What It’s Like Living Here — Kate McCahill in Santa Fe

Jun 052015

THE CAR IS SILENT until we’ve left Saranac Lake and are headed towards Tupper, and then the road begins to wind and curve, to climb and descend, and we’re thrust into deep, swampy Adirondack forest. It’s a freezing day in January, and Pants, the cat, begins to fidget. She growls, a low, guttural sound that matches the car’s grumbling engine. I sing to her, and her tail swats at the mesh walls of her carrier. Finally, she turns away from me to face the passenger-side door. Through the mesh, I can see that her ears are pricked.

Pants, I say, and she yowls.

My father recommended this curving route through Blue Mountain Lake and Indian Lake, towns built on the shores of those bodies of water, white buildings with red roofs, Adirondack mountains in backyards. Those are the last of the High Peaks, my father had said, and then there’s nothing til you hit the Rockies.

I am bound for New Mexico: I have two friends there and a teaching job. My father thinks New Mexico is the least American of all of the states, and from the moment I told him about the job offer in Santa Fe, he rooted for it. He proposed to my mother at Taos, on a day when it was snowing. I don’t know much about my father’s cross-country trips, just that he took them periodically through and after college, crashing in cheap hotels and in tents and checking the maps for the routes with the most mountains. Once, as we were driving under a bridge on the Colorado interstate, my father said, I slept here once.

There are trees still around us, but soon there will be none; that’s when I’ll have to start trusting him.

Soon, I say to Pants, we won’t recognize this country at all.

We spend our first night in Rochester, which is farther west than I’ve ever driven from home. In the morning it feels so strange to get in the car for a second day and go farther. The landscape flattens, the spaces between houses lengthens, the road empties. We reach the Great Lakes and there is water to the right, to the north, long stretches of it that reveal themselves through breaks in the lines of trees. There’s nothing between the Adirondacks and New Mexico, my father had said, but he hadn’t mentioned that there’d be these. I’ve never seen the Great Lakes until now; we drive alongside water for miles and miles, wind whipping across the road and smacking the car.

Through Pennsylvania we drive; we sleep in Illinois. We sleep in Missouri. By Oklahoma, I’m starting to worry, for how blank and brown the landscape is, and how windswept Tulsa. Is this how New Mexico will be?

When I cross the border, though, I know I needn’t have worried. Everything instantly changes color. The wind stops its howling, blocked by the distant ranges. The land is red and green and brown and gold and studded with dark green shrubs. All that lines the road are occasional wire fences, occasional grazing cows, and the beautiful, sprawling land. The shift from northern Texas into New Mexico is miraculous.

Look, I say to Pants, but she’s gone to sleep.

The sun warms the car and we drive west, farther and farther from our old home and closer and closer to our new one. In the distance, I see snow on peaks. I’ve never driven this empty road before, but somehow, it feels familiar.

Desert Nights

In Santa Fe, they call the speed bumps, ‘speed humps.’ I hear equal parts Spanish and English in the grocery store, at the gas station, in the library. The terra cotta walls of the homes match the color of the earth, and the riverbed that runs alongside our street has formed itself of clay, of wind-blown sage, of crumbling stones and of the mountains that rise up in the distance. My roommate’s dog gets prickers in her paws and limps; a man stops us to tell me that they’re called goat-heads, those thorns.

You aren’t from here, are you? he says, when I ask him a second time what the prickers are called. We talk for ten minutes; the rain begins. He seems not to notice. I learn that the rain is rare but these types of conversations are not; in the shops, at the school, on the street, people talk. People slow down and wave me across the street; people smile.

Meanwhile, the rain gusts and wanes and then turns to snow. The air smells of piñon and smoke. People decorate their yards not with grass and flowers but with gray and white stones, with antlers bleached silver and with driftwood worn smooth. I hike in the woods; I peer into the windows of shops, decorated with chili-pepper lights, and glance at the paintings inside.

Just before darkness falls here, the sky turns violet, and in the early hours of morning the mountains glow pink. I wake in the night and look out my window; the sky is brittle, the moon a round and shimmering orb, the stars icy dots far above us. Pants purrs from the window, making peeping sounds at the tiny, hopping birds I cannot see.

Here we are, three thousand miles and six days from home. And so it begins, our new life: we’ve traded water for sky and tall trees for grass.

Dark Rooms

It’s hot in the classroom on the first day of my teaching job. Every seat is taken. I unpack my things, write my name on the board, announce that this is English 109, and I am the adjunct instructor. My new students suggest Red or Green? as a get-to-know-you question, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know what that means.

Be careful, they warn me when they learn I’ve come from the east coast. Start with green.

For their first essay, my students must write about a challenge they’ve overcome. From that very first set of papers, I learn that some of my students go home after class to hoards of children, who clamor over them. One has a mother who is silent all the time, and one has a father who hates fat people. One has an uncle who takes her into a dark room from time to time and closes the door. One has a father who burns her writing; one has a memory of a bad-smelling room, a winter afternoon, the first time he said good-bye.

One woman writes that she can still remember being locked in a closet as a child with a bucket and a dish of water on the floor. One man, who can’t be more than 22, has been to jail already twice. He has two daughters and a wife, and he teaches me what the word recidivism means.

When they read their stories aloud, their voices sometimes tremble. Sometimes people weep. We close the classroom door but take inside with us our families, our lovers, our road trips, our childhoods crumpled by domineering mothers, by a life without a father, by a sideways glance that almost killed us and by the gleam of a bottle, half-full. We remember hard times, but there is much beauty as well. Sometimes, words pour over us and bring us somewhere else, far from this room, this desert college, this date and time.

Arroyos

In New Mexico, Pants discovers the outdoors. A Boston cat before, she now routinely squirts out the screen door before I have time to stop her. She darts to the smooth cement patio and rolls there with urgency; her tail thickens and the strip of fur along her back raises to a ridge. I can hear her purring throatily as she jumps the stone fence, skitters up the cedar tree, races down the stairs to the cellar door. She sniffs everything: the air, the trees, the stones, and I chase her out of the yard and into the desert, up and down the rolling hills and along the sandy arroyo.

While I’m out, I sometimes imagine Pants lying pressed against the window, a screen the only barrier between her and a world she is dying to learn. I imagine her slipping out and my chasing her, farther and farther each time until eventually I chase her right out of sight. Is letting her leave a sign of love? Must I trust that she’ll return, and that between the trees and on the dirt is where she most wants to go? I go over to pet her. We’ll have to find out a better system, I tell her, and she gazes out at the birds on the stone fence, then up at me.

It’s only a matter of time, her green eyes say, and I wonder where she sends herself when her eyes are closed. Are her dreams a river of scents and gusts of wind?

American Roads

I learned to drive in Boston, sharp turns and quick blinkers and the pedal constantly pressed against the metal. In New Mexico, I learn that yes, some people actually are out on leisurely Sunday drives, despite it not necessarily being Sunday. People drive slowly, and they don’t use their signals. It’s not unusual to share the road with a trucker, an immigrant boy in his grandfather’s ancient Ford, a tractor going thirty miles under the speed limit, a couple of horses galloping alongside the road. A pickup pulling a trailer, a horse’s head sticking out the window, its main fluttering in the breeze.

The oldest cars you’ll see in America can be found here in New Mexico, because our environment is just right for them—no salt, hardly any rain, and no moisture. Dry. High. Only the sun can hurt your car, peeling the paint over the course of months and years, bleaching your roof and hood bright white. Gas is the cheapest in the nation, I am told.

Windows

Winter rolls into spring, and the sky is a seamless blue. The air grows warm but never muggy, and even in the nighttime everything smells of baked pine. Stars fill up the sky. I walk down empty roads. At nighttime, coyotes come eerily close, their cries like human wails, frightening and familiar both. Pants watches them in the darkness; out my apartment windows, there’s always someone to watch. Birds live in a nest in the rafters, and beetles creep over the brick floor.

The seasons pass, and I feel my world broaden a little more each day—a new friend, a new trail to ski, a new view of distant Albuquerque. A new town, nestled in the hills, where the residents paint their houses teal and salmon and sell expensive turquoise and painted bones.

