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Category: place

A Moving Post

A Moving Post

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Today I write from the New Jersey turnpike, a rider on the highway instead of a walker in the suburbs. That I can do such a thing amazes me. So I write with a grateful heart on a bouncy laptop.

Yesterday I visited Central Park, and when I started strolling uptown I felt both wired and slow; I wanted to move more quickly. I wanted to ride a bike. There’s quite a brisk bicycle-rental business now at the 59th Street entrance and soon I was pedaling around the big park loop: zooming past the boat basin and the Met on the east side, up a small hill to Harlem at the north end, then past a noisy blue swimming pool.

I dismounted at the reservoir, which was my running track when I lived on the Upper West Side many years ago. There were the familiar curves in the path, the lapping water, the St. Remo Towers looming above it all. Coming back on the bridle path under an ornate metal bridge, I thought about the many times I’d walked around that large pond, how much my life had changed since then, but how the pond was still there, more or less the same.

It was early afternoon on a fine hot summer day, and I was back in Manhattan. Right then, that was enough for me.

The High Line

The High Line

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On the High Line in Manhattan, I’m thinking of space. How this space was created literally out of thin air — well, that, and an old trunk line and the prodigious dreams of its founders. And how because of this space, a ribbon of elevated parkland in a city desperately in need of a air and greenery, so many other spaces have been created. Chic buildings in what used to be a western wasteland. A skate park at the northern terminus. Viewpoints and wading walks and art installations, soon a gallery at the southern end.

And it’s all built around walking. Moving through space. Creating, with our movement, a space both public and private.

Letting Go

Letting Go

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One of many reasons I like the beach: It is made for restless people. Waves crash, gulls dive, tides move. Even the barrier island itself is shifting, sand grain by sand grain, imperceptible to us but movement just the same.

For those of us whose thoughts race and careen — who start with a prayer and end with a shopping list — the beach is both balm and inspiration.

I read in the paper the other day about the Dalai Lama’s visit to D.C., and how in honor of the Kalachakra Festival monks would be sculpting intricate designs from both sand and butter. All is transient: beauty, worship, the work of our hands.

The beach blares the same message: If things seem bad, wait a minute. They will get better. Effort is good, effort is expected. But we must also learn to let go. The beach is an excellent teacher.

Unencumbered

Unencumbered

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Yesterday I did whatever I felt like, went wherever my whims took me. I rode hours on my bike, bounced along gravel roads past midday-still inlets, walked to the other end of the beach and back. I watched the waves, splashed through sea foam and breathed the salt air.

At the end of the day yesterday I rode the woodland trail home. Late-day sun slanted through the trees. I spotted cottontail bunnies and a bird bluer even than our sweet Hermes. A flash of color in a green world. I breathed a long exhale and pedaled home.

Independence Day

Independence Day

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Here on Chincoteague, the Firemen’s Carnival ushers in a month of activity leading up to the annual wild pony swim and auction at the end of the month. We went last night to see the fireworks, a brief but brilliant display that seemed to have ended but then — when everyone had their heads down walking away — surprised us with another burst of color and light.

As I sit on the motel balcony this morning, the parking lot is a scene of mass exodus. Beach chairs and umbrellas go into the trunks of cars, bicycles are lashed to the backs. I’m packed and ready to leave for my new place, one that’s closer to the beach. The rest of the family just left for home; I’ll stay for a few days on my own.

I check the girls’ room to be sure they haven’t left anything. All I see is a cicada exoskeleton they found and set on top of the TV. I brought it outside with me. It’s cute, in a fierce little way. I’m staring at it now, willing myself not to be sad. It’s strange to be staying behind. Strange but good. It may be July 5, but today is my Independence Day.

White Trees at Sunset

White Trees at Sunset

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It was almost dark by the time I drove down Franklin Farm Drive with its magical, top-heavy Bradford pear trees. I had been meaning to make this pilgrimage for a week and am glad I made it before the blossoms blew away.

