A Convoluted, Slightly Ridiculous, and Poetically Chrono-displaced Halloween Story

By Anna Shvets on November 18, 2013

I’ve never successfully carved a pumpkin before. Every time, life got in the way: no pumpkins, no time, no tools, or all three. Once, I broke off the tip of a knife on a particularly stubborn pumpkin. Another time, my boyfriend and I bought pumpkins for carving, and then let them sit until they dissolved into a nasty-smelling puddle of bio matter.

This time was going to be different. I looked at the epically carved jack-o’-lanterns displayed on the internet–the faces, intricately carved trees and Harry Potter house seals, that barfing pumpkin. Pumpkins were bought. People were invited. Marshmallows and hot chocolate and cheese were set out. To the bafflement of all of my friends, a cordless drill was rented.

by johwee.deviantart.com

Yeah, that was an interesting conversation. “Hello, may I rent a drill to use on a pumpkin?” The clerk was oddly unphased. ?Unless it?s made of stone, go right ahead,? he said, with a shrug that could be heard over the phone. To really cover all the bases, I bought a teeny little pumpkin carving kit, which was quite effective for how flimsy it looked.

The evening went as planned, or at least as planned as such things can be. The hot cocoa, cheese, and company were enjoyable. We carved two faces, the (factually accurate) ?Winter is Coming,? and later, a trio of aliens.

Little did I know that using a power tool to carve a pumpkin would not be the bizarre or scary part of the evening.

After I carved the pumpkins and my boyfriend roasted the seeds, I set down my laptop on a chair–a questionable choice–and went to sleep, oblivious to the horrific fate about to befall my machine (pun intended).

In the morning, the laptop was on the ground. Ten minutes after I turned it on, the hard drive clicked off. The day was now formed.

Like a squirrel, I had hoarded up my stores for the winter: article ideas, rough drafts, to-do lists, even assignments completed early–and now those stores were gone. The last backup had been before the school year–better than nothing, but still a bummer. My files were trapped on a wrecked disk, and I needed to rescue them as soon as possible. Buses to Polaris, the home of the nearest full Apple store, only run at certain, strictly determined times. The best solution, clearly, was to bike all the way from campus to Polaris Fashion Center, 10.5 miles away. Google Maps claimed the ride would be an hour long. I made the appointment for 4:30 and packed my broken computer, an external hard drive, and the rental drill.

Why the drill? Mental calculus told me that the fastest possible route was from campus straight to the hardware store, then to Polaris. As it happens, the combination of all black clothing and a cordless drill (even with the power source removed) can look slightly intimidating. Oops. I carried it by the tip to curb the effect (ok, I don?t think anyone actually noticed).

The route I took.

After returning the drill, I was on my way. I took Indianola past the schools and the car dealerships, wondering about the kids who live so close to such a big university.

After reaching the Apple store, I was redirected to another store, which could do data recovery, which was 12 more miles away, and which was closing in less an hour. Instead of biking, I shelled out $60 for a round-trip taxi trip. The sunk cost fallacy had reared its ugly head. At the store, I was told that there was a good chance no force in heaven or hell could recover my data–restoring from an external hard drive it was. Then, after some other minor adventures not worth mentioning, I started biking back to the campus area.

Imagination running wild. (photo by Kathleen Duncan)

What I didn’t anticipate was how dark the roads would be without streetlights. As I biked down the dark country road with grass and bushes on one side and cars whizzing by on the other, I thought: this is how I am going to die. The road had potholes; I had seen and dodged them on the way to Polaris. I gripped my handlebars and prayed to a god I don’t believe in that I wouldn’t end up roadkill. Large swaths of my journey were therefore a real life game of Frogger: slip off to the side at the first sign of a car, wait for the current flock of cars to pass, look back for the red light that signifies a pause in the cars, pedal as hard and fast as possible, repeat.

I mentally played out my death by car and what I would do, who I would call, etc. Conversely, if a dark country road maniac, or worse, a zombie, tried to grab me, what would I do? How would I persuade them to let me go? Could I out-bike the zombie? Would it be a sluggish 50′s style monster or a fast 28 Days Later kind of deal? I had no contingency plan for zombies or chainsaw-wielding maniacs, but the whole day showed that contingency plans were not my strength. Death is a dreary topic, so I moved on to paying attention to the landscape.

There is nothing like biking across a city to let you see its true nature. In cars and buses, you’re isolated from everything around you, and walking makes it possible to zone out or listen to music. Biking, however, leaves no room for error, so everything is in sharp relief: the wind against your face, the faint whiff of skunk, the trains and the buzz of electricity from substations, the subtle changes of the landscape from mile to mile.

Columbus is like an onion–at least that’s what I saw from the cross section. Polaris is surrounded by department stores, grocery stores, restaurants, then big houses seated on large swaths of lawn with no sidewalk, then country roads edged by woods and fields, then industrial parks. In an age where everything is made in China and factory jobs almost seem quaint, it is startling to see industry laid so bare. Warehouses, the Budweiser plant, a small electrical plant, mechanical shops, massive trains bearing coal tars and plastics were across the city. The stores here were different as well; instead of restaurants and clothing stores, there were car repair shops and diners and convenience stores and gas stations.

A map of Columbus freight train tracks.

At some point, sidewalks reappeared. Everything was lit by this stark copper light. Eventually, these industrialized parts gave way to residential and college-y areas. Bars, cafes, suburban style houses (not nearly as neat as the ones in Polaris). The industrial, utilitarian parts were sandwiched between the sheltered suburbs and the somewhat less sheltered college campus area. Within an hour’s bike ride, I saw different neighborhoods with different assumptions and different economic realities. Here on campus, it is not known what secretly keeps the city alive, what drives the economy here. We go to the mall or to college, picking out a shirt or a book, not knowing the supply lines that extend across the city or across the world. I’ve thought about the vast difference between Old Short North and Polaris, but really, both are just different generations of sheltered. I don’t truly know what life is like for the janitor washing the mall floors after hours, or the train conductor. All of this is hidden from us.

When my mind was done with that economical/philosophical tract, I thought about all the neurotransmitters I’ve been studying for my Neuroscience class. The cilia in my inner ears, keeping me upright on my bike instead of toppling over into the nearest ditch like a top done with its spin. The neural highways in my thalamus, coordinating my senses into one coherent stream of experience. The dopamine giving me a rush every time I saw something else that was new. All of this finely tuned chemical machinery, working together to create and maintain consciousness and the line of thought.

So much of the scaffolding of our city and our minds is unknown and subject to failure at any moment. The train running along the city’s spine can explode any day; the brain can release a wrong chemical and cause the tremor that will send the bike careening into the nearby ditch.

I saw the night sky and thought of how stars and pumpkins were made of the same stuff, really. And then I thought of how many things are like the stars, still untouchable and far off and mysterious, like the train tracks going off into the distant downtown and somewhere far off into the countryside.

Halloween is a holiday of boundaries–the point between summer and winter, the one day where the border between life and death wears the thinnest and spirits could cross over into this world (and presumably drag the living back with them). The unseen border, thrown into sharp relief.

When I arrived home, I would study all night and stumble through the following week exhausted, but for that hour and a half, I felt peace. The pumpkins, which had been set outside the window, had wrinkled into themselves. The trees were rusted and bare. Some houses even have Christmas lights strung up on the eaves and the nearby bushes. The Earth makes its trip around the sun, and yet… the air still smells smoky and leaves litter the ground and the border between worlds seems as thin as ever, the background machinery just as hidden.

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