At the community college, I learn to start my lessons late. Only half the class is ever there when I arrive, and missing ten or a dozen students, I discover, is normal. This is the New Mexico way, I quickly realize. You ease into things here.

And so I start my lessons at ten minutes to nine. Students trickle in, people arriving as late as ten o’clock, and not even sheepish. They are a laid back group—sometimes too laid back when it comes to staying awake in class, turning in essays on time, avoiding words like u and thru and nowofdays. Trying not to write dessert when what they’re really describing is the desert in which they live. People look out the windows a lot; I learn not to scold but to ignore.

Fires

The semester ends, and the campus empties. The smell of fires from the Jemez Mountains thickens the air. Fire season, people say to each other in the grocery store, shrugging their shoulders, peering out the windows. The smoke smells sweet and strange.

Open Doors

On the fourth of July, I wake up and the door is open and Pants is gone. She never goes out at night; the coyotes are rampant, now that we’re in a drought. There’s no food, no water, and so they come scavenging in our yards.

I run out into the darkness, barefoot, not even feeling the goat-heads. I am shivering; my heart is pounding. She doesn’t come, and she doesn’t come. For an hour I stumble, calling her name. In the morning, she still doesn’t come. I walk weeping through the neighborhood, pasting up signs and knocking on the doors of complete strangers, who are kind and take my number and give me a drink of water. They tell me they’ll call if they see anything, and no one is cruel enough to mention the brazen coyotes that sing every night.

Months pass, and still I don’t give up hope. I wait for someone to find her in a garage. I walk the neighborhood, softly calling her name. Only when winter comes do I finally stop looking; when the first snow of the season falls, I go outside and kneel in the brown grass and close my eyes. There is no stone for her, nothing to bury that she left behind. I pray that she’s found her place between the trees and coyotes, the hawks, the velvet nights, the sun and moon. I listen hard, but only the wind comes.

A hundred times I will think of the open door, the wind and the darkness beyond, the chattering night and the sliver of moon. I’ll imagine cooling jewels of fireworks. I will think again and again of that night, when something wild came and took her away.

American Roads

Where I live, the days are long and clay-colored. By March, waves of heat blow in through the windows. Spring Break comes and goes, and my students start to fidget. People wear flip flops to school. Young women bare their bellies and guys their muscled arms, wound in tattoos. Trees begin to bud. We taste summer early here.

Now, I live on the plains with a long-haired man; we find pot shards in the garden every year. The mesa in the distance is long and red. There are trailers out here and old burial mounds, tiny adobe churches with bells mounted to the roofs. A peacock screams in the morning, and at dusk, coyotes come.

I have another cat, calico like Pants was, but this one came with a nipped ear and a strong desire never to go outside. She skitters away from open doors, content to purr and blink and flick her tail at the window. She also came with a name: Mora, after a northern New Mexico town. Pants is dust and sage now, dust and sage and piñon and wind.

The desert has taught me to pray for rain. I search the sky for clouds, and when the drops finally fall, I can smell water before it hits the ground. The scent creeps in through adobe walls. I can hear it on the roof. I stop what I am doing and listen and breathe, because I have learned what it means to wait for water.

This desert is at turns bitter and wild, sweet and enchanted. Tonight, the sky is the color of a cactus bloom. My father doesn’t blame me for never wanting to leave: he comes to visit; we ski at Taos; we hike in the canyons. He sees what this place has done to me: I am a teacher now, and in the summers I am a writer and a farmer. Money matters to me less than it did before. Pot shards line the windowsill, and the cat eats cobwebs on the stairs.

—Kate McCahill

Kate McCahill’s essays have been featured in Best Women’s Travel Writing and Best Travel Writing (Travelers’ Tales), The Lowestoft Chronicle, Wellesley Magazine, Numéro Cinq, and elsewhere. Born in Lake Placid, New York, McCahill now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is a member of the English faculty at the Santa Fe Community College. Read more at www.katemccahill.com.

What It’s Like Living Here — Stephen Sparks in San Francisco

Sep 032013

Stephen Sparks writes and sells books, and sometimes he writes about old books, forgotten books and unread books, always with a reflective, cadenced, ever-so-slightly diffident style that charmingly frames his passion and intelligence and his amazing ability to reveal the great art in what has been passed over as merely unique and eccentric. Would that we all had readers like this. Herewith he offers an addition to our mighty list of What It’s Like Living Here essays (we have well over forty now), a psychogeographic map, as he calls it, of his San Francisco, a “cryptic alphabet” of the heart. It ends, gorgeously, with a reference to nearby Colma, where the dead outnumber the living, and the fog obscuring “what it will obscure.”

We call it a city because it is simpler, but it is really a cities. There are as many San Franciscos as there are experiences, opinions, fantasies, dreams, glimpses, memories, understandings and misunderstandings of it. It is never just a place, always more than a geography: it is a collection of photographs, mementos, hills and wind and fog, afternoon drinks on crowded patios, and of course, bookstores.

I imagine a psychogeographic map, one that reveals in bright colors the places I frequent while the rest of the city—its eastern edge, its tangled, thickly greened heart—atrophies or diminishes into darkness. What shapes do my peregrinations take? I draw it and create a cryptic alphabet, untranslatable.

I live below the southern border of Golden Gate Park. Seated at my desk, where I spend many unproductive hours, I look into the San Francisco Botanical Gardens. The Garden’s collection includes plants from across the world—from Chile to the Mediterranean; across the street from my apartment are native Californian plants, less exotic, but, like all Californian flora to me, an eastern transplant, no less astonishing in their resilience and adaptation. There are redwoods growing here, planted a hundred years ago. From a placard placed at the entrance to the grove, I learn that redwoods can only survive within forty-five miles of the coast, where the incoming Pacific fog condenses on the needle-like leaves before falling in fat drops to the soil below. In effect, a redwood waters itself and, with its shared root system, it waters its neighbors as well.

Before moving here—and even now, six years later—I hadn’t thought myself much of a city person. I came here, for reasons I’ve never entirely understood, from a flat eastern seaside town popular with tourists for three months of the year and for the remainder desolate, boarded up, abandoned. In that place it was easier to self-mythologize: I lived the life of an exile, from what or where I couldn’t say, but on winter nights, when half of the streetlights were shut off and the salt-tinged wind creaked rickety signs on the boardwalk, the illusion of banishment was comforting.

In San Francisco, a city of exiles and passersby, of transients and tourists, it’s more difficult—to the point of impossibility—to conceive of myself as banished. If everyone is an exile, no one is. Even so, it’s true that I don’t entirely feel comfortable here; I’d list the usual complaints about encroaching gentrification, the Google buses, the fungal proliferation of boutiques and niche restaurants, the staggering rents, but to what end? San Francisco, a seven by seven mile squarish shape surrounded on three sides by water, can only contain so many people. For a time I’m one of them.

Maybe it’s the hesitancy of the earth here—does it want to be solid? does it want to crumble into the sea? Whatever the reason, I’ve never quite felt as rooted as those redwoods, which, I’ve learned, hold tight not by going deeper, but by being more expansive. Perhaps there’s something to be learned from them.

My daily commute, by bicycle, leads me through the museum concourse in Golden Gate Park. I pass the Academy of Science, with its living roof, the DeYoung Museum, with its twisted tower (the panoramic view from which never fails to impress visitors), the statue of Cervantes and his immortal duo, another statue of stately Goethe and Schiller, and come out on the north side of the park, where seven long blocks ahead I see a wall of verdant growth, the Presidio. San Francisco’s northwestern quarter is green and despite the drawbacks of living on this corner of the city (the fog, the wind, the seeming remoteness from the cultural life of the city) I feel lucky to have landed here. It feels only half-city, a compromise.

If I continue north on my bicycle after exiting the park, ignoring for a moment my obligation to turn east on Clement St., the heart of “new new Chinatown” or “new new new Chinatown,” depending on who’s labeling, to get to the labyrinthine bookstore where I earn enough of a living to scrape by, I enter the Presidio, once a landscape of windswept dunes and coastal scrub occupied seasonally by Ohlone Indians and later a military outpost for Spanish, Mexican, and finally U.S. soldiers. After a short, steep ascent—bike maps of San Francisco are color-coded to indicate the grade of the city’s multitude of hills and every cyclist quickly learns to navigate accordingly—I follow one of several winding roads further north. Just at the top of the initial climb into the Presidio is a breathtaking view, of which San Francisco has almost too many, of the Bay and Alcatraz; on my left the Goldsworthy spire points toward the heavens.

