Wandering Found

I left the dorms at a jog, quietly letting each foot fall to the pavement as it chose, not rushing the strides or their pace. The air was cool and sharp, free from the humidity of summertime and still resisting the bite of early winter breezes. The sun had begun its fall - its fall fall that is - an early, sort of sideways jaunt toward the horizon that seems to be going away for hours - but would sustain the shadows and their chill for a few more hours. I could not run the loop today. I would not run the loop today.

I turned down Commonwealth Avenue instead, preferring the beat of the moving world, its car horns and train screeches, cell phone rings and laughter to the strange pseudo-nature of the reservoir. The pace was determining itself, and I began to look around. People moved back and forth to school, the traffic moved in spurts of red and green behind me, the urbanized wildlife chittered in the trees. Tiles of pavement passed beneath me, concrete dotted with iron, the covers of the inner workings of the material world. Lightposts towered above me, wires lined the streets. And as I passed, I was most likely picked up on the security cameras of several different dwellings and businesses, a moving blur captured forever in static motion, in that one second of passing, like a ghost image in an under-developed photograph.

Down past the intersection, which I avoided, cutting across the marked lanes of the road and dodging delivery trucks, flashers on in that great, semi-acceptable gesture of double-parking we New Englanders love the most and hate the worst. A matter of perception, point of view, and time until the liquor store closes. Down beacon street, left side for a block. Within half a mile of the Circle the housing gets expensive. The feet keep moving, still of their own accord, and the light that filters down through the barely green trees reflected off my sunglasses and bathed my eyes in the glowing amber of late afternoon. I crossed the street, newly paved and lined, the thick black pavement unaffected by its first winter, the granite sidewalks not yet subjected to their first early November frost heave. Across the train tracks. One way.

The first row of apartments quickly give way to the hidden Eden of residential Boston, the gems just off the street that could be placed in middle American suburbia if not for their price tags and cordoned yards. The cars lined along the side look out of place in this more pastoral environment, the large ones even more so. Who lives here? I see a young mother pulling a stroller out the front door of a home on the left - a modest home, with light blue trim and a small but well-maintained garden posted up before the front windows, a model of Renaissance symmetry transplanted 500 years. An older gentleman in a grey suit, trousers hemmed high in the style of the recent past, bowler cocked on his head in the style of the not so recent past. He walked, as I ran, in the dead center of the street, and we moved slightly to our respective right hands as we passed, exchanging a brief, cordial head nod. We were, on foot, both an affront to the motor vehicle-centric infrastructure on which we travelled, and I suspect we both did it for the same reasons - because on this sunny day we could.

The street came to dead end and I looked for a way out, legs still pumping alternately and aloof below me. Cutting through a park, I passed a couple playing tennis, another couple walking slowly with their groceries, she with a beautiful red and gold cloth covering her head and he with a subtle black yarmulkah carefully placed upon his salt and pepper hair. Climbing the stairs on the far side of the park two young black men coach and instruct a group of youngsters in an after-school program, hopping up the hill like frogs. The top of the stairs brought more fresh pavement and yellow-white lines, a new set of stoplights, and the general pervasiveness of high-end autos. I crossed the street onto Beaconsfield road, a winding, traffic-less, residential street with homes that towered above on the left and fell off below to the right. I could be anywhere, I thought, and find a road like this. A small Vermont town might have a small cabin like the one beside me, the tall Victorian ahead could be stamped on a corner in Indiana, the split level ranch coming up on my right stood somewhere next to its brethren in the heart of Pennsylvania or Ohio, and the saltbox 1950's pre-fab was a clear refugee from the West coast suburbs that dotted California, Arizona, and New Mexico. But this was Boston, and the clank of my right foot on a sewer lid reminded me of the municipal system that lay beneath and above the pavements.

Three more miles down, as the crow flies, and I'd be in Roxbury, running through abandoned lots, fast food restaurants, bodegas, and tenement housing. I turned left, up and away from the city proper and chugged up a small hill to the street that would lead me back to the black arteries of asphalt that tied all to the center, converging on the crotch of the system, the Pike/93 confluence, South Station, Government Center. All of the major roads lead here, find some intrinsic connection to the movement of goods and services and labor. But between them, in the gaps between the restraining belts of Beacon and Commonwealth and Boylston, were myriad twisting, turning, poorly paved streets and convoluted infrastructures. You can get lost in these strange conflations of one-ways and cul-de-sacs, cut-throughs and alleys, parking lots that work as streets and vice-versa. I recommend it. To be turned around in a city, bounded by thoroughfares and abandoned by street signs, is a remarkable experience, and a valuable one.

