Warning: Environmental Hazard

On my walk across campus to work this morning, I had the opportunity to observe my surroundings, a simple yet pleasant act. I hate getting out of bed--as I'm sure my roommate would attest while telling you about my neverending series of alarms that fail to wake me up. So anyway, (I distracted myself with that aside; I'm sure I could write an entire blog entry about the saga that is waking me up each morning, but here I go again... back to the point) I was walking across campus, not paying too much attention to the wind until I looked up.

The sky was hovering ominously above (no, I'm not about to say it was "hovering" in the sense that it was just waiting for Chicken Little to run across the parking lot so it could fall) with this intense gray hue. The wind was pushing leaves across the wet pavement, occasionally creating miniature tornadoes upon colliding with a building. And as I was enjoying the peace of walking across a desolate campus in the grimness of pre-storm weather, I heard a humming, buzzing sound that could only be one thing: machinery.

"Who dared to intrude upon Allison's morning walk?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. It was the grounds staff. They were out there blowing leaves into piles and then sucking them into a plywood box with some noisy oversized industrial vaccuum thingy. (Don't you just love my use of technical jargon?) At the time, I was perturbed by the noise and by the fact that they were sucking all of the color out of the campus and soon it was going to look like the dead, barren, arctic tundra that reminds us yearly of the relatives who wanted us to go to college in southern California.

Now, fast forward to my walk home from work. The sun was shining brightly behind the gray clouds, making the day appear significantly less like armageddon. However, the wind's intensity was frightening. I'm talking about the kind of wind that makes you walk on a diagonal path when you fully intended to go straight ahead (and you're not even drunk). The kind of wind that takes a tree, shakes the hell out of it until you think it's going to crack and start bleeding sap in Quentin Tarantino proportions, and then launches the falling leaves at you like projectile weapons.

I'm serious. Leaves are deadly weapons on this campus. You're just walking along one second and the next you stepped into a cross-roads of wind tunnels and leaves are flying at your face, you raise your hands quickly to protect your eyes from injury, and then one of two things can happen: a leaf can hit your face, traveling at a good twenty miles per hour, stinging like a bitch and perhaps causing a visible injury; or you can walk out of the cross-roads without getting hit, only to realize that you look like a total dipshit with your hands to your face and your shoulders hunched in fight-or-flight mode, with no opponent to be seen.

As I hurriedly put my hands down, I was overwhelmed by a sense of appreciation for the grounds staff who were so diligently trying to keep us safe by sucking those bastard leaves into the box thingy this morning. (No, I don't actually believe that's what they had in mind. More likely than not, they're still being pushed by the administration to worry about the appearance of the campus because the parent/prospective student tour season isn't over yet. But can't I pretend that people actually care about one another? Come on. Work with me here.)

So, on behalf of all students, this one's for you, grounds staff. Unlike all those times your work has caused us to, say, jog through obstacle courses of sprinklers, or slip on thin layers of ice that just so happened to not get removed from some of the most-used sidewalk paths on campus, you've actually done something useful. Today, we were reminded why our tuition and fees should pay your wages. Good job. We appreciate it.