Today I want to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and so stick to the westernmost road, hugging the edge of the city, the country, the continent, coming out just below the toll plaza. Is there a psychic corollary to living on the edge like I do here, especially one as fragile as San Francisco? I remember my first experience of earthquake: things swayed, as if someone plucked a cube of Jell-O. I expected it to have been… staccato, abrupt.

So much of what I love about San Francisco is getting out of San Francisco. There is no more apt symbol of this than the Golden Gate Bridge, a ubiquitous symbol for a reason: it is a marvel. Crossing it, I inevitably think of early explorers’ inability to locate the entrance to the Bay. Its mouth seems vast as I’m buffeted by winds and chilled by swift incoming fog, but for two centuries of European exploration, it lay undiscovered, a small passageway leading to an enormous, fertile body of water that even now, plowed by container ships so large they are measured in by twenty-foot increments on their way to and from the Port of Oakland, is capable of wildness. A friend who swims in the bay—too cold for me—once collided with a seal; both man and beast came up, wide-eyed, and quickly churned wakes in opposite directions. The same friend tells stories of swimmers who get caught in strong currents and are funneled out of the bay into the vast, bone-chilling Pacific.

And now I too feel myself getting swept out to sea, away from San Francisco, out toward the rugged Farralon Islands and unfathomable Pacific beyond, a sea that Melville rightly describes:

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

Resisting the pull—but Point Reyes! Mount Tamalpais! Big Sur!—I make my way back to Green Apple, where I’m surrounded five days a week by a quarter of a million books and untold volumes of dust. My San Francisco is intimately bound up with this place: it’s the hub from which my experience of the city radiates. Green Apple has only a few slits of natural light: it is designed, like the objects it contains, to focus attention inward; also like books, it is as much a passageway, leading me back out into the dazzling sunlight, wonderstruck and receptive.

Out again, I watch the fog rolling in—evening is coming on. I’ve never been satisfied with the verb rolling. The fog doesn’t move that way, it streaks, it seeps, it may come on little cat feet, but it stays; its tail may dreamily twitch, but its ears never prick up at the sound of movement. It settles in.

I look up when I step outside. Here, where the temperature rarely deviates to extremes and the sky, when it is blue, is a cold blue unique to this place, I always look up. The view from my window reveals the western side of Sutro Hill and the massive Sutro Tower, for many a more ubiquitous landmark than the Bridge.

Like the Bridge, Sutro Tower is a conduit, a portal: it’s a telecommunications tower, bringing the rest of the world—or that sliver of it that makes it onto television and the radio—to the city. When I wake up, I draw the curtain and look for it. Some mornings it’s there, others it’s not; sometimes it’s parts, sometimes it’s whole. Its appearance or absence guides my decisions about the day. When I crave the shelter of the fog, I stay in my neighborhood, The Sunset, feeling very much perched on a lonely edge of the world. Should I crave sunshine, I know that a fifteen-minute commute east, on the other side of that hill, will bring me to sunshine. This ability to choose one’s weather is tempting to narcissists—it can start to feel that the world was made for our moods.

San Francisco breeds and eludes the desire to tell. An old friend who I haven’t corresponded with much over the past few years recently implored, “Tell me about living in San Francisco.” I started to reply, describing the city and my life here, but soon found myself unable to continue. Was I overwhelmed by the task? Was it the city that stopped me or myself? How well must one live a place to become part of it?

For instance, I left unmentioned the secret stairways I go in search of—yes, there’s a guidebook, but it’s necessary to make some discoveries on my own—and, as an inveterate walker, ascend into the silence above the city. At twilight the hills are especially alluring, twinkling car lights and fiery, visually confusing sunsets competing for attention. Looking east from the top of 17^th St., near Twin Peaks, I take in a vast swath of the Bay Area: from downtown San Francisco to the Bay Bridge—now strung with lights—across the Bay to Oakland, the Berkeley hills, and beyond, Mt. Diablo. (From the peak of Diablo, I once read, you can see more of the earth’s surface than from any other point except Kilimanjaro. Although I later learned this was factually untrue, I still like to believe it, and recall with wonder an afternoon I spent near its peak with M., sheltered from the wind behind an outcropping of stone. From up there we could see the across the windmill-studded Central Valley to the snow-capped Sierras, which cast a rain shadow so enormous Nevada and Utah are rendered desert, in the east; to the west, rare clear skies and the curved horizon beyond the Farallons, where the Great Whites breed.)

Even here, I’ve offered only one city, not a cities. I haven’t touched upon afternoon ferry rides to Sausalito, where, if you’re hardy enough, you can tramp up (up, up) into the Marin Headlands, never once having sat in a car; I left unmentioned the poetry room at City Lights or the shape of late afternoon shadows at Vesuvio’s, the iconic bar next door; I’ve neglected the Conservatory of Flowers; failed to elaborate on the lack of cemeteries in the city—there are only two, the rest are in Colma, where the dead outnumber the living… But then, every account is patchy. Perhaps there’s no better homage to San Francisco than to let the fog obscure what it will obscure.

— Stephen Sparks

Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) lives in San Francisco and blogs at Invisible Stories. He somewhat regularly contributes to Tin House and 3:AM Magazine.

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What It’s Like Living Here — Yeniffer Pang-Chung in Depok, Cisompet, Jawa Barat, Indonesia

Aug 092013

Here’s a What It’s Like Living Here essay from a village in Indonesia (a land of islands) by a very new writer, Yeniffer Pang-Chung, whom I met when I was in Halifax last November. She was leaving just after Christmas for an exchange trip to Indonesia and I took the opportunity to ask her to write something for NC. Yeniffer was born in Panama but grew up just outside Toronto. Depok seems like a place of perpetual summer. I love the idea of a community swimming hole at a bend in the river. I am mystified by some of the food they sell in the market. I am entranced by the five daily prayer calls coming from the mosque next door and the TV on for for prayers from Jakarta. (I had a friend once who went to Mass every Sunday in front of the TV so he could make his morning tennis match. Who says TV cannot be a conduit for God’s grace? Does God worry about such things?)

—

WAKE UP

It is the call of Azan at dawn, it is the first prayer call for the village. The far-reaching call is even louder with the mosque located within steps from my bedroom window. This call is the signal to begin yet another day in Depok Desa, a village with a population of 5000 in West Java Island, Indonesia. It is one of five prayer calls that will sound throughout the day. There are slight sounds of movement in my host family’s home, the first stirring from a night’s sleep, and soon enough, the television is turned on and tuned in to the televised prayer from Jakarta.

My own wakeup call is the burst of sunshine through my window and the loud cries of the children hurrying to school. Occasionally, there will be a curious tap on my street-facing bedroom window, or better yet, the children will boldly stick their heads through my open window and sounds of their mischievous giggles will rouse me from a night’s sleep. I wake up, wash up and eat my breakfast of rice and fried vegetables. Time permitting, I make my way to the front porch of my sunny yellow house with my instant coffee to take in the sights and sounds of the village.

My eyes travel down the recently paved main road and take in the colourfully painted homes and mosques. Clothing dries on the wrought iron fences, clothes lines, and store-bought drying racks in the front of the homes. It is loud and challenges one’s notion of a village as a place for quiet. There is noise everywhere. I can hear the steady pounding of nails into wood just a few feet away from where I sit, the sound of workers upholstering the furniture that my host family sells in the market. There are motorcycles, mopeds, and trucks rumbling up and down the road. Traffic lights do not exist in the village. Horns sound periodically as the drivers alert other drivers and pedestrians of their imminent passing. It can be shock initially, the screech of a horn in a place where it does not quite seem to belong.

DEPOK VILLAGE

My sense of time is altered in the village. Everything moves at a slower pace. An easy five-minute walk can seem endless with the sun beating down relentlessly. However, I do walk; I walk constantly, either with a purpose or just to be outside. The village is green. It is green with lush vegetation in the form of palm trees, exotic fruit trees, wild tropical plants, and expanses of grass-like sprouts in the rice fields.

