When a grand valley meets high waters (a satire)

Nikki Fisher

Welcome back to GVSU, Lakers. Nothing says “Hope you enjoyed your Spring Break” better than these record weather snaps, leaving us with both a low of -4 degrees and a high of 46 degrees in this week alone. With such vast changes in temperature, this columnist anticipates the 10-foot snow banks lining our campus like the walls of Troy to melt, leaving floods unlike anything Grand Valley has ever seen. When the Grand River flood, filling the Ravines and washing out campus sidewalks, here are a few things I think you should prepare yourself for:

1. Due to the high volume of snow days, classes will be forced to resume despite the deluge. Classes will take place on building tops. Space heaters will not be permitted on rooftops due to issues with fire safety and LEED certification. Administrators will kindly encourage students to “buck up” and “act like they’re from Michigan.”

2. With all the 50s layering the bottom of campus like sunken ships, the Rapid industry will employ the rowing team to serve as their new transit system, ferrying students from rooftop to rooftop in valiant pursuit of liberal education.

3. Fully clad in Louie-gear, T-Haas will zoom around campus on the speedboat from the “Laker for a Lifetime” video, singing “I’m on a boat aaaand I’m going fast aaaand. . .”

4. The BSPs (Blue-Structure-Preachers) will tear down their beloved blue structure (a.k.a. “the Transformational Link”) and create an arc that Noah would envy. Unfortunately, only a handful of students and faculty will make the cut to get on the boat due to the BSPs high standards for what constitutes sin.

5. On the optimistic side, we will finally have the opportunity to live up to our title as “Lakers” (though after four years, I’m still not sure what we ever did to earn this, besides being lucky enough to live in giant farm field 30 minutes away from Lake Michigan).

6. The “Little Mak” Bridge will wash out. All that hard work spent preventing erosion will be all for naught. As soon as the waters recede, the bridge will be scheduled to close for somewhere between two and sixteen months (depending on the extremity of the erosion the flood leaves behind).

7. We will find freshmen emerging from the Ravines as mud people. Before the flood, they may have been out sledding on stolen food trays, getting lost on the trails behind Calder, throwing broken bikes and appliances over the “Little Mac” Bridge, or doing only-God-knows-what-else happens in the ravines after-hours. The rowing team will send our scouts to look for these poor, misguided souls.

8. Someone will break into the waterlogged clock tower and learn how to play “Top 40’s” hits. A slow, “blub blub” version of Ke$ha and Pitbull’s “Timber” will shake all the other buildings left remaining. Local whales will be attracted to sound, causing further damage to campus infrastructure.

9. The Classics Department will take over. They did, after all, win the “Life Raft Debate” in 2011, where their representative, Professor Charles Pazdernik, persuaded everyone that their major would be the most useful in the event of a post-apocalyptic rebuilding. This will probably be for the best.

10. If the waters stay until spring, no longer will the grounds crew need to water the sidewalks with their top-of-the-line “sustainable” sprinkling system.

11. Many students will post out on the gardened-roof of the M.I.P. Library. Below, fish will swim in the floor-length windows among the books, computers, and 31 varieties of chair. In the garden, students will recreate their own society, called the “Grand and Virtuous Sustainable Utopia,” living off the fruits of their labor and splitting their wealth equally like true egalitarians. Here, they will hold protests, running around the roof’s perimeter to wave signs at T-Haas, who will still zooming around on his speedboat.

A Shout Out: To the GVSU writing center staff for helping me generate with this list. Y’all are wonderful, brilliant people.