Halloween at UCSB is a special time ... a time when thousands of party people descend on Isla Vista (IV) to join the 20,000 UCSB students for massive Halloween chaos. When Halloween falls on a week day it is still an unbelievable scene of drunken debauchery and general lawless insanity. This year it's on a Saturday. In previous years we have lived safely 10 miles away in downtown Santa Barbara, so this is our first experience of being near IV as the madness begins.
Every year the university sends out threatening emails and launches a PR campaign to "Keep Halloween safe, keep it local" to discourage people from hosting friends and try to contain how many people show up. There are special rules about parking permits for Halloween and the county sets up check points to control the flow of vehicles into IV (Isla Vista is in unincorporated county land since no city would willingly take on the cost of policing it). The university administrators want to think that its the outsiders which could make Halloween unsafe, but frankly Halloween is just a scaled up version of the inebriated mayhem which happens every Thursday through Sunday night in portions of IV.
Maybe it's just because I haven't seen the preparations before, but it's intense. The authorities have erected miles of temporary fencing around IV and surrounding campus buildings over the last week. The new graduate student housing is encased in fence, and all entrances were controlled starting yesterday. There's fencing down the middle of El Collegio road which denotes the start of IV, forcing people to cross into IV only at designated, controlled points. Here in family student housing we've been advised we may need to show both our parking permit and a piece of mail with our address on it just to enter the parking lot.
So, what are we going to do? Three words: Shelter. In. Place. We'll watch some movies, hand out candy to neighborhood kids, and enjoy some time together.
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