As many of you already know, the Blacksmith got me a Really Good Camera for my birthday. (This partially explains the recent dearth of posting.) Two weeks on, I'm still learning the terms of what will surely be a long, complicated and very productive relationship. (Yes, with the camera.)
I can feel the sweat trickling down my back as I wait for the light to change. I'm at the intersection of Main and River Streets in Montpelier on a sunny afternoon.
There is a car stopped in the left turn lane. A woman in the passenger seat keeps swiveling her head to look at me, then turning back and (apparently) addressing the other passengers in the car.
I can guess that she's probably not talking about the color of my hair or the size of my nose, though both are capable of attracting attention. The most unusual thing about me right now is that I'm not in a car. Instead I'm riding an old Raleigh bicycle with flowers tied to the handlebars and a load of groceries in my rear panniers. And because I am in the United States, this makes me an oddity. Even more fantastical is that I am riding in traffic.
The light turns green, and we go. As the car turns left, the woman leans out her window and shouts at me, "Why are you standing in the MIDDLE OF THE STREET on a BIKE?" Her voice rings with derision, her words paced and packed to carry maximum scorn, like a high school cheerleader taunting an unpopular kid.
I don't have time to explain that bicycles are vehicles according to traffic code, or that bikes are viable transportation. So my only response is, "Because it's legal!"
Sometimes I really miss Holland.
In the dim evening light, two people stand amid the pre-fireworks crowd on Montpelier's State House lawn. They're waving their arms in the universal semaphore for "Over here!"
The woman is talking into her cell phone. "No, past the sidewalk. We're waving at you. To the right of the lamp post. No, past the shrub. You have to go past the shrub! Yep... Yep... See us? Okay."
She hangs up and turns to her friend. "This guy made it OUT OF IRAQ, alive? Are you SURE?"
As many of you know, I don't drive a car.
I don't completely dismiss the advantages of cars. Most of my friends have cars, and I occasionally do ask them to drive me somewhere.
But the extent of our dependence on automobiles, and our emphasis on them as our primary means of transportation and delivery, are unconscionable, irresponsible, and untenable.
But this has been said before, by people much better versed in the subject than me.
The point is, I ride a bike. I have been lucky to have many wonderful bikes, notably an old Gazelle I rode in the Netherlands, and more recently a gorgeous Raleigh that my brilliant and thoughtful sister prepared for me when I moved to Montpelier, Vermont.
As US cities go, Montpelier is a pretty bike-friendly place. There's not a great deal of physical bike infrastructure, but the flat streets and generally accommodating attitude of most motorists makes it feel bikeable. This summer the city is hosting SculptCycle, an outdoor, city-wide exhibit of sculptures made from bikes and bike parts. You can see some photos here.
While I like SculptCycle, I have mixed feelings about it. Bikes need to be viably and meaningfully incorporated into our lifestyle and infrastructure. Exhibits like this one promote bicycling in the popular imagination, which is good. But they also make bikes 'cute' and 'artsy' and 'other'.
SculptCycle will do nothing to challenge some people's perceptions of bikes as nothing but recreational toys - and might even deepen them.
Bikes don't need to be made into art, they need to be given a real place in our transportation infrastructure. And they need to be replacing cars. Then we can make the cars into art, how about that?
I've just finished reading Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, and I actually feel lonely without Jason Taylor, the adolescent narrator, in my head.
It's one of those 'resurrecting childhood' novels, and the writing is so effective that it's sometimes difficult to endure: Jason is 13 years old, and suffers accordingly. But his story is also exhilarating and hopeful, the prose glistening with insights believably rendered in a teenager's voice.
Excerpts submitted for your perusal:
Good moods're as fragile as eggs. [...] Bad moods're as fragile as bricks.
People're a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can't hold, needs for things you can.
Fitting words together makes time go through narrower pipes but faster.
Ice-cream drips snailed down the cone.
I don't even know what I don't know.
"Will you look at those kites now! We didn't have them when I was a kid!" Danny was gazing at a couple of stunt kites with snaky ribbony tails. "Aren't they something?"
We had to squint 'cause of the sun.
The tails doodlelooped red on blue, erasing themselves as they flew.
"They," I agreed, "are epic."
