As rain poured from the heavens Tuesday afternoon and everyone scampered to shelter, our campus green space was holding on for dear life, choking on the constant flow of rain.

The green space, which got a bad haircut this summer, looked like a freshman doing his or her first beer bong – it was trying to swallow too much (in this case, rain) all at once. But they all learn, sooner or later, and the green space will, too. That is, if it lives long enough.

For the past year, many people have complained about what the green space is supposed to be (this columnist, included). It wasn’t even green for the longest time.

It has had quite a life cycle. It was a parking lot, until they removed the cars and inserted construction trailers and sheet metal, which never seemed to be used. Then, Eastern ripped up the concrete and replaced it with mounds of dirt. The grounds crew threw some grass seed on it and hoped it’d grow (because placing sod instead would’ve made for an obnoxious check for the university to write).

At that point, we waited. The grass didn’t grow until late last spring when the space finally turned green. The process was complete – or so we thought.

After a summer during which my car clocked the outside temperature at 107 and 108 degrees regularly, I came back to campus to find dirt, again. Only this time it was a bevy of different brown and grayish color tones.

The summer reintroduced us to the long-standing joke that was the green space.

If a student asked me where Buzzard Hall was, I gave him or her clear and concise directions.

“It’s the building across the street from the dirt.”

I can’t tell you if they found Buzzard, but I can assure you that the same person never asked me twice. You can run the numbers on that and tell me my success rate.

But although I joke about it now, I’m holding out hope for our green space and I think the recent rain (Tuesday’s beer bong and last weekend’s showers) could have helped. The hope lies in the green blades of grass I see popping up each day.

This green space might be the last chance we have to put grass somewhere on campus. Unless, of course, Carman Hall gets bulldozed to the ground because of that whole floor-closing thing last year.

Sadly though, this column brings me to a final thought – if you’re on campus for your first year, you may not even know what the green space is.

This evidence comes from a first-year student in the newsroom Tuesday, who didn’t know what the green space was after I’d mentioned it in passing.

“It’s that rain-soaked dirt over there,” I said as I pointed to the drowning space.

Alex McNamee is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2818 or at [email protected]