Staff Writer Victoria Mirian took a lonely walk across campus as part of The Daily Tar Heel's Bucket List for UNC students. She documented her experience here:
My friends said it would look like the walk of shame, but I had my mind—and my alarm—set.
I am notoriously bad at getting up early. I have 8 a.m. classes that I absolutely dread getting up for, waiting until the last minute to roll out of bed. I wouldn’t be surprised if my roommate counts how many times per week she has to wake me up so I don’t oversleep. So when that 6:00 alarm went off Sunday morning, I rolled over and went back to bed.
The same thing happened at 6:30 and again at 7:00. At 7:45, I finally realized that my window of time was probably closing. If I were to walk the campus while most people were still sleeping, I couldn’t wait. I dropped down off of the side of my lofted bed, grabbed my backpack and began the trek from South Campus.
Campus seems a lot bigger when nobody else is around. I nodded to another student outside of Lenoir who was guzzling down caffeine to wake up. Next to me, Polk Place stretched out, looking strange without students dotting the lawn between classes.
I wandered by an empty Pit covered in fallen leaves. A pile was collecting in the corner that was nearly big enough to jump into. My tired brain added that one to my personal bucket list: jump into a pile of leaves in the Pit.
Even though most of campus was asleep, the squirrels were wide-awake. They were everywhere, digging, running around—I saw one jump, not crawl, into a storm drain outside of Carroll Hall with something in its mouth. I could only imagine what it was doing underground, but upon inspection, there was nothing. It was gone.
By 8:30, campus had begun to wake up. Students were out running to the sounds of car horns and sirens going off in the streets.
I walked up a quiet McCorkle Place to pick up coffee on Franklin, but strolled back through a noisy one. Two kids playing around Silent Sam stopped to look at me. One pointed, exclaiming, “That is a flossify major!” Good try, kid, but no.
I passed by a prospective student tour on my way to Coker Arboretum, where I settled into my favorite spot, a bench under an American Beech tree, to drink my coffee and write. A new kind of quiet greeted me in the arboretum. While the wind rushed through the trees, birds sang and squirrels rustled in the grass.
As autumn leaves fell all around me, I knew that even in the morning, some things at UNC didn’t change. The campus was still, if not more so, just as beautiful under an early morning Carolina blue sky.
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