victory flag

During my first year in college, my boxers made a brief stint flapping in high-altitude winds above campus.

My freshman comp class met in the distinguished Gilman 500 classroom, a luxurious suite beneath the campus clocktower. Boasting a round oak conference table, leather gentleman’s chairs and windows on all four walls, Gilman 500 was every professor’s top choice for seminars. The fact that our little freshman class was scheduled there was obviously due to a scheduling oversight – no way would the university bestow the use of such a Lexus of a classroom on a ragtag bunch of rambunctious freshmen like us.

On one side of the classroom rose a metal staircase topped by a door that was always locked. That door led, of course, to the Gilman clock and belltower, and we knew it was always locked because, desperate to go up there, we checked it all the time. Campus legends about the medieval consequences that would administratively befall any students who trespassed into the clocktower only made the incursion a greater temptation. Every day class ended, three of my friends and I would make a pretense of talking until our TA would leave, and then immediately climb the stairs and check the doorknob for the unlikely event that it had been left unlocked. It never was.

But after several weeks, one of us noticed a wide gap between the top of the doorframe and the slanted ceiling. One foot on the metal rail, another on the doorknob, a heave and a little squirming, and voila – each of us found ourselves, magically, on the Other Side.

It was more bizarre than we’d anticipated. Dim shafts of light angled through a slowly swirling dust haze to reveal wooden stairs, ponderous gears and cranks, and best of all, just above us, the translucent faces of the four clocks, each the size of a door, numbers in reverse and softly glowing with the sunlight outside.

We hooted, we stomped. We bounded up and down the creaky stairs, picking old tools out of the dust and clanking them on the gears. We rose all four flights to the utter pinnacle, where hung the massive bell, large as a jacuzzi and revealed by open arches to the campus grounds below. When we shouted down to the students walking between classes, they didn’t seem to hear us, so we rapped our knuckles raw trying to hammer a ring out of the iron bell. Even a machine-gun-like drumming would result in a soft crescendo barely audible to our ears, much less to those of the passersby far below.

Poor us! Here we were, four new freshman standing above the entire Johns Hopkins University campus, and we couldn’t catch the attention of a single person. Such a victory was meaningless without the fame that should attend it.

“Maybe we could leave a sign, or a flag, or something,” someone said. We looked around – no flags. No poles or ropes, either. Tons of dust, though – and some dusty old tools, a few scattered pieces of dusty wood. We descended all four flights, looking for something useful but finding nothing. Disheartened, we turned to go.

“Hey, wait a second,” I said, stepping behind one of the crankshafts. “I’ve got a flag.” A moment later I was waving my blue-and-white-striped boxers.

Back at the summit we secured one end of a piece of wood to a white railing using a strip of cloth we’d ripped from my boxers with the help of an old set of pliers. We tied the rest of my underwear to the other end, where they protruded four feet out into the open air, flapping in the strong breeze happily.

We raced down all nine flights of stairs to the ground, where we squinted and shaded our eyes with our hands and, yup, you could just make them out up there. The blue and white stripes were fairly camouflaged against the sky, but if you knew where to look you could see them – and that’s all that mattered. I was famous and, even better, safely anonymous. What would the administration do – take a DNA sample from my underwear?

With a high-five we headed off to lunch. I detoured to my dorm first to re-apparel myself, but when I got to the cafeteria I couldn’t find my co-conspirators. Instead I sat with some other friends and waited for a break in the conversation so I could boast.

“Hey, you know Mike Hobson?” someone was saying behind me. “You’ll never believe this – he hung his underwear off the clocktower! Man, we gotta go see it!” Pleased, I turned around and saw, two tables away, no one I knew – a group of complete, perfect strangers. If word was getting around that quickly …

I left my tray at the table untouched and marched straight to Gilman Hall, pounded up to the fifth floor, squirmed back over the doorframe, climbed all four wooden flights and jerked my underwear off the stick with a definitive yank.

And despite the fact that we felt no one had noticed our presence in the clocktower, the next time we had class in Gilman 500 we noted with disappointment that the gap over the doorframe had been sealed.

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copyright © 2003, michael w. hobson