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Urban Obstacle Course

Urban Obstacle Course

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My one-mile walk to Metro in the afternoon is a study in pedestrian behavior. I became interested in this when I lived in New York, where a rush-hour stroll down Fifth Avenue can be an exercise in start-and-stop frustration.

There are fewer people on D.C. streets but sidewalks can be narrower and walkers slower. So at 5:30 p.m. I must still employ some of the skills I learned in New York: looking for openings in a crowd, gauging the approach of the walker ahead of me, looking down at crucial moments so as not to engage in one of those awkward dances where no one knows whether to go left or right.

If everything works according to plan, I can make it from my office to Metro Center in the same time it would take on the subway.  This produces a lot of satisfaction, some welcome weariness and a renewed appreciation of pedestrian flow.

It’s an urban obstacle course, completed for the day.

Cicadas in the City

Cicadas in the City

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Out the door and down New Jersey Avenue. The familiar arching trees shade the hotel and taxi stand. The Capitol lies ahead; its scaffolding gleams in the noonday sun.

I run for every light, avoid the waits, move as much as possible. It’s the pace that does it, I think — a steady cadence does much to loosen the joints and free up the mind. But scenery helps also, and yesterday’s was perfect. Blue skies, cicadas still singing, all the bustle of early September.

For many years I mourned New York City. Washington, D.C., could never measure up in quirkiness or energy or street life. But in the last several years I’ve mellowed to D.C. I appreciate the cicadas, for instance, and the tall trees that shelter them. Their crescendo is the sound of hot southern cities, a sound that says slow down. No one heeds it, of course, but at least it’s there, mixed in with car horns and sirens.

Time, Place and Prairie

Time, Place and Prairie

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Last weekend at the National Book Festival, author Marilynne Robinson said some things about time and place that I’m still thinking about.

On time: She sets her books 40 to 50 years in the past, she says, because she likes to write about a period when people had less access to each other, more privacy; when they couldn’t always be reached. “I think it made people think differently,” she said. “I like people who think long thoughts.”

On space: A native of the East, the Berkshires, Robinson had to learn to read the landscape of the Midwest. “I find the prairie very beautiful,” she said. But there was was not an automatic affinity. “I wanted my soul to love the landscape.”

In time, she said, it did.

Time for place. And a place that grants time.

Place of Memory

Place of Memory

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A trip to Kentucky, one I wasn’t planning to make, has put me in the place of memory. I came to see my mother, who is improving though still in the hospital. What I found is so much more. It always is.

To be in her house without her is to imagine a future where she is memory. Unimaginable — except it was precisely what I was thinking about when I began the drive out on Monday. Perhaps because I was trying hard not to frighten myself, I arrived here unprepared for the memories this place evokes. By the time I pulled off the interstate onto Paris Pike it was as if I had flown here rather than driven. There was that same abrupt displacement, the same new ways of seeing it provides.

There was Loudoun Avenue and Dad’s old neighborhood. There were the charming cul-de-sacs off North Broadway. And then downtown, the one-way streets still two-way in my mind.

Even the summer air — breathed in deeply after leaving the hospital at 9 p.m. — even it belongs here and nowhere else. I struggle for a way to explain this that makes sense. Is it the way air currents move across old bricks? Is it the breezes that spring up in bluegrass pastureland? Or is it simply because it comes from the place of memory?

Voting for our Feet

Voting for our Feet

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Some folks will pay a premium to walk in the suburbs. Just ask Merrill Lynch. When their lease was up in Rockville, Maryland, they chose to move to the new “mini city” of Pike and Rose — a decision that may have cost them 40 percent more than staying at their office park location.

It’s a decision that’s playing out over and over again in the Washington, D.C.-metro area and across the country. People are voting with their feet — or rather, voting for their feet. They’re paying a premium to live and work where the vibe is urban and the body can move around without being encased in several thousand pounds of steel.

In some ways this isn’t new at all. For centuries — heck, for millennia — humans have gathered to eat, work and walk. We do better when we’re not tied to a desk or an untethered building in the middle of nowhere. We do better together (for the most part). And we do better in motion rather than stasis.

(Detail from the highly walkable city of Annapolis.)

A.M. and P.M.

A.M. and P.M.

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Morning on Metro, waiting for a train, the line of commuters stretches to infinity. All of them must leave the bus or park the car, file into the station, take a seat (if there is one) and occupy themselves for 30 or so minutes. It’s the numbing life of regularity that is unfortunately required for much of anything to get done.