It is surrounded by mountains and rice paddies. Sometimes I feel as if there is almost too much to look at. I venture to the warung (convenience store) daily to satisfy a sweet tooth or to refresh myself with a cold drink. The warungs add even more colour to the landscape with their variety of bright-printed single serve packages of cookies, chips, laundry detergent, and flip flops hanging down in columns in the front of the stores.

Walking along the main road, I see tarps laid out along the side of the road bearing unhulled rice, shelled peanuts, and corn kernels roasting under the blazing sun. The season is dry, hot and humid with temperatures averaging the mid-30s daily. The produce will stay out until the first rainfall hits, and then it is quickly collected and saved for the next day’s promise of sunshine.

A steep climb awaits me if I take one of the many side roads branching off the single main street. A rocky path leads up the mountain to smaller and less visible sub-villages, clusters of homes and explosions of natural beauty. Towering trees bring temporary relief from the sunshine. The mountain homes differ from those along the main village road. The contrast juxtaposes traditional Indonesian craft with the ever growing shift to modernity. The village Anyaman homes are raised on wooden stilts and constructed out of intricate bamboo weaves. Nestled between these homes are brightly painted stucco houses that rest solidly on ground.

VILLAGE LIFE

I return to the main road where all my new family and friends reside. Alone here one is never quite alone. Coming down back to the main village, the noise engulfs me, beginning with the familiar honks of vehicles passing by. The cries and laughter of children can be heard everywhere. Walking down the road of Depok is an invitation to be spoken to. Children and adults call out “mau kemana” and “dari mana” — common greetings that inquire about where you plan on going and where you have come from. House visits are common. My friends and I congregate and plan the day’s adventure. Food is usually involved; there is food everywhere in Depok. One of the first phrases one learns living in the village is ‘makan dulu’ which translates into “eat first.” The homes I visit offer a plethora of snacks from coconut biscuits to deep fried bananas (salty or sweet), fish chips, coated peanuts, and an abundance of exotic fruits.

RIVER

A trip down to the river is particularly appealing during the sweltering hot days. There is no carved out road to the river but dirt paths molded and reshaped by frequent rains. The descent is slow and rocky. This section of river is located across from two elementary schools, so children frequent the place, scampering down the hills with ease. They are quick to shed their clothes and dive off of the rock studded banks. The rocks allow you to sit securely and let the rapids fall fast and hard against your body. The river is a haven. The view is magnificent with towering green vegetation, rice fields, and clear skies all around. I feel as if I am sequestered in a tiny piece of paradise. But the short hike up to the main road feels longer in damp, heavy clothes.

PAMEUNGPEUK

I am ravenous after time in the water. A craving for Mie Baso brings me to the Pameungpeuk market. It is a 20 minute angkot ride. Angkots are pickup trucks modified with wooden benches and a metal framed tarp; they are the most accessible transportation to the market for non-drivers. Pameungpeuk is the place to go for fresh meat, fruit and vegetables, clothing, and school books. The market is a dimly lit maze of stalls with loosely defined sections dedicated to selling food, housewares, and clothing. Families of goats, lone chickens, and dogs scurry about the market amongst the busy shoppers. It is easy to get lost in the maze. Outside of the market are free standing stores, food carts, and restaurants. Mie Baso and Mie Ayam are the most popular food choices for visitors to the market. Both are broth-based noodle dishes served with either chicken meatballs or stir-fried chicken. They are comfort food, eaten with sambal, fresh chili sauce, and preferably washed down with a cold drink.

SETTLE DOWN

At the end of the day, the best place to relax is home on the porch where I can settle in for the warm night and watch the comings and goings of the rest of the village. The noise that marks the day time disperses. Greetings trail off into the night as the village becomes pitch black; there are no streetlights to help one navigate. However, the quiet never quite closes in. People fill the mosques after sunset during Magrib, the most essential prayer time of the day, and their prayer chants buzz through the village. The engines of passing motor vehicles merge with the sounds of insects in the night, the cries of stray cats in heat, and the hoarse croak of the Tokeh, a red spotted lizard that punctuates the night. Then night breaks again when the call of Azan filters through my sleepy haze. Roosters crow, people wake up, and before you realize it, a new day has begun.

—Yeniffer Pang-Chung

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Yeniffer Pang-Chung is a Psychology and Health and Society Graduate from York University. She was born in Panama City, migrated to Toronto, Ontario and now resides in Mississauga. Her passion for volunteering took her to the far reaches of Indonesia on an unforgettable experience of living and breathing in a new culture, while participating in various community development initiatives abroad – something she hopes to continue in.

Ghost City: What It’s Like Living Here — Joe Milan in Seoul, Korea

Jan 312013

Herewith Joe Milan’s lovely, ever so slightly melancholy portrait of the Seoul he has come to know teaching at the Catholic University of Korea. This is contemporary Seoul, dominated by a priapic, neon-lit tower, the traditional architecture destroyed by war and rebuilt to resemble someone else’s urban dream. What should be his own world is strange to Joe Milan; his life in the city is punctuated by memories of home in America and rumours of war. His Seoul is a complicated place, riven with memory, tradition, absence and paradox. But sweepers shape the piles of raked leaves to look like hearts and the rice cakes his grandmother serves have the scent of pine.

This is the latest in our growing collection of What It’s Like Living Here essays, the 41st in fact. Think of that.

Concrete

Seoul Tower, a tourist magnet in the heart of the city and the best quick way to see the place, reaches into the sky, perched alone on a forested hill apart from the packed clothing shops, red sauce stained food carts and sterile department stores of Myung-dong. In the shade of trees, you huff your way up the winding road. There are heart shaped piles of leaves raked onto the walkway and every few meters piles of rocks stacked beside the path. A young child, biting his lip, totters toward one of the piles with a rock. His mother cheers him on, “Put it on the top and make a wish.” Years ago you did the same. But unlike this child, you tumbled and fell short before the stack.

The tower stabs the sky, a rocket ready to leave the trees and the ancient rock walls behind. For centuries this hill was a lookout. You imagine bored men with long beards and spears in hand staring out to the ridgelines, waiting for the signal fires of incoming invaders. Today’s soldiers stand watch on hills fifty kilometers north of Seoul. They are mostly eighteen and nineteen-year-old boys doing their military service, cursing their fate, waiting for a different sort of fire that would pop and boom and flash and screech and burn.

When you reach the elevator doors it is dark until the walls burst into blue light from hidden projectors in the ceiling. An image of the tower at night appears on the elevator door, back-dropped by stars that you had never seen in the sky in Korea. Lasers write in English “love n tower.” You wonder if they are going for “lovin tower” or “love in tower.”

At the observation deck you’re greeted by an attendant dressed in white and black like a maître d’. She bows slightly–a nod really–and motions you around the half-wall to the windows that surround you. From up here the city is field of concrete buildings and glass towers rising and falling toward the river: the Han River. You are not sure, but it could mean the “One River,” or the “Korean River,” or even the “Suffering River,” but your Korean isn’t as good as it should be. The river is a bluish crack between the two halves of gray city. Crisscrossing veins of tight alleyways wrinkle the city, hold the city together with backstreets wide enough only for scooters loaded down with TVs and tin boxes of cheap Chinese food. Alleyways walled with brick and concrete branded with random acts of paint that always seem to morph into the same dull gray. This gray, like fog smothering and hiding a hillside, is the Seoul you remember from your childhood visits.

But this isn’t the same city. Speckled in the gray are wide highways and glass towers and miniature red brick boxes that litter the gray field to the base of white stone mountains wrapping the city. Your eyes trace the spine of the mountains where, long ago, tigers cloaked by the black of night, crept down and preyed upon the villages clustered just outside of the city walls. Now on those same peaks blasé hikers dressed in florescent pink and blue Gortex drink rice beer and eat savory pancakes.

