The Round Room
There
wasn’t as much junk laying around as you might expect from a school full of
hippies, but one piece of flotsam that stayed in place was an old wooden
railroad spool, big enough to serve as a tool shed. We built a ledge around the
inside on which served as a bench. You could sit there and smoke without anyone
seeing you. We called it “The Round
Room.” One day three or four of us were sitting inside the darkened cylinder,
passing a joint, when Bob looked down at the floor and said, “Look! Do you see
that? Sky and clouds on the floor?
At first, we laughed, thinking Bob was shitting us. But I
saw it too, a blue tinge on the floor and beige clouds moving in the wind. Bob
then pointed to a small hole in the otherwise darkened Round Room.
“We’re
inside a giant Pin-hole camera!” he said, smiling (a smile in the mail or a
smarmy slug?) and passing the joint. “Everyone block the light from any holes
besides that one.”
We put
our hands or back over the other light leaks. The entire outside panorama
become colorfully clear, projected upside down and backwards on the walls of
the Round Room, as if the world had been turned outside in by the light
squeezing through the pinhole. As our eyes became adjusted to the dark, we
could see people moving around outside.
Jaime
said, “Look there’s Greg, walking upside down. He has no idea we can see him.”
Ross
said, “This is ideal man. We can smoke in here and see anyone who might be approaching
from any angle.”
A
couple of our teachers took our discovery as an opportunity to teach us about
the early uses of the camera obscura and the invention of photography. We
learned that each point in the scene emits light and because all of the points
do that at the same time and in straight lines, the entire scene is projected
on the inside of the giant camera. Previously when an “uncool visitor” came to
Desiderata (“Desid”) we put all the garden tools in the Round room and called
it the tool shed. Now we could call it our Giant Pin-Hole camera that smelled
like pot smoke.
Using the
pin-hole camera as an early warning system didn’t quite work, since if an
authority figure was spotted our choices were to put out the joint and pretend
to be just sitting there, maybe smoking cigarettes, or to just exit the Round
Room and let the open door condemn us with a puff of sweet smoke. But luckily,
we were seldom visited by authority figures. A notable exception was the day the
FBI stopped by looking for a drifter who had dated Squeaky Fromme. No one was
in the Round Room at the time. Stay tuned for that story.
