Practical Magic. (Or in our case, Practically Tragic.)

Connie Taylor Krupp
Apr 24
10 min read

Updated: Apr 27

HAPPY JOLEBRATION DAY!

Johannah on a beautiful autumn day at West Virginia University.

Today is the birthday of my belated BFF, Johannah Cantrell. I call it Jolebration Day and each year I post a short story about one of our misadventures.

This year I'm posting about our run-in with magic. Or something like that. It was a college class about Magic and Something and Something Else. And the moral of this post is "Don't mess with magic unless you're ready to pay the price!"

It all began when we were freshman at West Virginia University and figuring out our college curriculum for the upcoming Spring semester. Something “possessed” us to choose an evening class on Magic which was something that we normally wouldn’t have signed up for, being devout-ish Jesus Freaks. Unfortunately, the class was held on the furthest campus from where we lived and was three hours long, but it only met once a week, which was super-appealing. And we both had come to realize that early morning classes were not for us (it’s called oversleeping people) and an evening class seemed like a way better fit for our nocturnal personalities. It also helped that the class had some bewitching title like Magic, Religion and Crap Like That. So, at the very least, it didn’t sound altogether boring.

So sign up we did. Research the amount of time it would actually take to get to the class we didn’t.

Now for those of you who have never had the great privilege of attending WVU—or visiting its plethora of campuses—let me briefly describe it to you for it is unique in the world of college campuses. The city of Morgantown is built within a mountain valley alongside the Monongahela River. For some baffling reason the original downtown campus was plopped at the top of High Street, the main thoroughfare of the city. Hemmed in by winding roads and precipitous mountains, the campus became too small too fast. A second sprawling campus was built a couple of miles away on slightly flatter hilltops. But heavy traffic and gridlock quickly became a problem. Therefore WVU became the home of the first Personal Rapid Transit system in the USA. It became operational(ish) in 1975. Consisting of small monorail-like cars zipping along a concrete railway in the sky, the PRT was a bit like a boring Disney Ride (except for one sweet spot on the way to the downtown campus where a sudden and unexpected gear shift occurred—which would send the uninitiated flying backwards, much to the delight of the students aboard. (We liked to hum The Eagles’ tune, “Life in the Fast Lane”, with bemused smiles as the embarrassed passengers regained their footing.)

Visitors had to purchase a ticket to ride the PRT but every student was issued a thin plastic card to insert into the turnstile much like an ATM machine, which was not yet prevalent in the USA. Being college students, we regularly lost our cards or—even worse—had them eaten by the turnstile. Then your only means of making it to class was to leap over the turnstile which automatically activated THE BOOMING VOICE OF GOD which would bellow from the speakers above: "GO BACK OVER THE TURNSTILE! GO BACK OVER THE TURNSTILE!"

Of course, no one ever did.

The greatest perk of the PRT was you could always use its frequent breakdowns as an excuse for being late to class. Whenever a tardy student rushed into a classroom they would breathlessly mouth, "PRT. Sorry!" and the teacher would nod understandingly and continue with the lesson.

The early PRT cars in futuristic white. Now they feature WVU's colors and logo.

Now it was pretty cool to have a futuristic means of transport as a young college student. And one would think that it made getting around WVU a breeze. But unfortunately, getting to the PRT was often a lengthy process. Honestly, there were two college proclivities that students needed to possess in order to succeed at WVU—neither of which was mentioned in the brochure.

The first was the ability to calculate the following formula:

TN2RC = W(R) 2B + BT + W4PRT + RPRT + W(R) 2C

Time Needed to Reach Class

equals

Walk (or Run) time to Bus

plus Bus Time

plus Wait for the PRT

plus Ride the PRT

plus the Walk (or Run) time to Classroom

You couldn't even fill out a schedule if you hadn't mastered that one.

