing their whistles every few minutes in front of the Student Union and, one day, I discovered a Bongo lying on its side by the engineering colleges while nearby a car, that must have hit it at a very high velocity, sat with its engine block smashed in.

Perhaps these changes culminated one day as I was walking to my office and a bicyclist flew by my shoulder and head-on into an on-coming motorcycle. Both students were pretty banged-up and a bit stunned from the impact. I helped the more badly hurt student to the side of the road, at which point a car pulled up. As I was still trying to make sure the student was not in bona fide medial shock, the driver of the car hit the horn, and waved at me to move the damaged bicycle out of her way so she could proceed. As I did this, she just barreled past and on her way without casting a glance at the bleeding student.

These days, it is perfectly normal to see huge SUVs, some of them looking like ocean liners that have somehow slipped their moorings, parked all over campus. The sounds of doors being beeped open or closed is ubiquitous. Getting out for a quick lunch is like a Chinese puzzle box of which vehicle has to be moved first so the other cars can get out. The “honking hierarchy”--with buses on the top, then luxury cars, then small cars, then motorbikes, then bicyclists, and finally the humble, baseborn “low man on the totem pole”, the pedestrian--now seems part and parcel of the campus experience.

In my classes too, there seems to be a sea change. When discussing things like dating or eventual marriage, female students no longer dream of a romantic ride on the back of a bicycle with the wind in their hair, but they write down that one of their solid requirements for a possible new boyfriend is ownership of a car—and they are not, I would hazard, talking about a Tico or a Pride.

I am not so naive as to suggest that CNU could or should return to the bucolic state I found it in back in 1996; one thing I have learned in life is that you can never fight against an automotive tide. But for those who are new to the campus, I just thought I would share a bit of memory that there really was a time when you could walk away from the bustle, noise and exhaust through the university gates and into a soothing island of quiet, one that will probably never be again.