You think of the mountains of your life in America, the jagged knife edges of the Cascades and the Olympics: young and bold mountains skirted in a shag of green. These mountains in front of you have spots too ragged for the trees where the naked rock shows white. The new concrete poured over cracks in the alley by your apartment, yet to turn gray from the rains, is white, too. The rains leave trails of gray streaks clinging to the cracked corners of windows and the bars that guard them. You think about the concrete your father taught you to pour. When you rushed, didn’t let it settle right, tiny fissures and wrinkles broke to the surface. He would shake his head as his finger traced the cracks and say, “Haste makes waste, boy.”

Here, in Korea, elderly faces speak of decades of haste.

Have you eaten?

You finger the stenciling on the window in front of you. It reads 9,596.52 Km to Los Angeles. Seattle is in the same direction, though not as distant. You remember the cold damp air coated in the smell of pine and cedar. Below the tower, to your surprise, are green blotches dropped in the gray field: parks. They’re newer, brighter, than the growth on the mountains. This is where old men in Member’s Only jackets, hunched over lacquered wood boards tattooed with black grids, play Go. They argue over where the next white or black game piece should go. Old women gather in the parks, too, chatting while they unpack their foiled rolls of seaweed and rice: Kim Bap.

The other green blotches are the palaces with tree lined parade grounds rebuilt for the umpteenth time after the invasions that came every century or so. Out of the rubble of the last invasion, people rebuilt Seoul anew with brick, glass and concrete. They rebuilt Seoul replicating the buildings of the world outside of Korea. The replicas of itself are the only buildings built with wood.

You try to find your apartment, Block 20. One gray lego block among thirty other blocks flanking the glistening steel bowl of World Cup Stadium. Twenty-five years old and already your apartment looks dilapidated. You’ve considered calling a location scout. You would tell them, “Hey man, I got the perfect place for you to film 1984 and you know remakes are all the rage.”

When you open the creaking cold metal door, walk down the half-wall corridor, step into the dark stairway where the lights flicker to life after a few steps, emerge out of the building into the hazy sunlight, and find your way through the maze of double parked cars jamming the parking lot, you see them. The retirees. Beside the first floor windows they crouch over trashcans and styrofoam packing boxes tending their gardens of verdant life. The old men and women are guerrilla gardeners suited up in dirty white gloves and teal visors. They start early in the morning, planting, weeding, battling the gray one clump of vegetables at a time. No one tells them, “You can’t do that” since, they are old. And here, at least for people, age gets respect.

A vine has snaked up three floors of your building, clinging to your window, offering what could be cucumbers, or some knobby vegetable more bent and rugged than anything you’ve seen at the supermarket. Can you take one for a salad, or will a battle-weary old woman come knocking on the door to ask for her harvest?

From the trashcans and styrofoam boxes along the sidewalks, the gardens grow. On rooftops and huddled in demolished housing lots, these gardens grow. But you know this is no green fad. This is memory that is spoken even now in the elderly’s greetings, “Have you eaten?”

Sirens

Yesterday you pushed and swayed and weaved through the currents of people in the subway station and jammed yourself into the subway car. You let go of your briefcase and it didn’t fall to the ground. It floated, defying gravity, hanging with the friction of bodies dressed in suits.

Youthful figures in black, their headphones jammed in their ears, all silently ignoring the chug of train tracks as if this is part of a pact where everyone pretends not to be clutched by the crowd swaying with the train. The flat-screen monitor above the exit doors loops a video about how to use a smoke hood hidden in padlocked glass boxes at the station. There are at least ten steps and you felt like you should take notes. There had been fires on the trains before.

At lunch you heard the sirens. Wailing loudspeakers erupted from their hiding spots on poles painted like trees. Fake branches and leaves shrouded the speaker horns and square boxes. Radio transmitters? Looking out your office window, you saw the cars stop and the sidewalks cleared. You waited for the flashes from a far off ridgeline, artillery fire booming and shells smashing and battering the buildings, dogs howling, fires exploding and engulfing the city then raging and rioting all the way up to the peaks. The office corridor hummed without pause, and you heard someone laughing. You alone, it seemed, wondered of the possibilities.

English

Everything in Seoul Tower is in English. Everything new is tattooed with it. On neon signs jutting off buildings, on the menus in the Korean dive bars serving “pork intestine,” in catchy commercial slogans, and on K-pop tracks that old expats describe–with derision–as nothing more than “nursery rhymes slapped over euro-techno beats.” English isn’t hidden away in the enclaves of black walled of foreign bars of Itaewon anymore. It was in those kind of places you hid after work, always looking for a blank space of wall to add your name in chalk. You hid there with the other English teachers and American soldiers. Those places are gone like most of the people who wrote their names on walls.

In Itaewon, vendors shout in English “we have clothes in your size.” But outside this little corner of Seoul, you force yourself to speak Korean, hesitantly, trying to spit out phrases while gagged by the rocks of verbs and conjugations. In the beginning you motioned and pointed and people would look at you with confusion and ask, “Mwol?” But now, they understand you and applaud you. You can order yourself a coffee. It is something, although your pronunciation is butchered to the point of another language altogether. Being half-Korean doesn’t help. Nor does that feeling of shame whenever you utter that fact and they search your face for something left behind.

You worry that your English is getting worse. With lightning speed, chopped and spliced with slang, you feel lost with your friends in America on the phone. English is continuing without you as each year passes. You are losing your ear for the only language you have while surrounded by a language you should have had.

The concrete house

As you make your way back to the elevator in Seoul tower, you see through an opposite window a fog of buildings climbing a hill in the distance. That’s where your grandmother lives. You know it; its shade of gray is darker and older than the rest.

Next week is Chuseok, an ancient holiday celebrating the harvest and the dead. Your apartment, like the subways, the streets, all the gray city should be empty and cold except for a few stragglers without a hometown or a family to go to. Almost no one is from Seoul. You’ll buy a box of fruits to give your grandmother and you’ll carry it with you on the abandoned subway on one of the few days you can get a seat.

But the night before Chuseok, you’ll gather with your friends and have a few drinks. Someone’s girlfriend will feel bad for all of you. And before she leaves for her own hometown, deep in a dark corner of a friend’s concrete walled apartment, you and your foreign friends–who each have lost a parent to one disease or another–will solemnly stand as she lays out a table with food and empty plates. She will tell you this is a Jaesa: a way to honor the departed family spirits, something many Koreans don’t do anymore.

There will an empty plate set out for your father. You’ll pour liquor into a shot glass and circle it around the incense smoke three times and pour it out into a bowl. Taking a fork, instead of chopsticks, you’ll clang it down three times against your father’s empty plate and rest it on the fried fish dish. You’ll imagine him tearing apart southern fried catfish, the crumbs littering the plate. He had always missed “real catfish from way back down home.” He would say the same here, but maybe the thought will be good enough. Three times all the way to the floor, resting your forehead against your hands, you’ll kneel and bow and breathe deep. Then you’ll walk out of the room so your father’s spirit can eat. You’ll miss your father as you stare at the web of cracks scarring the wood print linoleum floor.

On Chuseok you’ll go to your grandmother’s apartment. The two of you will eat: glassy japjae noodles, chilly red pork, and damp white and green rice cakes filled with sugar and the smell of pine. Afterward, as the sun sets behind the haze, you’ll walk with her through the grayed alleys on cracked pavement. Soon her neighborhood, built forty years ago, will be torn down and buried in memory for newer apartments that too, will crack and gray with the rains. She will say in Korean to her friends that pass by, “This is my grandson. This is my grandson. He came home for Chuseok.”

When you reach the old house that she lived in years ago, built when the concrete buildings were new and clean, she’ll say, “This is where I lived.”

“I remember,” you’ll say.

—Joe Milan

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Joe Milan has spent nearly a third of his life traveling and living outside the borders of the USA, and his most recent landing is in Seoul where he writes and teaches at the Catholic University of Korea. Joe is a recent graduate from the Vermont College of Fine Arts .

What It’s Like Living Here — from Tiara Winter-Schorr in Manhattan

Aug 092012

Herewith a lovely, sombre essay on living in New York City, almost a threnody in its preoccupation with the dead, the wintry weather, the rain, the weight of living, yet rich in observation, lived detail — the description of the Hudson is a word-painting. This is New York like no other.

