I Walked

I walked to IMAS publishing from the Pentagon Metro station because there was too long a wait between buses to Falls Church, Virginia. It took much longer to saunter the four miles than it would if I’d just waited for the next bus. But the sun was warm; it didn’t rain for six weeks; there was a blackberry bush on the way and I’d pluck and eat a few. And at least I was pressing forward. I’d arrive late to work but no one ever said a word.

Then I bought a hundred-dollar Chevette from the boss who was driving a red Mustang convertible rainy days and a bright yellow Ferrari on beautiful sunny days.

I drove that ugly brown Chevette, stick shift, only an AM radio, for 10 years and sold it at a profit for $110 dollars. It was built like a tank. And I no longer walked the four miles from the metro line to the office. So I made myself walk Rockbottom Park with its wild-growing bamboo stalks, and also the Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan neighborhoods of DC, and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to get my exercise. I listened to The Doors on my Walkman.

And I walked to Tesla—the vacant middle-school we’d turned into a church, about the same distance—four miles—in the dry Colorado Springs autumn when my Buick broke down and I had no money to fix it. I walked there on Sundays and later got a ride home. And when I did have transportation, I walked Memorial Park past the irises of every imaginable color and past the geysers in the ponds. And at some other park in that city, I walked around a lake whose name escapes me.

I didn’t listen to anything those times. I listened to my own thoughts and tried to hear from God.

And I distracted my wandering brain with daydreams, fantasies that have been with me since I was a baby and that seemed like a life-path I was following but the dreams never came to be and the plans turned to dust in the dry heat and were swept away on the breezes.

And I walked Denver neighborhoods in a late afternoon misty rain on my lunch break from barrista duties at Randy’s coffee shop in the Kaiser Permanente building, past gardens of wildflowers and colored rocks and felt happy in a way I don’t remember feeling anywhere else. Returning to clean up for the day and finish off with a strawberry milkshake I whipped up to take with me for the hour-long drive back to Colorado Springs.

And one afternoon after walking, I sat in an outdoor café in Colorado Springs, along one of the main streets whose name also escapes me now. All around me were Mexican pottery shops and I bought some brightly-painted soap dishes and condiment bowls with different shades of teal and blue just because they were inexpensive and pretty.

And my Czechoslovakian black glass bead necklace broke apart on my sweat-drenched neck and came off in my lap and spilled onto the street and a few small beads slipped down into a drain but I salvaged the rest and had it restrung later, when I was back in Binghamton.

And I walked the streets of Paris on the Left Bank and up in Montmartre after a few stops on Le Metro and I rode a funicular up to the top near the big cathedral where I looked over the rooftops of a cloudy city and watched the Eiffel Tower turn gold as the evening deepened.

And I walked the dusty, dry, Sonoran desert among giant Saguaro cactus whose arms were reaching for a sun-baked sky just outside Tucson, and I stopped in the shade of a Joshua tree to catch my breath and dozed for a few minutes, dreaming of warm, refreshing pools and awakened to return to where I’d left my water bottle in the rented car, gulping a few swigs of the lukewarm liquid and washing away dehydration and daydreams.

And I also walked the hilly streets of San Francisco at night, up from Fisherman’s Wharf after eating at a seafood restaurant where you could look outside a window at a dock where the sea lions sun themselves and take a rest from swimming, lying on top of one another and making barking noises in the dark.

I caught a cable car halfway back to my hotel and it was standing-room-only among a bunch of inebriated party-goers who couldn’t help themselves from laughing when the cable car stopped, unexpectedly, halfway up one hill and the conductor couldn’t get it going again.

It got very quiet in the trolley cab and you could hear the faint whir of the big cables that run at all times underneath the streets that the “grippers” on the underside of the cars grasp onto to be pulled up the hill. But sometimes the grippers wear down and can’t hold tightly enough to make the climb and some conductors are too proud to get newer ones installed. I understand that it’s a matter of macho arrogance to not switch out grips too soon.

All his attempts to get the cable car moving again failed and the conductor’s face turned red and the party-goers resumed their laughter which only made him more embarrassed. He finally ordered us all out to the street and just sat there by himself in the car, in the dark, waiting for rescue. So I resumed walking the rest of the way to my hotel, arriving tired enough to allow me a deep, dreamless sleep.

Much later, on a church trip to Nigeria I walked in the safety of a missionary group along a road one afternoon and past a roundabout where red and yellow tulips had been planted and a small car sped by and someone inside called out the window: “Hey white people…how you like Africa?” And laughed.

One afternoon with time to kill, I walked along roadways in Las Vegas, far enough from the casino-lined strip that I got lost trying to make a circuit that didn’t exist. Most places, you can walk and keep turning right or left until you get back to the starting point and feel accomplished having worked your calf and thigh muscles and succumb to the drowsy exhilaration that comes when you’ve walked enough and the endorphins have come along for the ride. But that’s not true on the periphery of the city of Las Vegas, where the dusty streets never connect and the hot, parched exhaustion sets in as you realize you can’t actually get there from here.

And the last time I lived in Queens, which is where I was born, I took the subway to Queensboro Plaza and walked over the 59^th Street Bridge on the narrow sidewalk that runs parallel to the street traffic across the East River. At the apex I counted five other city bridges: the Triboro on my right and beyond the Whitestone Bridge; the Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Brooklyn Bridges on my left.

On the Manhattan side I walked to the Roosevelt Island tram that spans the river, paid the fare, got a seat and then felt my stomach lurch when the wind swayed the aerial car back and forth on the wires as we glided high above the water and over the island where no cars are allowed and where I also walked one summer afternoon, a full circle along the perimeter of Roosevelt Island.

And all those times I walked my head was always somewhere in the ether; AWOL from my life, and sometimes too agonied or plagued by anxiety to notice what was around me and appreciate the distinctions of all the places I was walking.

But I remember them today. They come back in vivid honesty, spilling one upon the other in a collage of sight and sound and motion.

I’m back in Binghamton and the winter is over and I haven’t walked anywhere and I’m feeling soul-weary and out of shape so it’s hard to remember that I once walked so many places and saw so many streets and buildings and gardens in so many cities and towns and coastlines that when I say the names of them out loud it sounds like a dream or a fairy tale–as if these are places I made up and not real geography—not actually places I have actually walked.

I wonder that one person can exist in so many places in her head and heart, with so many pressing desires to be somewhere special and yet have sat here for days and months and not made any progress towards anywhere at all.

A mid-Spring storm dumped wet heavy snow onto trees and powerlines but couldn’t last past a day or two because it’s 50 degrees and post Easter. But it covered the forsythia and daffodils and jonquils and I wonder if they’ll bloom again when they have shaken off the snow.

And maybe I can make a start—very slowly but determined–and begin to bloom again if I can take just one step and then the next and another and remember what it awakens in me when I walk.