Once in a while, everyone becomes a speed-demon on the highway. Those who must drive East to West across the lower palm of Michigan know that it could be deemed “The Most Boring Highway on Earth.” There is nothing to see but roadkill, outdated billboards, and the Lion’s Den.

Personally, I allow myself 10 mph over the posted speed limit on long, open stretches of road. I diligently check my mirrors for the po-po and I follow all traffic rules. But no matter how high my driver karma is, I can’t seem to get a break here in Michigan. My ride back to Kalamazoo for the summer from my home town of Detroit, which usually takes two and a half hours, took over four hours. Moving from four lanes to one, in rush hour, in several construction zones with low speed levels, I swerved from side to side and drove on the shoulder just for kicks.

Travel in Michigan is a bitch. During the winter, there are severe travel advisories set in place for the whole state, warning about the hazards of driving on icy roads (not that anyone would know from this map, anyway). But heavy, frozen water is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dangerous driving here. Every season poses a threat to the roads.

For Michiganians, the idea of merging into one lane on a four-lane highway is almost a right of passage for summer driving. Come Spring, the construction workers immediately line the lanes with oversized, neon-orange barrels while trucks blink a bright yellow arrow like a sign on Broadway. This custom isn’t limited to the main highways, either—there’s no escaping construction on local highways, city streets, or any other possible route available.

With all the weather changes that the Wolverine State sees in half a year, let alone half a week, the alleged cause of the roads can be considered “uncontrollable unluckiness.” The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) takes advantage of the few weeks of sunlight to fix these roads, commencing summer’s Construction Season. The first step is clearing the construction path, regardless of how long the project will take, or how it affects the thousands of passing drivers. Michiganders, please add at least an hour to your commutes.

There must be a way to outsmart Mother Nature, right? According to a report by the non-profit organization TRIP, Michigan indeed would benefit from the transportation projects, altering the outstanding unemployment and the various types of drivers:

To achieve sustainable economic recovery, Michigan must proceed with numerous projects to improve key highways, bridges and transit routes. Enhancing critical segments of Michigan’s surface transportation system will boost the state’s economy in the short-term by creating jobs in construction and related fields. In the long term these improvements will lead to economic competitiveness by reducing travel delays and transportation costs, improving access and mobility, and stimulating sustained job growth, improving the quality of life for all Michiganians.

The lack of funds set aside for quality materials can be added to the list of blames. Fixing it is as simple as raising some money for weather-resistant roads. Sure, construction is inevitable, but if that work that was done could be done one time, there would be no need to risk the danger of construction on daily work routes. No one wants to suffer through the agonizing alternation between the accelerator and the break, but if it fills even a small pool of employment Michigan, anything is possible. As soon as residents tire of the potholes, it’s time to suck it up and pay some well-deserved taxes.

Once we clean up the roads, we can focus on entering the 21^st century. Firstly, Michigan should hire workers to maintain a website for real-time traffic reports, replacing this joke. Those who care enough to take small steps in the right direction ironically know their way around the internet far better than the actual MDOT. DriveMI holds a petition that strives for more taxes dedicated to better roads. Considering the radio has lost its place as a source of information, traffic notifications should exist somewhere.

traffic season foliage

Secondly, Michigan must adjust their public transportation system, another significant money saver. With less money thrown in the black hole of construction’s current state, more money can go to installing public transportation services that can focus on daily commutes, while reserving roads for longer trips, such as shipping truck routes. Building good roads is like putting money into education—this is an investment that creates undistorted solid ground, with more convenient transportation methods for everyone.

In the meantime, the drivers must keep their cool with the stop-and-go traffic. Watch how the traffic flows to keep the accelerating and breaking to a minimum. If you’re alone, find some good podcasts or make a good playlist, because you may be in for a long, monotonous road.

Kalamazoo College’s campus is bookended by two community gardens. Walk down Academy Street, starting from the top of the hill at the intersection with Monroe and finishing at the railroad tracks at the bottom, and you will pass both of them, although you wouldn’t know it. Both are tucked away, impossible to find unless you have precise directions. Both are attracting more and more attention as the campus ramps up its efforts at sustainability. And both are growing more dreams than their small plots can hold.

A green garden right on campus

At the top of the hill, in the spacious backyard of an empty, college-owned house, is the plot that hosts the gardening class. As you walk up the driveway and around the tool shed, the noise of the campus fades and the neighboring houses and trees create a bubble of near silence. The garden itself is a flat, seventeen by twenty-eight foot plot partially covered by plastic sheets. Part of the rectangular patch of ground is still grassy, waiting to be cleared for planting. Besides the grass, there’s nothing green in sight at the moment.

