Scav Rally and a Homecoming

Last night I went to the Scav rally at my old dorm, Snell-Hitchcock. Since I moved out last year, along with most of my close friends, I have never felt comfortable going back to Hitchcock. It is always strange coming back to a place that is so familiar and yet slightly strange. The signs are different, there is new furniture in the rec room, and of course new people walking the halls.

That awkwardness was heightened by the nature of the event. I was Scav captain for the previous two years. Ok, to explain Scav, I'd need pages and pages, but the brief explanation is this:

There is a list of items, and teams compete to get the items, just like a normal scavenger hunt. However, the items are not normal. Often they're not items at all. Sometimes there'll be some code you have to break, or some performance you have to do. One item was to eat your own umbilical cord. Another was to get a real tattoo that said "Sorry about the syphilis, can we still be cousins?" Others are real items, a walk-in kaleidescope, for example, or a Tesla coil that can transmit power across the Midway (although we faked that last one; turns out actually doing it would require tons of electricity and would be both dangerous and highly illegal). On top of that, there is a road trip that can travel up to 1000 miles, picking up/stopping by items along the way. Of course, no one tells you which items are road trip items. That would be too easy.

The way Scav goes, the list comes out on midnight of the Wednesday before Mother's Day. Judgement Day is Sunday at 12. In those 84 hours, the teams must complete hundreds of items ranging in point value from .01 points to lambda points to hundreds of points. Of course, the points are all relative, so it doesn't really matter. Many people don't sleep if they can help it. Classes are often, uh, forgotten, as is homework. Which, at the U of C, is significant.

See, the only thing more important than work is work no one grades. Scav is not easy, it is sometimes even not fun (though terribly fun on the whole). But the delight comes from the fact that the whole endeavor, and it is an endeavor, is fruitless. Of course, it isn't; even if most of the items are destroyed at the end, the memories last. But it is fruitless in the sense that the fruit of the labor is not the purpose of the labor. The work itself is the reward, and that, it seems to me, is the nirvana of this absurd world of higher education, where resumes and cover letters are woven into the very fabric of our minds, strange rough threads in an otherwise smooth piece of silk.

Obviously, I am passionate about Scav; it is more than four days in May for me, it is a statement about society and our future. It is a confirmation of my faith in humanity, that we can be such silly creatures. Dictators are not silly. Genocide is not silly. Our silliness is directly connected to an environment of peace and a hope for the future. For these reasons, I was a captain of the Snell-Hitchcock Scav team for two years.

Now, as I return no longer a resident of the dorm, I am not sure of my footing. As a 4th year and a former captain, I feel like I should be giving advice, like every word that leaves my mouth should be to help the team. Yet, I am a foreigner, now. I know maybe half the people in the room, and many of them I am not all that friendly with; three years of dorm drama has taken its toll. And I do not want to be one of those captains who can't let go, who assumes some kind of authority like an ex-President calling up the White House to put in his two cents on how the current guy is doing.

But I am there because I was invited to give a speech and share a story. As I am talking, it all comes back to me: the War Room, the team headquarters that is covered in tarps and sleeping bodies as well as spilled paint, pretzels that have been crushed on the floor, half-finished items, and electrical cords leading to unseen machines. The feeling of waking up one morning to find that the Green Room, our house lounge, has been transformed into central command for a great endeavor, talking about Scav this feeling comes back to me. The anticipation is half the fun, the count-down. The power tools, the late nights outside building high-point items, soldering and screwing and hammering and hitting. The communal food that somehow materializes and is devoured in a flash, and the look in peoples' eyes as the present an item they have worked so hard on to a judge, who half the time put the item on the list simply because they thought it would be cool to see a mimeograph machine or a video called "Not Fast Enough Not Furious Enough".

And as I leave, having played my part, I think about how singular the tradition of Scav is, how unique to the U of C. And I can't wait for May.