I met Tiara Winter-Schorr when she took an undergraduate writing class with me at the University at Albany a dozen years ago. She was the class star, stylish, courteous, curious and smart. She had the spark every teacher is looking for. We’ve been friends ever since, hardly ever seeing each other, sometimes silent for months and months, but always ready to catch up, find out how the story is going. Shortly after we met, Tiara dropped out of school to help care for her dying father. Just last year, she graduated from Columbia University with a degree in creative writing.

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Hudson, Part 1

I live nine stories above the water, above a river. I arrived to stay seven years ago just after my father’s death, during the kind of deluge that occurs in Manhattan only at the water’s edge. The streets around here are always desolate, yet densely populated with trees and cars. But as sheets of solid rain splattered onto my windshield that night, I sat waiting for a parking spot and looking into the brightly lit windows of apartment after apartment. I imagined that the circle of buildings around me held a teeming mass of people. I watched the sky change from shades of deep red to grey and then to shades of off-black. The river has no self. It is never blue or green. That night and every night, the water canvasses the moods of the sky for deep or pastel shades, the George Washington Bridge for green light, the artificial street lamps for putrid yellow, and then lays out a palette in globs of motion and color. Several hours later, I parked three inches too close to the only fire hydrant in a two block area and received my first parking ticket.

The river has almost convinced me that my apartment exists at the edge of a flat world. My living room is dominated by a large expanse of glass, a window too large to be called a window. But the view is cut short, endless until it abruptly stops beyond the George Washington Bridge and a cluster of low-income housing projects. Here is where the world seems to stop. Boats fall off the edge and disappear into another world that is not-city. Boats come into the city this way too, of course, and I know they are most likely heading to a waste-processing plant about a half mile from my building.

Stretches of the West Side highway race above and alongside the river, which is the most stunning place to drive in northern Manhattan. The Hudson catches the glare from the sky and coats itself in whatever shimmers it can trap from the sun. But you will be constantly reminded of the gross show of engines against the flow of the water. Drive fast enough and you are convinced that the narrow strip of water is motionless, as if boats drag slowly along an inferior liquid ground.

This narrow strip of the Hudson has harbored me, defending against the twin illusions of the city that you are both landlocked and free. The traffic at rush hour teaches me differently. There is no room between bumpers; there is music from other cars, pure cacophony pouring into your car windows even in cold weather; there are children and teenagers who stare with unimpressed faces into mine. Here next to the river, I find that I am not landlocked, yet not free.

My first winter living above the Hudson was one that offered no refuge, not even the double panes of glass that barred me from the elements. The wind was the river’s first omen that cold was coming into the city. The lights in the sky turned to different shades of grey each day and the river pushed forth choppy whitecaps. Living here will send you searching for refuge and you will find it when you realize there is none in a city like Manhattan – save for what the river offers you in smells of salt or the illusion that the humidity coating your skin is a kind of armor.

The Dead

My neighbor directly to the south is Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, a shelter for the dead that expands over 24 acres up rolling hills. The decrepit entrances are not trustworthy except for the most modern, which is a glass door leading to cramped office where you can inquire about obtaining a small plot in this place, Manhattan’s only active cemetery. I did this once, spoke to stout woman with grayish skin about a place to put my father’s urn that now sits in my living room. I am gently informed that only mausoleum spaces are still available at the cost $9,000. The high stacks of marble niches look too much like the low-income housing projects which blacks out the view from my living room window.

But the grass is greener and softer here than in most parks, and the concrete pathways are cleaner too. Never mind that the dead only share this space with bats, coyotes, and desperate or crazily brave homeless people. The coyotes arrived sometime last summer, most likely making a long trek down train tracks from more forsaken neighborhoods in the northern Bronx where packs of feral dogs and coyotes still roam free. One small female was found shot dead, not far from the grave of Jacob Astor IV, who died in 1912 when the Titanic sunk. Looking around at the building-size statues of angels and Virgin Marys, you may have the odd feeling that a gated community for the dead has been invaded by wildlife, both human and animal. The ground plots have been taken up entirely, and the bones of the former people are a reminder of old New York opulence and the artists who eked out a living nearby. There are a series of Astors, including the Titanic victim; there is Greta Garbo’s lesbian lover, and the son of Charles Dickens. Ralph Ellison also came to rest here, most famous for his novel The Invisible Man. Most of us in upper Manhattan – Harlem and Washington Heights – are still the invisible to likes of the wealthier classes living further south on the island. But here at Trinity, they are all invisible, save for the luxurious statues and monuments erected in their honor. The further uphill you trudge through the winding acres of lush green life, the older the graves become. At the peak of the hill, you will find the oldest carved grave in New York, that of Richard Churcher who lived a mere five years before coming here for a final place of protection. I often wonder how he died, perhaps because my own brother lived only ten years himself. But I cannot imagine leaving my father in one of these claustrophobic mausoleum spaces surrounded by ghosts of opulence and live coyotes. At night I watch the bats fly between the trees like night birds who look down at our dead.

New Yorkers die at a faster rate than most people in the United States: our hearts are ensnared by disease, or our organs by cancer, or we kill ourselves with drugs. Influenza is still a leading killer and probably was the cause of death of many people at rest in Trinity. Although there are nearly 20,000 grave sites buried under the island, they are invisible and long forgotten. You easily forget that the cracks in the concrete are held up and held together not only by earth but by the dead who still vibrate beneath the rhythm of relentless footsteps and tires.

September 11, 2001 was the day of New York City’s largest mass death. Almost 3,000 people vanished, turned from flesh to ash that spread out into the air, the Hudson River, the East River leading to the ocean, and the concrete sidewalks. Manhattan had never experienced such a mass of invisibility and the dead of 9/11 found their final shelter in the same place they lived their lives – the streets, the air, the water. You cannot feel the death at the new Freedom tower, not in the way that it is palpable at Trinity Cemetery. The dead of 9/11 are part of our atmosphere as New Yorkers. During the impossibly slow construction of the Freedom towers, 2000 graves belonging to African slaves were found. The city gave a gentle nod to centuries of invisibility by finding and preserving 419 bodies. But unlike Ralph Ellison and the inhabitants of Trinity, they will never have names.

On sleepless nights I wander Manhattan, often passing Trinity and ending up on deserted streets further down the island, streets marked by sleeping homeless. There are shelters but you more likely to die in one than on the street. I do not know where the homeless go if they die in Manhattan. The ones who wander up to Trinity to sleep will not be allowed to stay when they are dead. The doors to the Church of the Intercession are locked six days a week, as most churches are. You are landlocked. You are not free.

The Border

Walk one block east from Riverside Drive and you will find yourself on the border between Washington Heights and Harlem. The boundaries between the two neighborhoods are questionable divisions held in place more by ethnic and racial differences than the lines of a city map. These maps are untrustworthy anyway, victim to the whims of realtors and an ever-growing push towards gentrification. Let’s assume that Trinity Cemetery at 155^th street acts as an unofficial divider between a neighborhood that is predominately African-American and a neighborhood dominated by Dominicans and other immigrant Hispanic groups. Most maps insist that Harlem ends somewhere around 153^rd st and gives way to Washington Heights, which has been dubbed “Little Dominica” in tones of affection by residents and in tones of trepidation by non-residents. No matter which direction I turn, south toward Harlem or north toward Little Dominica, I find that I am foreigner here with bits of Puerto Rican and Native American and Filipino and German blood filling my veins. Maybe living life in liminal zones is my way of finding shelter.

The Heights

Little Dominica is known for its history – the fiercest fighting of the Revolutionary War, which has given way to some of the fiercest gang fights in upper Manhattan; the assassination of Malcolm X, the site of which is now a BBQ Rib & Bar dive; The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park which is medieval structure hauled here from Europe and rebuilt and now boasts Christian art from the same time period; and of course the endless expanse of the Columbia University medical center, begun in the 1960s and still extending its reach through the area.

The Heights is called so because we are 265 feet above sea level, the highest in Manhattan. My ears fill and pop as a constant reminder that as I walk the streets, I am growing closer to or farther away from the sea. The abrupt hills are actually miniature mountains. Street steps have been constructed to try to ease the pedestrian exertion, but climbing 130 steps to reach a given street does nothing to offer rest. What it does is strength your legs and maybe your heart, if you are lucky. The alternative is that you avoid walking into the upper reaches of the Heights.