I counted 40 trees just on one side. Spring is extravagant here; it sends forth far more beauty than we need. Honestly, it’s hard to criticize the suburbs too much this time of year. The flowering cherries, phlox, redbud and forsythia see to that. They remind me that these outlying neighborhoods are designed to be beautiful.

I often forget this. I rail about the crazy highways and the ugly strip malls— but the suburbs happened when people left the dusty, dangerous, crowded city for a calm, green, airy substitute. The movement from city to suburb is as certain as the American push westward toward the frontier — and perhaps springs from the same place, a need to step out of the fray, to find a place we can call our own.

Purpose

Purpose

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To live in the suburbs is to orbit rather than to center, for our very existence is built on proximity to the city. You could say that all towns exist in complement to others, their services and spaciousness reflecting how close or far they are from the next best place. But we who live on the periphery, we were never intended for anything but the vast outer ring. Our place has no point but to serve another.

Still, what begins accidentally can proceed with purpose, and so I walk and listen and search for what lies beneath the subdivisions and shopping centers. Because what is true is deep, and what is deep is hard to find no matter where you look for it.

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through Boston and New York and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality … ” Thoreau wrote in Walden. “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

A Book, A Namesake

A Book, A Namesake

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In a few days this blog will be a year old, so the other day I picked up my copy of A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. The name of my blog was a conscious tip of the hat to this title, but I hadn’t read the book in a while and I had forgotten that it begins with Kazin’s walk through the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he grew up. “Every time I go to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away,” he says in the first line,echoing a feeling so many of us have when we return to our hometowns. He admits that he has not moved far from home. “Actually I did not go very far; it was enough that I could leave Brownsville.”

As he walks through his old neighborhood, he recounts the sour smells, the shapeless old women sitting on stoops, the “dry rattle of old newspaper,” the end of the line. Brownsville is a place to leave, and even though it’s no more than an hour from Manhattan, it seemed like the middle of nowhere to the young Kazin. He describes the tiring subway ride back home after a day in the city. “When I was a child I thought we lived at the end of the world.” He knows every station, “Grand Army Plaza, with its great empty caverns smoky with dust and chewing gum wrappers,” Hoyt, with its windows of ladies’ clothes, then “Saratoga, Rockaway, then home.” Kazin is lucky in that his new life and his old one lie so close together — they are miles yet worlds apart.

Re-reading A Walker in the City surprised and encouraged me. Writing about place, in particular those places we call home and those we call hometowns, is something I plan to do more of in this blog. Kazin has set my mind to spinning.

Sorting Ourselves Out

Sorting Ourselves Out

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In The Big Sort author Bill Bishop writes about our tendency to live in evermore like-minded communities, worship in evermore homogeneous churches and vote in evermore polarized elections. The subtitle of his book is “Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” People who associate with people just like themselves tend to become more extreme and lose their ability to compromise. The middle disappears. What you have left is a lot of people on the fringes, shouting at each other.

Demographic data show that people who live in the far suburbs or exurbs tend to be conservative, while people who live in cities tend to be liberal. As a walker in the suburbs, I pay attention to the cars in the driveways and the bumper stickers plastered on them. And I know that, while northern Virginia has trended Democratic in recent elections, our neighbors are a congenial mixture of political types. Gun-toting NRA folks happily loan their snow-blowers to environmentalists who only own shovels.

One of the things that slows or stops the Big Sort is devotion to place. When we don’t vote with our feet, when we stay where we’ve landed — or (even rarer these days) where we’re born — we deny the Big Sort the demographic movement it requires. Census data released earlier this month shows that the share of Americans who made a long-distance move dropped to a record low of 1.4 percent. It’s the lowest level since the government began recording this statistic in 1948.

Maybe there’s hope for us after all.

Morning in the City

Morning in the City

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This morning I write from my office, overlooking the alley I described yesterday. My desk is positioned so that I look out not only into the alley but into the street beyond. On this cold day walkers scurry in and out of my line of sight. A man with a hand truck crosses the street, a bike messenger zooms along with the traffic, pilgrims shuffle to Starbucks. Everyone is hooded, gloved and booted. There is little color in this world; it is monochrome this morning. But it is moving. A world of swirling shapes in gray and black.