Locked In

An anecdote that happened to Tony and me escaped my brain as I sped through that post about his recent visit.

As we were leaving San Luis for San Francisco, we decided to cruise through campus and catch a glimpse of how much Cal Poly's changed since our time there.

Whoa.

There's an entire new city built over by the old horse unit. It has a town square and a swimming pool and a basketball half-court and a sand volleyball court. Tony even remarked that their "downtown" was bigger and nicer than the one in his current town of Sulphur, in western Louisiana.

From the drive out of there, I was able to catch a glimpse of the older brand-new development up on the hill.

The newest part, the one we drove through, was named something like Poly Canyon Estates. I got nervous that they'd razed old Poly Canyon, an area out in the cut, in the mountains back off in the distance where students of yore built old structures and students/stoners of today go to, eh, enjoy the scenery.

Tony and I found the old dirt entrance, were relieved, and started out driving down it. Slowly we made our way to the end of the road, and saw that it was all fully intact. This next picture is from a distance, but shows the stuff we remember was still around:

When we got back to the front, ready to commence our trip around campus and quickly get back on the road north to the Bay Area, we noticed that we were now locked in. Can you see Tony's head popped out of the car?

Literally. The hydraulic gate that we didn't really notice on the way in was now shut, and unable to open. There was a warning sign on front about mountain lions (see it on the left above), and it had the phone number of the campus police. I called it and explained our situation. We were alums who got stuck behind the gate.

Eventually (there had been an accident and they'd forgotten about us) a campus cop came and opened the gate for us, and we had a quick talk with him as we drove out. It was all laughs and Aw shucks how these have changed and the like, and afterwards, as Tony and I slowly made our way back to the freeway, we marveled at how differently any conversation with a campus cop would have gone ten years ago.

It was one of those moments, where old meets shiny, and a gatekeeper--literally--in the middle trying to reconcile the voids.