The summer street culture is what holds the residents in a tight grip. Old men sit at tables in front of apartment buildings playing dominoes, but are quick to shield their faces from photographs. So are the boys who collect on street corners selling whatever wares are tucked into their bulging pockets. The hottest days squeeze the oxygen from the air by the smells of illegal street barbecues and marijuana and sweat. We are overrun by children who roam freely as if it is a small town and not an area burning with crime and gang life. Music is ever-present, usually salsa or some rhythm that reminds me of my foreignness in this land. The streets are always crowded, always festive, always dirty, and dotted with reminders of plenty amidst poverty. Roughly 97% of Little Dominica lives below the poverty line. Many are undocumented and receive no help from the government. They avoid photographs for this reason – there is no refuge for them either, no place where “La Migra” is not allowed to hunt and deport. But the stores are not folding to gentrification, and if one closes then another opens and bursts forth with toys for $1 and women’s dresses for $3. You can live here below the poverty line and make your way through crowds of families in bargain stores and emerge with an armful of whatever you were lacking when you entered. There is plenty here even among the poorest.

Harlem

My Harlem is a 30-block stretch that I use to get from home to a specific destination and back again. This Harlem is not the historic central area that boasts the Apollo Theatre, not the area where African incense chokes the car fumes, and not the gentrified part that swarms with Caucasian shoppers at newly-opened designer boutiques. My mile and a half of Harlem is almost a forgotten area, mostly residential and peppered with mom & pop businesses. Yet look closely and you can see the decay from the pressure of gentrification pressing forward. I see it daily as each store closes, a “mom” dragging sales tables of vintage soul records and African masks on to the street for 80% clearance sales. I see it again days later when the same store is boarded up and a street kid on the corner informs me that the rent around here for businesses has been hiked to $10,000 a month. He also offers me a dime bag of marijuana. His business may be the only one to survive around here. The African-American families who settled here years ago during the height of the Harlem Renaissance are being dispossessed and moved. Where will they go? There is no asylum or place of protection from the stress of developers who see only land, never bothering to acknowledge the people living on that land or those buried beneath it.

Columbus Circle

The Upper West Side of Manhattan commences here in a speeding circle of cars that centers around a monument of Christopher Columbus, erected some centuries ago to honor his discovery of the New World. The location is appropriately troubling to me, a place where the Columbus legacy has been mercilessly fulfilled. For a moment, emerging from the subway, you can absorp the immediate beauty of the statues, the fountains, the shopping, the park, bustling streets of New York City that each of us has seen in the movies. But the reality of the space, the buildings that inhabit the circle are a futuristic reflection of what Columbus intended for the New World. The monument and fountains and racing vehicles are eclipsed on the west side of the circle by the world headquarters of the Time Warner Corporation, the NYC studio headquarters of CNN, and Lincoln Center’s Jazz Center. Looming to the north is the Trump International Hotel and Tower (boasting a solid gold escalator inside that terrifies me for its height and its glaring shine) and the headquarters of Gulf and Western Oil. The rank display of corporatism is easy for me to gawk at, such a shockingly conspicuous show of empire even for a native New Yorker. Glamour may be NYC’s most ruthlessly apparent illusion and it is here that you feel it the most. You are landlocked among blinding skyscrapers and the sudden luxuriousness of Central Park that seems to reach endlessly in every direction. Beyond the lush display of opulence around the circle, there is a jarring reminder of nature among concrete repression. You may even abruptly feel free, giddy at the sight of paradox rushing around you in one sweeping move. The glamour and illusions are what holds so many us on this island, one that is barely large enough to contain so many bodies. I suspect that the tourists who arrive daily in packs do not see much beyond the allure of shopping and the sweet green grass across the way.

The circle is also one of the major transportation hubs for the city. The circle and the park crash awkwardly only at this moment, are bound in a tight juxtaposition of old tradition and modern movement. Your first impression might be one of strict boundaries: the circle, the park beyond, each bus stop and underground subway station a discrete unit with organized movements. But look at the streets just outside the park and you will find about 68 carriages drawn by horses, not the kind of fierce beast you might see in Victorian Era photos of the city, but rather the kind animal whose ribs rise in an arc from under sallow coats. The kind of horses that NYC allows to work the streets are lame, limping from the weight of their load and uncomforted by the blinders meant to shield them from the terrors of the engines rushing by them. The rank display of cruelty could almost be lost against the gentility of the park and the profusion of wealth. I was not there the day a horse collapsed and died under a heat shroud of 91 degrees, in turn causing a pile-up of cars and busses. But the tourists who rode in that carriage may know more about the savagery beneath the affluence and the persistent repression that is part of living here.

Times Square

Otherwise known as the crossroads, this roughly seven-block area is paced by 39 million tourists a year. Every light in Times Square went out once, during the northeast blackout of 2003. The darkness must have been majestic. I pace here a lot, either to ward off restless legs and insomnia during winter nights or to find relief from the humidity in the pre-dawn hours of summer mornings. The late nights hours leading to dawn are the dimmest and emptiest here, mostly because the corporate offices like Ernst & Young and Morgan Stanly have closed up. Firms like this hold more space in Times Square than the more appealing corporations like MTV and Toys R US but this is harder to see when all the lights shine equally bright. Keep pacing the tiny area until you notice the most infinitesimal changes, until you become accustomed to the gaze of late night workers leaving through the backdoors of nightclubs and the same faces waiting blocks away to catch the last bus uptown. If you do not cultivate a personal way of seeing Times Square, you risk the vision of a tourist and then there is nothing, no relief for the restlessness and nothing left to notice.

Two a.m. is kind of cut-off point, when the streets become less of a wasteland of overdressed theatre-goers and bright-eyed tourists. The streets become emptier and lights seem dimmer, but empty here does not mean deserted. This is my Times Square, a place where you become aware of every detail around you, the different shades of blinding lights, the rats that chameleon with shadows underfoot, the stretches of concrete that double as cardboard homeless shelters, and the changing faces of child-like prostitutes that lean against subway stops and eat from plastic containers. From about 2am to 5am, the Disney-led gentrification weakens enough for the lights to shine on the reality below it.

Times Square sits near to the center of the city and you cannot smell the river from here, you can only see lights and faces but you can walk until there is nothing left in your limbs except exhaustion that feels like freedom.

Hudson, part 2

The river, after holding me for these seven years, seem to be pushing me along like one of the ice chunks that break up after the end of a winter that brings only ice storms. Last winter was like this, cold but no snow, no blankets of white, just icicles along the windows and the stillness of the river as it froze inches deep. I only went outside a handful of times, I think, kept in by the icy wind that makes my heart feel weak.

But I have found my sanctuary here for so long because of the river and the bridge. Nothing that moves as fast as the water and the traffic above it can make you believe you are trapped on this island. You may be free but you are as pushed in one direction or the other as a floating chunk of ice coming down the river. I have considered moving but cannot think of where to go. The expanse of sky pushes against the edges of the New Jersey and New York skylines and beyond into a world that is not flat.

— Photos & Text by Tiara Winter-Schorr

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What It’s Like Living Here — Danila Botha in Toronto

Nov 072011

Danila Botha is a South African-born short story writer who lives in Toronto. She’s the author of Got No Secrets, a collection of stories in the Bukowski-Burroughs-Easton-Ellis tradition of black romanticism/alienation but with young, feisty female protagonists. “Jesus Was a Punk Rocker” was part of that collection and earlier appeared on these pages, as did two new stories “The Other Other” and “Valentine’s Day.”

dg
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What It’s Like Living Here

From Danila Botha in Toronto

Forest Hill

I am back in Toronto, back at my parent’s house (at 28, after moving out at 18, it feels surreal, to put it mildly). My parents live on a beautiful, tree-lined street in Forest Hill surrounded by large, striking houses: cold, cube-shaped modern structures or light and dark brown brick homes with cottage-style thatched roofs and salt water swimming pools. Their palatial home is full of silk curtains, French antiques, grey and white swirling marble floors, expensive fabrics in shades of cream and gold and dusty pinks. My bedroom has needle point carpets adorned with roses. I stare down at my chipping nails, my wrinkled Black Flag tank top, the new tattoo on my arm. I twirl a strand of greasy hair around my index finger. I am reminded of a Chantal Kreviazuk lyric: “…it’s crowded and I feel lost in here, I’m trying to find a familiar fear/I look everywhere but I just can’t see/there’s not anything that reminds me of me.”

