Hokie Hauntings

What do you write when a place you've visited, an atmosphere you've embraced, and people you've met have been ripped apart at the very soul?

Today it's been one week since the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and I still hardly know how to process it all. The images on TV and the Internet are eerie because I was just there last fall. This is a campus I visited, a town whose streets I walked, whose Huckleberry Trail I jogged day after day, whose odd fiberglass Hokie Bird sculptures I surveyed, and those are students and teachers I may have passed without knowing they'd be victim to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history just a few months later. Was it only just October I was there?

One of my sisters has lived in Blackburg nearly two years, working with college students through a young, dynamic, outside-the-box church that meets on campus. Her apartment is about one mile off campus on a street that runs straight toward school buildings and athletic fields. Within hours of arrival, I was tailgating with undergrads and grad students, we'd bartered with a friendly alumnus for $10 football game tickets, and we traipsed across what felt like half the campus to the stadium. We clambered up on steel bleachers set up behind the end zone, the student section, where nobody, but nobody sits down. I still have pictures on my cell phone of the fireworks, the foam fingers, the semi-frozen fun.

The marching band filled out a few tiers below and led the whole section in the catcalls, chants and trademark rituals of a Hokie game, like shaking your car keys on a "key" play. I wonder now if marching captain Ryan "Stack" Clark, a victim from the first shooting, in the doorm that morning, was down there anywhere. Probably. I wonder too, if anyone I passed on the steps, on the sidewalks, near the gates, at the concesson stand -- were any of those nameless faces later named on the list of the dead or injured?

There's a photo online, one of thousands of images taken in the last week in Blacksburg. It's a movie marquee, with a message for the students that reads: "Our hearts are with you VT." There isn't a street sign to be seen in the picture, and very little else for clues to where it was found. But I know exactly where that marquee is. I can tell that photo was taken from the west side of its entrance, and I'm almost certain which of the nearby shops the photographer would have had to have been standing in front of when the image was captured. I know it's the Lyric Theatre, that not only is it the only independent arthouse cinema and playhouse in town, it's the only cinema in town, and I could describe the classic ambience inside. I know all this because I've been there, and because yes, Blacksburg really is that small (despite a campus of 26,000 students.)

That same chilling sense of recognition hits again when I see footage from inside the War Memorial Chapel, where some of the students my sister works with met to pray. I can literally hear the echo of footfalls, even if there's no audio of the corpsman's march. The wooden altar at the front is thick, heavy, golden-hued, the lectern off to the right is mounted on wheels, and despite its weight, rolls smoth and quiet, even with an accidental nudge. The steps up from the pews to the raised floor that runs around the side of the chapel are slick and wide. The chapel is not very big either. The drillfield, on the other hand? The one where students held a candlelight vigil for their fallen friends? Massive.

In the past week, numerous leaders and members of that campus church, my sister among them, have been written up in newspapers, photographed, interviewed by news anchors and filmed by network and cable affiliates. In the few minutes she has had time to call or email, we hear details that nearly defy comprehension. The scale of the sorrow is bigger than all of them. I know she's barely sleeping, of course -- too many students need her help, and she will willingly lend a hand, a listening ear, a shoulder, a hug. But I wonder, and I worry whether she's had any time to grieve herself.

Last Friday, the nation, it seemed, wore Hokie colors and adopted the Hokies as their own. Maybe it rubbed off from my sister, or the trip down there, or the combination of both, but embracing the Hokies in spirit wasn't hard for me. They've already haunted my thoughts.