Back to The Education of Oronte Churm

Aug. 22

Move-In Blues

By Oronte

Surely our astrophysicist friends have a term for the chaos that exists when individual bodies in mutually influential orbits haven’t settled into a cohesive whole. I call it move-in week.

It’s not a problem everywhere. In Miami, where the city is a giant gateway for transience anyway and the university relatively small, the arrival of students in the fall is unnoticeable. But here I’m guessing we lose about a sixth of the town’s population each May, get used to having those people gone, then see those thousands wash back up at the end of August. With every cycle of departure and arrival the town is inundated with trash, traffic gets heavy and disorganized, and new pedestrians mill around confusedly, looking at each other. What’s more, my favorite pens and notebooks are sold out all over town. And don’t even think about trying to get into Red Lobster.

This year it seemed authorities had spent more time getting ready for the wave. Signs have been up for two weeks reminding drivers which roads would be clogged. A new highway exit is open on the opposite side of town to relieve congestion. And earlier this week cars in certain lots had notes on their windshields reminding owners to park elsewhere during move-in. It felt possible to escape the worst of the crush.

But yesterday was Freshman Move-In Day, and you could hear them coming, like barbarian hordes from the north, before they ever left Chicagoland. Dads everywhere were seething with rage that despite all good intentions the tribe was getting a later start than planned. Moms were still vacuum-bagging the comforters at mid-morning, all the kids had gone to Target for last-minute DVDs, and all those dads sat in their SUVs in their driveways, racing their engines to red line to make their point.

I walked over to the nearest of the dorms to take a look. Main roads were busy but not gridlocked as I’d expected, despite the weather starting to go bad. Signs stuck in the ground outside the dorm read, “20 Minutes to Unload and Go,” and “Unattended Cars May be Relocated.” A young woman named Karen in a shirt that read “Hall Chair” had command of an army of orange-shirted I-Guides, whose task it was to drag in arrivals’ belongings on flat dollies. She gave one of them a thumbs-up then talked to someone on her walkie-talkie. I asked her how things were going, and she said there hadn’t been much of a rush yet. “Looks like the rain is letting up now, though,” she said cautiously.

The university had let some people into the dorms earlier in the week, since move-in wasn’t on a weekend this year. But they were prepared for anything, it seemed, since traffic for this dorm was routed around several city blocks, with monitors, police, and students who would hand out free stuff placed strategically along the route. In the hour I stood watching, none of that was necessary. A dozen minivans, official car of the American middle class, were parked at the curb in front of the main entrance at any given time, but there was no line of traffic waiting, and families got checked in, dropped off, and moved along quickly.

“If you ladies are in Group One, you can go on downstairs after this load,” Karen told a few of her troops. “Travis, do you need help?”

Families dragged in all the stuff needed to survive a semester at a big state university. It was packed in Sterilite bins, Texaco anti-freeze boxes, laundry baskets, laundry bags, garbage bags, Dell computer boxes, plastic filing cabinets, Office Depot sacks, Container Store containers with more containers inside them. A dad ran through the drizzle with a flatscreen TV held protectively in his arms like a baby. Nearby a member of the campus workers union stood under a large tree, watching, not bothering to hold up his protest sign that read “Justice for All.” He looked at his watch then left.

As I was leaving, it began to rain hard. A mom stood at the back of a minivan, yelling, “La maleta” at her husband’s rump as he dug around in the dry interior. “Eh? he said. “La maleta! La maleta!” she cried over the hiss of water. Next to her stood case upon case of bottled water, canned energy drinks, and Shin cup noodles. Karen was instantly on the scene, her hair plastered to her head now.

“Karen, you have done magnificently,” I said when they were done and Karen had taken shelter under the overhang at the entrance. “How many you expecting today?”

“A hundred-and-thirty families,” she said.

“How many are still left?” one of her soaked orange-shirts asked ruefully. It rained harder, a real downpour, and another orange-shirt down the dripping line called loudly and cheerily, “Welcome to the university!”

I walked home thinking about those 130 little tribes. They made me blue, not because they’d invaded our town, but because everything about the university, from its landscaping and architecture, to the education it provided, to its organizational efficiency, would have the effect of distancing, for a time if not permanently, the members of those tribes. I’m one of those who make it happen, and I felt a little sorry about our power.

Mrs. Churm called just then to say that she driving back into town from a meeting, and it was a nightmare: Dozens, hundreds, tens of thousands of cars lined up to the horizon, coming in on the new highway exit on the opposite side of town.

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