It was around 11pm on a Tuesday night when I was fully loaded up on the most fried food I could get for ten bucks, sitting the happiest I could be at the gas pump waiting for my friend’s car to fill up. This is, of course, all part of the beauty of a run to Sheetz – a midwestern gas station chain I can’t believe I took until my second year of college to discover. But that wasn’t even the best part of the night – the chemicals and preservatives were no match for a viewing of the northern lights at the football field.
One thing I’ve been taking for granted about living on a campus with a whole lot of flat Ohio space is that Oberlin’s North Fields make for the perfect spot to view any sort of celestial anomaly. And we’ve had quite a few in my time here! The solar eclipse last semester was stunning, and more so than it was in other, more typologically scattered places. Almost anywhere you seem to go in Ohio gives you an unobstructed view all the way to the horizon. On eclipse day, you could see every slight change in color all across the expansive domed sky – a full 360 of yellows and blues shifting everywhere in between.
But anyway, after we were properly stuffed with mac n’ cheese bites and high on Sheetz-refresher-caffeine, we ran out past North Quad, past the football field, and out to join the stargazers in the pitch-black night.
The further we got from the lights on campus, the more we could make out the greens and reds painted across the night sky. We sat there in the quiet serenity and just soaked it all in – the pine trees on the horizon, the wide-scale view of Ursa Minor and Seven Sisters, and the crisp, midwestern wind that had just begun to pick up in a whisper of the first moments of autumn. Even in my second year here, I still find myself thinking, “Never would’ve gotten this in the city.”
We slowly began to hear whispers of other groups of friends laughing and running around in the great, dark expanse of the night and (because we are the way we are at this school) had a mandatory round of call-and-response clapping patterns. Other colleges have their cliques and fraternities, but here, any thought of that stuff gets thrown out the window for impromptu bonding experiences that just can’t be replicated anywhere else. The weird theater-kid energy every one of us somehow finds inside of us at one point or another reached a breaking point that night when the entire field seemed to agree on returning back to a kindergarten mindset.
The breath of fresh air was like no other I had taken as I watched my friends running around and screaming about who was coldest or whose hometown is superior. I realized for the first time this semester how lucky I am to be able to take these little snapshots in my mind, storing a mental album of stories and images I’ll forever remember. I keep having to remind myself that right now, even when I forget that I won’t always have this, some of the best parts of my life can also be the most simple ones.
A lot of this year has been reckoning with the fact that time isn’t slowing down, no matter how much we may want it to. But that hasn’t stopped us from being the wild, uncertain, and curious bunch we’ve been since we got here. I hear about experiences some of my friends have at other schools and wonder how they spend eight months of the year without the things I’m so incredibly grateful for here, and that includes even the smallest moments – even the indiscernible shouts into the night from beyond a football field.