To get this week’s session started, instructor Seema Jolly tells the class to check up on the progress of the seeds they planted last week. Students fold back the clear plastic sheets and peer down at the soil. At first glance, there’s not much to see, with the exception of one flourishing row of radish seedlings. Looking closer, the students spot a few tiny sprouts that will grow into beets, turnips, and lettuce. “A lot of gardening is just observation,” Jolly reminds the class. “When you just spend a little time and look at where you planted, you’ll start to see things sprout up.”

This garden is still in its infancy. It was created at the start of spring quarter to host a new gardening physical education course. The idea for a campus community garden came from Farms to K, but a lot of other players are involved, including the PE department, Facilities Management, Sodexo, and the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning. Amelia Katanski and Alison Geist, faculty members involved with Farms to K, pitched the gardening class idea to the PE department and contacted Jolly, a K alum with experience working and teaching in community gardens, to see if she wanted to teach.

Most of the students are seniors and will have graduated before these veggies are ready to come out of the ground, but Jolly says the class isn’t frustrated. “I’ve told [the students] that the PE gardening class is kind of a beginning step to creating a community effort on campus, and so I think framing it in that way makes it a little bit easier for the students to get on board with this, because it’s going to continue after they’re gone. They really are setting the foundation for a much bigger project than just their ten weeks here.”

How big of a project, exactly? And how to create a unified community effort on campus? As word about the new garden started to get around, there was a sudden surge of interest from faculty, staff, and students. Although this widespread enthusiasm looks promising for the garden’s future, there’s a downside: “Everybody’s got their own vision of what they think this garden to be, what it could turn into, and who it would be serving,” Jolly explains. Will the garden continue to be used for a class, or will it evolve into a community garden? Will the food go to the gardening students, to the school cafeteria, or to a food bank? Could the garden eventually generate revenue and become completely self-sustaining? Nothing has been decided.

If this wasn’t complicated enough already, there’s another garden just down the street, with its own tangled roots and its own dreams competing like plants for the sun. Tacked onto the side of the mammoth Markin Racquet Center, the long and narrow seventeen by forty-three foot plot seems smaller than it actually is. The sharp slope of the ground adds to the sensation of compression. While the gardening class’s infant garden is mostly dirt with a few razor-straight rows of seedlings, this garden is thriving, if a bit chaotic-looking. Kale plants line Markin’s brick wall with their raggedy-edged leaves and strawberries carpet the foreground. The plot is partially surrounded by a rickety-looking picket fence, and next to the entrance a hand-painted sign reads “D.I.R.T. Organic Garden.”

D.I.R.T., which stands for Digging In Renewable Turf, is the campus’s student gardening organization. D.I.R.T. has been around since 2004, and Ben Cooper and Tammy Pheuphong have been leaders since 2007. “We don’t really have a lot of formal meetings,” Pheuphong says, and indeed, a list of suggestions left for her by one of the former leaders includes the tip, “Have a party rather than a meeting whenever possible.”

The D.I.R.T. gardeners are laid back but hard working. Saturday mornings, Cooper and Pheuphong rally as many students as they can and head to the garden, rain or shine, to do tough physical labor. For the two seniors, it’s the combination of devotion and flexibility that has allowed them to hone their gardening skills and double D.I.R.T. membership during their three years as leaders: they are always experimenting with new methods and refining their techniques, whether it’s changing the organization’s promotional tactics or comparing different ways of preventing soil erosion. This spring they’re trying square foot planting: dividing a section of the plot into squares, each square being devoted to a specific plant, in order to see whether the plants will thrive so close to one another. Pheuphong explains that it takes about a year to figure out whether a project like this is going to work, which means that the garden is in a constant state of revision. Sometimes a project results in failure. “Gardening’s not instant gratification,” says Pheuphong.

With all the experimentation going on, it’s hard to measure the long-term impact of the D.I.R.T. garden. Although it is relatively established compared to the gardening class’s garden, it raises many of the same questions. The D.I.R.T. organization still hasn’t quite figured out what to do with the produce from the garden. Currently, the food is up for grabs: anyone on campus can share in the harvest. But a lot of the crops go to waste over the summer when the students are gone. Some ideas include donating the food to a food bank, or selling it at the local farmer’s market.

Plans for the garden’s future are also in a sketchy phase. Much of the decision-making will be left to Trace Redmond, a first-year student who will be taking over D.I.R.T. leadership after Cooper and Pheuphong graduate in June. In Redmond’s ideal vision, the garden would function more like a city community garden in which various groups would each have a plot. For starters, he wants to get the Living-Learning houses involved by giving each house its own plot, but that would mean expanding the garden or starting smaller gardens next to the houses themselves.

