SUMMER SENSES
Katrina Clarke recalls the silent sound of the city when Queen’s University closes for summer,
Tall grass grows over red Solo cups, chalk drawings replace vomit on sidewalks and furrowed brows turn into sunburned foreheads — these are the signs summer has arrived on a small-town university campus.
I spent four years at Queen’s unaware of this alternate universe, during the months when stress was but a distant memory and quiet blanketed Kingston’s notorious party-filled streets. Hours after I handed in my final exam in April, I was usually aboard a train en route to a summer job elsewhere.
It wasn’t until I graduated at the peak of the economic downturn with no job prospects in sight that I realized had nowhere to be. So I stayed.
It took time to get used to the slow pace of campus. I was incomeless and living alone, subletting an old house with lots of centipedes and no Internet. My dataless cellphone was my only lifeline to connect with the handful of friends still in town. Then it broke.
I spent days biking to friends’ places, knocking on doors to see if anyone was home. I read books, learned how to barbecue and jogged. Some days I just didn’t talk to anyone. I felt somewhere between a kid on summer break and retired. Most- ly, I was bored.
Then, magically — given the state of the economy — I got a job at the university. Then another. Then another. Two summers later, I was still in Kingston.
As time wore on, I learned to appreciate the quiet.
The lingering animosity that existed between the 22,000 students and the 123,000 Kingston residents — often surfacing in the form of late-night bar brawls prompted by a student’s disparaging “townie” remark — dissipated when the students left town. Indeed, even tickets for Liquor Licence Act violations drop by 50 per cent in the summer, Kingston Police told me, though noise violation numbers tend go up slightly.
Those of us who stuck around were mostly graduate students who had swapped the school year’s wild parties for trivia nights, and intense studying in favour of football. Others, like me, were new graduates working 9 to 5 and settling into new early-to-bed routines.
I found community in a group of colleagues and grad students, all of us early 20-somethings trying to be adults, which involved drinking vinegary homemade wine, starting a lacklustre book club and not getting drunk on Tuesdays.
Inevitably, the first sounds of student life would pierce the sleepy campus in late August: engineers hooting and hollering during Frosh Week; police sirens blaring; new students chanting cheerily; and, sometimes, the crushing sound of a car flipping.