The second thing you needed was strong calves. Because STEPS! The downtown campus is practically an M.C. Escher rendering of stairs threading up, down, and around every street, building and parking lot. The steps next to the PRT station were so daunting that they were nicknamed The Stairway to Heaven. By the time you had ascended its heights your calves were on fire. Indeed, one professor told me that he could quickly ascertain if someone was a freshman because their calf muscles were not yet over-developed. And since it rained or snowed about 70% of the time in Morgantown, the stairs could be treacherous. (I saw a lot of crutches at WVU.) So adding the weather conditions into the commute time was always a must as well.

Well, Jo and I failed to do the required travel calculations before signing up for our Magical class. Nor had we taken into account the fact that the beginning of Spring semester fell in the dead of winter. Which meant snow. Lots of snow.

And yes, there was lots of snow on the evening of our first class. It had been snowing for weeks. Snowplows had erected walls of snow along every road, which required some surefooted scaling to reach the sidewalk on the other side. Dreading the journey, Jo and I bundled up and began the trek to the bus stop.

Here's a quick description of what it took to go from our dorm to the downtown classroom that evening.

1: Trek through the snow to the bus stop.

2: Catch a bus to the PRT station.

3: Take the PRT to the downtown station.

4: Climb the Stairway to Heaven steps to reach the sidewalk which would take us down a hill and over a pedestrian bridge by the old stadium to reach the only corner where it was safe to cross the street to reach our classroom’s building.

The first mishap of the evening occurred at the bus stop. I was balancing precariously on a mound of icy snow when the bus came rumbling up beside us. Regrettably I was not wearing crampons. (Which should also be mentioned as a student necessity in the WVU brochure.) I was starting to take a step when both feet shot down the aforementioned mountain of packed snow causing me to accidentally ski underneath the bus. My shins slid against the edge of the bus’s underside like two piece of deli meat going through one of those slicer machines. I would have continued sliding/slicing all the way under the bus but my kneecaps stopped me. (Thank God I had knobby knees!) Hearing my screams of agony, Jo bounded through the snow and grabbed me under my arms to drag me back up over the snowmound like I was a wounded WWI soldier who had been cut down in a snowy trench. Still on my back, I yanked my jean legs out of my boots to inspect my shredded shins and tried to not get mad at Jo when she started laughing. Since the bus wouldn’t wait, I had no time to treat my bloody wounds. I rolled over and Jo yanked me to my feet. We clambered aboard the bus and then we both started to laugh. Or, in my case, whimper-laugh.

The next mishap was learning that the lines for the PRT in the evening can be long. Especially when the temperatures are in the arctic range. (I should also mention that when selecting the sites for the PRT stations someone thought it would be amusing to place them in the windiest locations immaginable. (Those bitter mountaintop winds made you feel like Luke Skywalker after his tauntaun had frozen to death in the Hoth System.) Our wait took forever and we had to battle the growing concern (along with hypothermia) that we might be late for our first class.

That worry ended once we got on the PRT because by then we KNEW we were going to be late for our first class. As we hurtled towards the downtown campus we conferred on the best way to make up for lost time.

“It’s fastest to just run up the Stairway to Heaven!” Jo insisted.

“Yeah, but those steps are gonna be super-icy!” I whined. “You know how scary insane they are in snow. I think we should take the long-cut and go through the buildings next door.”

“That’s a ton of steps too. And you lose time in the hallways.”

“Yeah, but we won’t have to worry about ice. I’ve had enough injuries tonight, thanks very much!”

“Yeah, okay.”

The PRT doors slid open and we took off in a sprint. Into the building. Down the hall to the stairwell. Up the flights of stairs, back down the hall and through the front doors and out onto the ice-covered sidewalk and SPLAT!

Down I went. This time I slammed onto all fours.

Jo whirled around at the sound of my kneecaps thwacking into the pavement and rushed back to help me up. But then she didn't because she couldn't. She was doubled over in laughter. As I slowly peeled my stinging palms off the icy sidwalk to examine them for injuries, I looked up and saw Jo—hands on her knees, body shaking with laughter. She was looking at me, tears popping out of her eyes, trying to speak through her cackles.