For now, though, there are only the two gardens, one at each end of the campus, bracketing something larger than life between their modest plots. There is a charge behind each, a community that wants to see its ideals of sustainability realized in the form of an abundance of fruits and vegetables. If this kind of cornucopia is the goal, then the campus’s gardens are coming up short. The gardening class’s garden hasn’t gotten much out of the ground yet, and the D.I.R.T. garden hasn’t decided what to do with the food it’s producing. So how do we assess their impact? Maybe it’s the human growth, not the vegetable. The networks that are created, the knowledge that is passed along, the passions that are born.

Trace Redmond, working in the garden

For example, Ben Cooper will participate in a summer internship at Sleeping Bear Dunes, where he will learn about ecosystems and monitor the Piping Plover, an endangered species of bird. Trace Redmond wants to travel to Oregon to study the vascular system of redwood trees. As a K student, Seema Jolly got involved in D.I.R.T., which led her to an internship with Fair Food Matters, and from there to a position as a Garden Manager with a Utah non-profit called The Youth Garden Project. Now she’s back at K, showing students how to pull up weeds and thin radishes.

At the D.I.R.T. workday on Saturday, Ben Cooper hooks up the sprinkler while Trace Redmond hammers away at the leaning picket fence. For now, the other volunteers are trying to stay out of the sprinkler’s range, but they will soon break up the moist soil where the square foot plots have been marked with a grid of twine, ready for planting. Maybe the project will be a bust. But for the moment, the gardeners are soaking up the spring sunshine and pressing their fingers into the dirt to make trenches for the seeds. As Tina, a D.I.R.T. participant, puts it, “To have a project, to have a space where you feel like you’ve carved out a little area of something good and clean, I think it can just be really satisfying.”

Listening becomes difficult once campus life resumes and the adjective ‘college student’ overpowers any other words that can begin to describe who I am during ¾ of the year.  What I mean to say is when the fall classes start, so do the complaints, and I can stand to listen to the complaining for maybe a second.  Then my head explodes.

A complaint is not a criticism.  It offers no potential solution from the complainer to adjust any displeasure.  It does not incite a second party to discuss and formulate a solution to a problem.  Instead, complaints are abruptly presented, sometimes vulgar or harsh, and responses either further the depth of the complaint, or shoot it down completely with a mix of humor and annoyance.  And that is something college students love to do (or so I’ve come to understand).

College students love, love, love to complain.  They enjoy expressing their woes of vigilantly working late into the night, ignoring drooping eyelids and feigning consciousness.  They love to complain about their struggles with the faculty.  They complain about a ‘B’ average or a weekend with nothing to do but drink and play videogames.  “I’ve got three exams this week and a ten page paper due tomorrow morning.  I haven’t studied at all and I got as far as the second page of the paper last night with the help of Red Bull and Adderall.  Life sucks.”  Well, yes it does, for someone who can afford to attend college, live with peers you call friends, keep busy, and prepare for a money-making career (if the economy isn’t in the toilet by graduation).

Now I realize I sound like I’m complaining.  Maybe I am.  In fact, I’m complaining about complaining and I apologize.  But everyone complains from time to time, and it’s OK to take in small doses.  I guess it can be seen as a way to commiserate with others who may feel similar woes.

So let me bring to light a complaint I’ve had that I’m sure most students and ex-students have shared.  I hate the question, “What are you doing this summer?”

Everyone asks this question with positive or caring sentiments.  Friends and family are curious with the life of a budding student and they wish to stay abreast of all the classes, internships, and beer pong the student experiences.  For those sentiments, I am grateful knowing, at the very least, someone is interested in my life.

But it’s a hard question to respond to.  Besides the repetition of reciting the same few answers again and again, there exists some unspoken pressure to sound interesting.  If your summer isn’t up to par with the rest of the students’, you’re S.O.L.  No internship?  No summer job?  No exotic vacation?  Sorry dude.  Good luck finding a job!

As I sit here writing this article, with no obvious prospect of summer employment or an extravagant way to occupy my time, I realize it’s not so bad.  Why should I get a sympathetic ‘sorry’ for an open summer?  Do I constantly need a rapid intake of work to feel productive?  Of course not!

Though I’m not getting paid, I still work for myself.  I write, play music, attempt to cook, mow a lawn here or there, keep busy with friends, attend weddings; the list goes on.  It’s not obvious experience for career building like an internship or a job with a steady income, but it keeps my mind healthy.  I get to tune the skills that keep me excited and open to other possibilities.  I’m only bored if I choose to be.  Not all work consists of text books and pay checks.  If I view any work as worthy of my time, it is worthy of my time.