I moved to Montpelier in January, after many years of transience and wandering. I've paid rent in a lot of different cities, but I have the feeling that Montpelier will be the first place I've really lived since leaving my native Pittsburgh 13 years ago. By which I mean that I'm finding myself interested - maybe for the first time - in being where I am.
For a better part of my life, I was preoccupied with places 'away' and things 'other'. Growing up in a small midwestern town, anything non-American fascinated me: in high school, I befriended the exchange students, and was active in Amnesty International. At university, I majored first in anthropology, and every class in my schedule signalled a distant longitude: Religions of India, Asian Art, African Literature. Later I would finish a degree in international relations.
I cast my net far, perhaps because I had felt, for various reasons, that my home did not protect me as a child. At age 8 I started having epileptic seizures. By its nature, any neurological disorder admits the sufferer's demons into her head. One does not learn to seek shelter from the obvious quarters of home and family, because they are, in many ways, powerless to provide it. Though my family's hilltop homestead - with its apple trees, corn patch, and raspberry bushes - was an idyllic kingdom for an outdoorsy tomboy like me, it was indefensible against epilepsy.
So instead I imagined that safety lived over the horizon, and I pursued it first through books, and later travel. I became a consummate escapist. I believed, simply, that life was elsewhere.
When I was 21, I decided to move from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, though at the time I'd never set foot west of the Mississippi. I stayed in San Francisco for 12 years, except for an ill-conceived foray to Philadelphia one winter, an eight-month stint overseas, and an autumn in Berkeley. Within those 12 years, I had as many apartments. Between its high cost of living and nearby fault line, San Francisco always seemed ready to shake me loose.
Of course, if I had obtained the safety I sought, I would have found it a strange and slippery beast, repulsive and unmanageable, and myself as unable to cope with it as to net a giant squid. It was the act of pursuit, the constant thrilling possibility of leaving a place, that gave me the only kind of leverage over my life that I understood. My thumb was always on the eject button. I suppose it's analogous, psychologically, to pre-emptively dumping your boyfriend because intimacy seems too threatening, the work of partnership too daunting. (Not that I would know. Ahem.) I can see now that it is a cowardly way to live, which is odd, because so many people mistook me for brave and adventurous.
I guess it wasn't an accident that I found myself in two places of marked transience: first, the San Francisco Bay Area, where no one is assumed to be a native, and most cocktail-party banter opens with, 'So where are you from?' Later I moved to The Hague, a city in The Netherlands that's home to several international organizations and an expat population of almost 30,000. And no matter where I was, I took comfort in the idea that I might just as easily be somewhere else.
But here in Vermont, I find myself among people who feel genuinely connected to their land and communities. At first I found this charming, in the slightly detached manner of a bemused anthropologist. But as Montpelier becomes more familiar, my reserve is being supplanted by something far more discomfiting to an inveterate wanderer: a sincere desire to feel at home here myself.
I've registered to vote, joined the Hunger Mountain Coop, and got a library card. I've even bought a sewing machine, which many of my friends regard as the real certification of my intent to stay. Also, I have accepted that maple syrup is not just a condiment but a way of life.
And I find that my fear of fitting myself into a friendly, functioning society - of the sort I encounter at the local farmers' market and on Montpelier sidewalks - has matured into something more encouraging: respect, and a little envy. I wonder if I am finally ready for the daunting adventure of settling down, being where I am, and leaving all that untrod ground... untrod.
- The kitchen is being patrolled by ants the size of baby hippos. My roommate says ant traps, I say Allan Quatermain.
- The T-Mobile customer service representative can totally feel what I am saying. I'd rather she didn't.
- When you're working on your resumé in Microsoft Word, be careful if you have, say, a reference's phone number at the beginning of a line. Word would like to make that into a numbered line item for you and remove some necessary information any pesky zeros. And you might not notice (having temporarily forgotten that MS Word is not a program but an ADVERSARY), print out said resumé, and deliver it to a few places you'd like to work. That same resumé on which you claim, without apparent reason, to be a proofreader.
- It is irrationally, unnecessarily hot. After 13 years of living in temperate maritime climates, I'd forgotten that 127% humidity feels like something the Nazis invented for torturing Indiana Jones.
- Tomorrow it is supposed to be 90 degrees and thunderstorm. And I have a job interview. I'll take bets on what my (fine, curly) hair will look like when I get there.
