The hallway in Carter Hall connecting the rest of campus to the Great Hall is like a perpetual awkward moment. When you are walking towards another person, there is a certain distance that we all know about (though I don’t suppose any of us could say what it is for sure) that you must be apart from the other person before you look up and make eye contact with them. If you try to acknowledge the person too soon, then you will have to awkwardly endure the time in between actually passing them without knowing where to look or whether you ought to say hi to them again as you walk by.
Photo from Covenant College Marketing Department
In wide open spaces, this situation is easy to avoid by casting your gaze all about and looking at anything and everything until the person comes close enough for you to pretend that you have only just seen them. But this hallway in Carter is just long enough that when you see the person on the other side, it is far too soon to say hi, and there is nowhere to look to pretend you haven’t seen them.
Canned sardines would tell you that the hallway is a bit cramped and entirely too narrow even for them, and there is nothing to look at other than the end of the hallway and the several pictures scattered throughout. You cannot pretend to look at those pictures though. Everyone knows you’ve already seen them. They might be interesting to a visitor; there’s a beautiful shot of Carter Hall on a fine sunny day, a picture of president Halvorson posing with a group of ecstatic Mountain Affair winners, a bulletin with the smiling faces of several students who had impressive internships last summer and advertisements trying to get you to choose their internships. Cool stuff if you didn’t pass it every day and try to pretend you were looking at it to
avoid that dreaded eye contact.
And you have to be careful looking too hard at the decorations because the hallway is also lined with doors that will sometimes spring open like a jack-in-the-box and you will nearly collide with Jack if you aren’t ready for it. The floor is a kind of mottled linoleum that is slick even when not wet, but when it rains, everyone in the hallway gets to see you sliding around like a two-year-old learning to ice skate. The fluorescent lights glaring down from above don’t care about how uncomfortable you are, nor do the confining white walls. Whenever you open the bleak brown door, the smell of whatever is being served in the Great Hall hits you square in the
nose and lingers there for far longer than it should.
There are always people in this hallway, no matter the time of day or night. They are your fellow suffering students, wearily shouldering their backpacks as they try not to make eye contact with you (but they always do), or they are faculty, and they try to smile at you as if that will make your journey through that place better somehow. Sometimes there are many people, crowding around you and making you feel like a kid in a bumper car at a carnival. Other times it seems nearly abandoned and you think to yourself that maybe this time you will pass through to the other side in peace. This is a foolish thought which you ought not to have, for without fail, like some kind of ghost of awkward moments past, some lonely soul will float eerily into the hallway, the quiet slap of their footfalls echoing in the thick silence.
I wonder if moles passing each other through their tiny tunnels, deep in the silent earth,
feel something the same when they have to feel their way past each other, or maybe ants
marching single file past another line of their brethren trudging doggedly to work. That’s what we’re all doing in that hallway. No one goes there to go there, but everyone goes through there to get somewhere else. It is a world between the worlds, a gas station on a road trip, an airport you get stuck at for a four-hour layover. It wasn’t meant to be the sort of place you would want to stay; you’re supposed to hurry through, shuttled along like produce on a conveyor belt at the grocery store. And for this purpose, the awkward hallway in Carter Hall is sufficient.