"I practically heard the sound of meat frying when your knees smacked the sidewalk!" she howled.

"Owwww." I whimpered. "My knees feel like fried green tomatoes!"

Jo responded with "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Then I started laughing uncontrollably too, still on all fours, my hands and knees embedded in ice and concrete. Finally we got control of ourselves. Jo helped me up and we began sprinting. We still had to barrel through another building then run for eight minutes down the icy sidewalk and across the pedestrian bridge to the corner of the Sunnyside neighborhood (the area with all the bars). That was where there was a stoplight, which offered the only point of safe passage through the Sunnyside traffic. But as it turned out, it wasn't safe. Well, maybe it was. But somehow in our frenzy (we were already SOOOO LATE) we misread the crossing signal and began crossing at exactly the wrong time. Suddenly we found ourselves trying to make ourselves as thin as possible as we froze on the double-yellow lines disecting the middle of the road while cars whizzed in front and behind us, missing us by centimeters. We were trapped there, awaiting our imminent splatter, for at least an hour. I mean a whole minute. (It was one of those Time-is-Relative-When-Facing-Death experiences and honestly felt like forever. We were terrified.)

Finally catching a break in the bumper-to-bumper Formula One Speedway, we bolted across the other half of the street and into the building that our class (hopefully) was in. (We actually weren't sure.)(Another calculation we failed to make.) After scurrying throughout the building we finally found our class. We peeked through the window in the door. It was packed. There were only three available seats. In the front row. Right in front of the teacher.

"Noooo! Crap!"

"What do you wanna do? We're like 40 minutes late! The PRT excuse won't work. And we'll have to sit right in front of him. Should we just skip class this time?"

"The class only meets once a week. If we miss just one class we'd have to get straight A's all semester just to finish with a C. Plus we nearly DIED to get here. We gotta go in."

We dallied a bit longer, waiting for the professor to pause for a moment. But that never happened.

"Great! He's a talker!"

"Crap. Let's just do it."

I pulled the heavy door open. It squeaked in response. Every head turned. The professor looked, but didn't stop speaking. Yep. A talker. We scampered to two of the seats in the front row and gritted our teeth as we tried (but failed) to unzip our backpacks and take out our notepads and books noiselessly.

Now the good thing about a talker is that they love hearing themselves lecture so much that even a major class disruption like the one we had just executed will go unrecognized. And for that we were grateful. We kept our heads down, hoping to remain invisible. And it went well for about three minutes. That was when I began to realize how much my shins and knees were hurting. And my palms! I had been so frantic I hadn’t had time to process the pain. I stopped taking notes and turned over my right hand for a little inspection. At that moment, Jo looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. Wordlessly I held up my right hand to show her my muddy, bloody palm which was still shaking with adrenaline from nearly dying while crossing the street.

It was like throwing a switch which launched us into a snorting, spitting, drooling, eye-watering cataclysm of torso-contracting laughter.

It was AWFUL . . . UNCONTROLLABLE . . . And UNENDING. We could NOT stop laughing. We pushed our faces into our desks and covered our heads with our arms, trying to disappear. We could feel the eyeballs of every single person in the class staring at us in horror and bewilderment as our bodies quaked with convulsions.

But the professor didn’t stop talking. Which only made it funnier. Ergo . . . we laughed harder. And continued to do so for the next twenty minutes when, mercifully, the three-hour class took its break. (To be honest, I think the professor just called for the break early because he couldn’t deal with us anymore.) Without a word (and still laughing really, really, hard) we grabbed our backpacks and stumbled out of the class, never to return.

Afterwards, we dropped the class. We also paid closer attention to traffic signals. I tended to my shredded shins, battered knees, and scraped palms until some skin returned. And we never dabbled in magic again. So I guess we learned something from that class after all.

Happy Birthday Jo!

Your laughter always dampened my pain.

Or at least accompanied it.