Evening on Metro, a sudden shower douses us as we exit the train into a sunny afternoon. I simultaneously open my umbrella and put on my sunglasses. Then I trudge with the masses up the escalator, through the turnstile and toward my car. But then I remember to look. Surely it’s possible. And yes, it’s true. A rainbow. Just when we needed it most.

Rows of Sharon

Rows of Sharon

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The Rose of Sharon is blooming now beside the driveway. The dark green plant is covered with plump, white, rose-like blooms. But it’s not my Rose of Sharon I want to write about — but a row of these plants that line a yard a block away from here.

I know the history of these small trees, know why they bloom where they do. The corner house is the home of “the faithful jogger.” Don’t know his real name, only that my children used to call him that years ago because every day, at least once a day and regardless of weather, he could be seen running up and down Folkstone Drive. He never seemed very happy, had a plodding gait — I always imagined he had taken up the practice for his health. All of which is beside the point except to illustrate the man’s persistence. He doesn’t give up easily.

And he didn’t give up when three years in a row bad wind or ice storms took down his split rail fence. Twice he built it up again. In fact, he was always one of the first people out clearing debris. Then a few days later, more fencing would appear.

This last time was different. Instead of planks he planted rows of spindly Rose of Sharon trees, the smallest, slightest stock, barely more than sticks in the ground. There were many of them, though, and I could see his plan — to create a green and living border, to make a fence that would bend but not break.

It’s been years now since those trees went into the ground, and years since he last jogged down our suburban lane. But those once-spindly trees are filling out into a proper, flowery border. They have matured to beauty and to fullness. And when I saw them the other day, I saw not just what they are but what they were, what they have become.

This is what happens when you walk a place; when you know not just its stories but its back stories as well.

Trudging

Trudging

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To commute is to trudge. Yes, one must be nimble, must dash quickly into the car as the doors are closing. But there is a good amount of trudging involved, too.

The other day, as I was hiking up a broken escalator, concentrating on the thin-strapped gold sandals of the woman ahead of me, I thought that if we can’t walk a mile in someone’s shoes, we can always walk a few paces behind them.

Doing so may not give us complete access to the stranger’s hopes and dreams and worries, but it does accustom us to her pace, to the effort she puts forth to climb a flight of stairs, which in some cases is herculean.

At the very least it requires a pause and a shifting of priorities, a switch from me to thee. I don’t like it, of course. I’d rather rush up the stairs at my own pace. But trudging keeps me mindful of the lives of others.

Dancing for Joy

Dancing for Joy

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The rain was coming but hadn’t yet arrived. The clouds were low and there was a bustle in the air. I walked quickly to beat the weather.

Down at the Mall, it was time for packing up. A cleanup crew was taking down the tents and partitions, the props of celebration, and loading them into idling trucks. Tourists in t-shirts were snapping shots of the scaffolded Capitol. All around me was movement and energy.

But the best tableau came later, as I was leaving the office. I glanced down at the expressway, and there, amidst the dust and turmoil, a hard-hatted worker pivoted and jumped on the folded arm of a construction crane.

I stopped and stared, thinking at first that I was seeing things. But no, it was real — and, at 15 or 20 feet above the ground, seemed quite dangerous, too. But danger seemed the last thing on this guy’s mind. To him, the crane was a balance beam, a stage. I felt his joy travel up my spine.

Skunked!

Skunked!

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I had to stifle a laugh last week when on a hike through the Rocky Mountains I came across a fellow hiker in awe over a deer. In northern Virginia deer are pests — I have to spray my day lilies with deer repellant every night to be sure the buds aren’t eaten — and there are fox, racoons, owls and much more wildlife. A neighbor swears she saw a coyote in her backyard.

Over the weekend I got the most unwelcome of wildlife visits. Saturday night a skunk sprayed Copper, and before I realized what had happened, the dog had come inside and rubbed his back all over the living room carpet.

This was followed by me chasing Copper around the house, finally corralling him in the garage and bathing him in a hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and dish detergent solution. At which point I set off to deskunk the house.

I dowsed the carpet with baking soda and there are now bowls of vinegar in every room. The good news is the house smells less like skunk. The bad news is it smells more like vinegar.

I guess this is the price I pay to live in a suburban wilderness.

(Photo: Wikipedia; nope, I didn’t take this picture!)