There is a direction to the madness, a general understanding on my part that I know where I am going and where I will end up. But the path is uncertain, and by no linear means will I arrive back at the starting point. These uphill, downhill, curving stretches of road, now turning through the residential alcove that hides between Beacon and Commonwealth, will guide me back through this maze of sunlight and green air, back to those places I know well, taking me back in memory even as they take me forward in the present. The feet keep moving, the pace is fine, and though the chest heaves higher and further from rest there is catharsis to this movement, the energy I've consumed coming back to me in fluid motion - left, right, left. Up on my right there is a gingerbread house with frill yellow trim set against a sky blue exterior and a bright red door. And on the steps of this 18th century Victorian are two kids, both in jeans and skeakers, both sporting Red Sox hats, one over his tight-cropped, curly black hair and deep skin, the other over blond swatches and freckles. The sun sees them both the same, they see each other as peers, and luckily, on this afternoon, no one else sees them at all. Two massive oak trees mark the corner of the block and cast shadows over the stop sign in diagonal relief. I turn right, onto the sidewalk for a moment until the traffic clears and I run sideways across the lines, white then yellow yellow and white again, off the next side street and up, sloping, towards the backside of Comm Ave.

The streets get even dicier here, and I find myself tangled in a maze of parking Do's and Do Not's, mangled in the concrete and steel infrastructure of ill-planned condo complexes and one-way driveways that lead to nowhere. A block further and the image of the VIctorian with its artistic aesthetic, gated yard, and flora is gone altogether. Bricks dominate my view, perched in staggered row after row to form massive square boxes with glass portholes to keep the prisoners' hope alive. I can't make out who might live here, or how they found this place to live, or decided that this was what their life would be. And I can't tell for sure that I won't be in a similar situation in the months to come, untethered, lost between the selves I knew very well at one time and the self I am beginning to understand anew with each block and each step and each passing minute. I am here, actively, and yet here passively, too - caught once again in the intersections of time-space and thought-memory, doomed to overanalyze even as I move with the most concrete motion. Up, down, up, down. Left, right. Left.

And I come up between two buildings, pass a cable company van and a screaming cab driver, wind passing over my ears, bringing the sounds rushing to the center of my brain and me rushing back to the center of this sensory, sensational experience. Just a run on a Tuesday afternoon in Boston. Just the movement of my feet on the pavement, trapesing through the turbulent middle of a city without a center. I can hear the first clicks and turns of the T, the medieval screech of an outdated transportation system whose convoluted design barely outpaces the spiderweb of pavements, some named and some not, that constitute a quaintly archaic infrastructure. There is no method to the madness other than madness itself, and yet as I dodge Range Rovers and Priuses hauling ass on the backs of fossil fuels I am comforted by the ability to make journeys of un-straight lines that still lead me back to the known world. And I am convinced, once again, that there is an appreciable difference between being lost and not knowing where you are going. I am going forward, and sideways, and backward all at once, but there is only one motion involved, the simple corporeal stepping of my feet beneath me and my heart within me. So I will take these tools to be my own as I skip past South St, a place I once knew well that has forgotten me now. And I cross the train tracks a last time as the confines of the campus coming running towards me even as I remain running away from them, a mere flash in the time-space ether away from leaving them altogether. Busses pass me, fences hem me, the road is straight and wide, and my feet continue to move deliberately underneath me, supporting the motion of limbs and mind, the exercise of vision and thinking and hearing and being, all at once, twisting and turning through a world of lost souls and broken hearts. There is only the light that still comes down green through the trees, the angle growing flatter with passing minutes, the sound of shoes on the pavement, left, right, left. Right. And the chest heaves in recognition of the beginning, as if just now feeling the collective weight of trip and telling the body and the mind to stop, STOP, stop. Lost in one place, found in all the others.