Because It Means Something

Hard at Work
Hard at Work

It’s easy in the daylight. In the summer. It’s easy when it’s 75 degrees and sunny. Simple.

The All-Nighter isn’t easy. Working through the night in the bitter cold isn’t easy. Winter in the Keweenaw isn’t easy.

But neither is Michigan Tech. Chemistry class isn’t easy. Senior design isn’t easy. We aren’t out at night building sculptures and having the time of our lives because it’s simple. There would be no point to it.

Nor is it simple to just say what Winter Carnival is. Its parts? A hockey game? A comedian? Sure, that would be simple to explain. But what is the All-Nighter? What is it?

No, that isn’t easy. Even taking all of these patterns of the entire evening, the people and sights and sounds, and placing them together; no, that isn’t enough.

Lights, Sound, Snow

There are a few people sitting in the hallway in Walker. It’s cold. Very cold. Fingers-burn-a-bit-when-you-come-inside cold. A few minutes,  and some feeling comes back. Then the pain. The floor has currents of slush and sand in it.

Outside there are four or five statues underway, illuminated by utility lighting and the broomball courts. Hoses and irons and that swishing sound that skiing outerwear makes. The crossing to Wads is busy, two crossing guards with traffic wands keeping things relatively orderly.

Blizzard is getting parade instructions from a member of Blue Key. The parade is about to kick off toward the other end of campus, the pep band playing their greatest hits as they head west. Behind them is the outdoor movie screen.

A few measures of “Tequila” down the sidewalk is the nightclub. Hundreds crowd around, music pumping through the flurries of the night. The bright lights atop the stage battle with the floodlights in front of Fisher. Electronic dance music has everyone rising and falling in rhythm. Alesso. Swedish House Mafia. Sebastian Ingrosso. A remarkably Scandinavian set, much like the long night.

Sort of like satellites around the dance floor are one-night statues, six or seven teams packing wooden boxes with snow, two tamping everything into place as though they were stomping grapes. Walls are going up. Bricks carved out. Signs sculpted.

Not far away, the Society of Women Engineers is selling pasties, At $2 an easy bargain to keep construction going. Kids and dogs dodge through the revelers. The stairs to Fisher are a sandy mess, dryers blasting away to little effect. An all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast is running through the night.

It’s loud. And it should be.

It Was Never Easy

Winter Carnival began almost 100 years ago. 1922, in fact. Tens of thousands have walked along these buildings, building something else, something difficult, something in the hardest conditions. We get to carry it for a few years, then pass it on. Just like surviving Fundamentals of Engineering, it’s the kind of thing we share. The name of the school has even changed a couple of times while Winter Carnival continues.

We always come back to it.

Chasing the Sunset

Walking west, where the sun has long since set, the bronze husky statue has a lot of friends tonight. Further back from the main thoroughfare of campus, under much brighter lights, a month-long statue is coming to completion. The library closed at 8; collections and archives, important as they are, not what we need tonight. Instead, right out front, deep-fried Twinkies and Snickers scent the air as though it were a county fair.

Up above, photos posted with #MTUWC on social media are projected high atop the MEEM. Looking up at it means snow sticking to your eyelashes. It’s windy, too. By the time you’re in front of the MUB, the wind tunnel is full effect.

And the MUB is even more active than usual this year. A couple of statues are going up in front, music blasting from the balcony outside the ballroom. The Campus Bookstore is staying open until midnight. In front of ROTC, two different statues are taking shape. One more is rising near the Academic Office Building. The hot chocolate in front of Alumni House didn’t last all that long. The sidewalks are flat and slick. You can take a few big steps and slide for yards. Meters. This is Tech: I should use metric.

The Inaugural

You have to wonder what they were thinking when they came up with that first Winter Carnival. How did they describe it? How did they say what it was to be?

And could they have imagined what it was to become?

No one then would have thought of LEDs or projecting atop academic buildings not yet conceived. But surely they were thinking that this was perfect. The winters are hard. Our school is hard. That has meaning. That’s worth celebrating.

Meaning

Because here I am, at the west end of campus, sitting in an office in the Administration Building at 4 in the morning, trying to define the All-Nighter. To explain Winter Carnival. And it’s not easy. After years of walking the center of campus, of scribbling words, of taking photos, it isn’t easy. Each time it’s the same, coming away with only a slice of what it means to be here. I can only be at one place at a time. I can only be a part of one project. I can’t play broomball while eating a deep-fried Twinkie and dancing and ironing a wall. But to take that slice. To be a part of it, to do something hard. That means to be one of us. To be one of the Huskies.

It’s because no one walk through campus can explain it that the All-Nighter is so perfect. It isn’t easy. Explaining it isn’t easy. But maybe you can picture the hallway in Walker, the stairs in Fisher, the Campus Bookstore. You can picture the bricks high at the top of the MEEM. You’ve walked this path. You’ve heard these sounds.

No one of us can explain  All-Nighter, because it’s all of us together who create it, who understand it. We don’t build and experience in fierce weather, in the dead of night, constructing moments and monuments because it’s easy. We know it’s hard. We meet it head-on, we revel in it, we glorify it and celebrate it, because it’s hard. And because we can do it even though it’s hard. We will do it.

No, one person explaining it could never be easy.

And none of this would mean much if it was.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigan’s flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.