Friendships: some are forged through laughter, some through tears, some through fire. And some are forged through CARNAGE.
Casey Harper’s eyes are wide with excitement as he walks into the Bounce House living room and says, “Roommate! We should do a talent show.”
“Roommate!” Sam Ryskamp replies. He puts down his book. “Ok. We could call it, the First Ever Best Ever Bounce House Talent Show.”
The event — hosted by CARNAGE, the Committee for Recreational Endeavors And Games Etc. — involved ten to fifteen friends dressing up, performing songs and stand-up comedy, juggling, and reciting poetry in Phillips Auditorium on a chilly January night. Roommates Harper and Ryskamp wrote their own rap about their friendship and off-campus house, the Bounce House, where their circle of friends regularly gathered to hang out.
Harper — who graduated in December — and senior Ryskamp have come a long way since freshman year and invested an enormous amount of time and effort into the friends of the Bounce House. But when they first met as roommates at the start of freshman year in 2011, the pair didn’t think they’d get along.
“The first thing I saw [when I walked into our room] was a pair of cowboy boots sitting on the top of his closet, and about 85 percent of the room was covered in [his] stuff,” Ryskamp said. “Our friendship started out kind of awkward, I would go to bed really early, and Roommate would never go to bed ever.”
“It was kind of awkward,” Harper said. “Second semester we really started to become friends. Calling each other ‘Roommate’ was a huge landmark for us, we’d say it when we didn’t have anything else to say.”
“Yelling ‘Roommate!’ at each other across the Quad and in the dining hall…it broke the ice a little bit,” Ryskamp said.
“It gave us belonging,” Harper said.
It wasn’t until sophomore year that CARNAGE was born, and that’s when Harper and Ryskamp began to develop their friend group at Hillsdale College.
“We were with a group of friends sophomore year trying to organize something fun for fall break, and all the girls had already planned all this stuff out, so we were divvying up the tasks, who would take care of what, and Roommate and I realized we had no real skills to offer,” Ryskamp said. “So we said, ‘someone needs to organize games,’ so we decided to organize the games. Out of that CARNAGE was born. Since then we’ve organized group game nights, multiple pranks, talent shows, Aaron Carter concerts.”
But more than just organizing events, CARNAGE slowly evolved into a brand for the kind of fun students could experience at the Bounce House.
“Every time we did something at the Bounce House, it was sponsored by CARNAGE,” Harper said. “Anytime we were hanging around, it was a CARNAGE event.”
Ryskamp sees the Bounce House as a hub for students who want to have fun without feeling pressure to drink.
“My favorite thing about CARNAGE and the Bounce House is we found ways to have crazy adventures that now make good stories and found ways to have fun that don’t involve alcohol,” Ryskamp said. “Lots of students come to campus and think you have to have alcohol to have fun, and that’s not true. CARNAGE is about making memories you can actually remember.”
But for Ryskamp and Harper, CARNAGE and the Bounce House were not merely mechanisms for having fun but instrumental forces in developing their character and fulfilling their education at Hillsdale.
On one visit to the college, Ryskamp recalls participating in a scholarship competition and how it really made him think about what he wanted to get out of his four years at Hillsdale.
“I went in pretty confident, but then I sat down at a table with some pretty brilliant professors, and they started asking some pretty difficult questions. It was definitely the worst interview of my life,” Ryskamp said. “I was kind of frustrated afterwards, thinking, they can’t expect me to know deep questions like ‘what is the good’ and ‘why I am I here.’ So then I thought I’d put their money where their mouth is and come here so they could teach me the answers. So I came to Hillsdale, and when I came here, I realized those questions are important because they’re a way to live. The only way to answer those questions is to live in a community.”
Harper agrees, saying the only way to really complete your education at Hillsdale is by struggling and growing with friends whom you can trust and share your experiences, eurekas, and endeavors.
“This group of friends has made my Hillsdale experience,” Harper said. “I learned more about the good, the true, and the beautiful through my relationships with them than in the classroom. It’s like when you learn a foreign language — the best way to learn is immersion in a foreign country. If you really want to understand what Hillsdale means about learning truth and becoming a better person and rising to self-government, the best way to do that is in community with other people who are striving to do the same. You have to immerse yourself with other people, if you really want to become fluent in living the ‘good’ life.”
Sophomore Sam Clausen, who participated in the First Ever Best Ever Bounce House Talent Show with Harper and Ryskamp, has maintained the mission of friendship and community in his Simpson suite, which earned the name “The Wigwam” by his suitemates and friends across campus.
The Wigwam, which throws regular parties called “Powows,” can fit almost 70 people on a Saturday night, says Clausen. At the latest Powow, party-goers competed in a Frozen T-shirt contest, ate snacks, jammed to music, and caught up with friends from every social circle at Hillsdale.
“It’s been a way to reach out on campus and say what Hillsdale’s culture is and shape how awesome it is,” Clausen said. “Relationship-building is huge. As much as we talk about what’s good and true and beautiful, the real thing we learn here is how to live a decent life. In my opinion and my experience, relationships are the most important thing.”
Now that he is finishing his last semester at Hillsdale, Ryskamp looks back on his four years and considers the bonds with his friends akin to the bond of family.
“In a way it feels like we’re family now,” Ryskamp said. “We came in all little kids, and now we’re supposed to be adults. It’s cool when you can have a group of friends and respect the way they live and how they treat serious issues, and also have fun and build a raft and sail on Lake Winona. It was a great raft until we ran out of duct tape.”
Community is what makes us who we are, Ryskamp says. That’s why when a student chooses a college, he should evaluate the community of the college, because it is the relationships with fellow students and professors that will change and mature him.
“You can know everything in the world about everything, but if you don’t have relationships, you don’t have that much,” Clausen said. “Even Paul says that even with all the virtues you might have, if you don’t have love, you have nothing.”
For Harper, who now lives and works in Washington, D.C., the close friendships forged through CARNAGE are a gift difficult to find in the working world.
“It’s important to note that the biggest reason for the success of our friend group is that it was orchestrated by God,” Harper said. “That was a big reason for CARNAGE, to keep our friend group strong. Now that I’ve been out in the real world I’ve discovered it’s a lot harder than you’d expect. The thing about Hillsdale is there’s such a high density of awesome people that I don’t think you’re ever going to get again. That’s just not how it is in the real world.”