My favourite piece is my bookshelf. It’s beige wood, with light green leaves painted on it, an antique I’ve had since I was five, stuffed with my favourite books: Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies For Little Criminals, Etgar Keret’s The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, the Zoe Whittall edited collection of stories called Geeks, Misfits and Other Outlaws, Lynn Crosbie’s Liar, Aryn Kyle’s Boys and Girl’s Like You and Me, and Jami Attenberg’s Instant Love. My collection of first editions is on the top shelf—Catcher in the Rye, Frankenstein, and Naked Lunch. I think they’re the first things I’d save in a house fire. On my mint green and silver leaf antique chair, there’s a pile of my old stuffed animals, including a white owl, a lime green Care Bear, and a two-dollar toy machine creature that resembles a cucumber with eyes.

I go for a walk with my little brother to the plaza near the house. The air is heavy and humid. The plaza feels both comfortably familiar—it has a Second Cup, a Winners and a Shoppers Drug Mart—and horrifyingly foreign, like the nightmares I have when I’m jet lagged. My brother points out the sunset. I know the violets, periwinkles and magentas are the result of pollution, but still–

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An Alien Feeling, from Sion Dayson in Paris

Sep 162011

Five years ago today Sion Dayson moved to Paris, the last move, so far, in a peripatetic existence. This essay is Sion’s contribution to Numéro Cinq‘s What It’s Like Living Here series, a vivid, intelligent meditation not so much on place but on the deeper implications of belonging, of identity and strangeness.

Sion Dayson is an American writer living in Paris, France. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Smokelong Quarterly, Six Sentences (Volume 3) and the anthologies Sounds of this House and Strangers in Paris: New Writing Inspired by the City of Light. In 2007 she won a Barbara Deming Award for Fiction. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently putting the finishing touches on her first novel. It recently placed as a Semifinalist in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition (novel-in-progress category). You can read more of her experiences in Paris at her blog, paris (im)perfect, and find out about all of her work at siondayson.com.

An Alien Feeling

By Sion Dayson

When I was a baby, I had a nanny named Josephine who came from the Dominican Republic. My family lived in New York then – the mythic New York of the ‘70s that I would love to have known.

Josephine spoke to me in Spanish, long before I could understand or form words. There’s no doubt, however, that this early exposure stayed with me. When I started studying Spanish formally in junior high school, the language came easily, my accent hardly noticeable. Vocabulary stuck like scotch tape.
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Cara K., my best friend, took French classes and I teased her endlessly for it.

“What good will French ever do you?” I ridiculed.

In fact, I charged anyone who chose not to learn Spanish as elitist. By that point we lived in North Carolina where the Latino population was exploding. Spanish was not only useful, but to me, completely beautiful.

What It’s Like Living Here — Allison Kaufman in Connecticut

Aug 122011

What It’s Like Living Here,

by Allison Kaufman in Connecticut

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Living by the Numbers

Seven days. You check your watch constantly. You live and die by the ping of the calendar on your phone. Realize that there is slight irony in the fact that you are writing of this place with only seven days left before there are seven states between you and this desk. Seven being the magic number, not in the lucky sort of way. Seven being the number of days that you work twenty-four hours. Seven being the number of blocks there are in the daily schedule.
It’s only been three years. You’ve done everything you can. You repeat this mantra.

You’ve been a parent now for three years. Not biologically, but in dorms. You sleep in an apartment that is likely larger than any you will ever own. There are 10-foot ceilings, a handrail that snakes around the living room, and a kitchen whose appliances and cabinetry are older than you are. You install pendant lighting. You paint (Nantucket Grey).

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Your charges in your first year were 16 junior and senior girls. Your toughest disciplinary issue was dealing with a girl who left a douchebag (literally) with a bow on it in front of a neighbor’s room. You fought laughter while scolding the seventeen-year-olds. You noted that there were only 4 years separating you from them. You wished you had thought of the douchebag gift your senior year of college; a roommate of yours, the one you and your friends called Sandy Vagina, could have used a wakeup call.
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What it’s like living here: Stanley Fogel’s Cuba

May 182011

Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life is the first book-length text ever published on Numéro Cinq, another first, another huge milestone in our adventure in digital publishing. I am calling it a “What it’s like living here” because, in fact, it tells us what it’s like living in Cuba today. But, of course, it doesn’t fit the pattern: it’s a book. The first chapter, the introduction, takes the lesson of Edward Said’s Orientalism and applies it to the West’s construction of the so-called Cuban historical fact. The next three chapters are very much a memoir of the years Stanley Fogel has spent living and teaching in Cuba, the personal facts behind the wall of words. Snapshots is thus a blend of the critical and the personal (with a dash of Fidel Castro’s own rhetoric added for flavour). Stanley Fogel is in a good position to see what he sees. A Canadian scholar with a yen to be “displaced,” he has spent about four months a year since the early 1990s in Cuba. He is a quirky, perceptive, thoughtful (critical in the best sense) guide to that other world. He tells a story different from the received wisdom, he fills his story with people and anecdote—our Virgil.

Me: I spent 36 years at the University of Waterloo/St. Jerome’s University where I was overcome by deconstruction and taught critical theory. A travel book, Gringo Star, ECW Press, only partly captures my desire to be displaced in the world. In 1999 I was awarded an honorary degree from Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Re. the opus at hand: I have spent c. 4 months per year since 1991 living in Havana, discovering the richness and distinctiveness of Cuban life–culture and politics transformed by the Cuban Revolution. I am retiring there shortly. (Do come visit if you’d like an ‘insider’s’ sense of Havana.) —Stanley Fogel

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¿QUE COÑO PASA?

SNAPSHOTS OF MY WONDERFUL CUBAN LIFE

By Stanley Fogel

A mi hermano, Mario Masvidal, y la revolución cubana

Thanks to Elizabeth Effinger and Trieneke Gastmeier
for typing and grooming the manuscript.
Thanks, also, to St. Jerome’s University for grants
towards the preparation of the manuscript.
The photos, man with libreta and man with eggs,
were taken by Giorgio Viera.

Chapter 1: ¿COÑO, QUE PASA? An Introduction

A loose translation of “¿Coño, Que Pasa?” is “Jeez, whazzup?” “¿Que Coño Pasa?” is a grammatically skewed version of the first phrase. Its speaker is betraying more bewilderment and/or astonishment at what s/he has witnessed or heard than in that initial formulation. Both, though, transmit the effusive, gestural nature of Cubans’ speech and flamboyant responses to what is happening locally or beyond. Indeed, to absorb the import of the remark most fully, it is best to hear it uttered by someone, steeped in Cubans’ idiomatic lexicon and delivery, who shortens the noun to “’ño,” confident its meaning will survive. If you’re planning on spending time in Cuba and want to sound authentic, work on your “’ño”; remember, the shorter the syllable the better: taking the first, small bite out of the word “gnocchi” will suffice. Despite the possibly sexist dimensions (coño=cunt) of the formulations, no offense, feminist or otherwise, should necessarily be taken by the addressee of either remark, given that both men and women have been heard to repeat them, most often in gender-free contexts.

Too often, however, the voices of individual Cubans have been muffled or overwhelmed, most noxiously, of course, by pervasive U.S. media disseminating their political leaders’ rabid and hawkish views regarding the island. “A Caribbean gulag” is the mantra incessantly uttered, one which erases any sense of the lively, polyphonic voices existing there. Much more persuasive and compelling than dogmatic right-wing comments, to my ear at any rate, are Fidel Castro’s speeches which offer the vision of utopian and egalitarian possibilities for Cuba’s inhabitants and, indeed, for the world. That impressive voice, however, has come to represent, metonymically and univocally, the diverse people who live in Cuba. In addition, it often offers idealized visions that can by no means always or easily be translated into quotidian life. Nonetheless, not least because Fidel’s speeches have been so influential in shaping Cuban government policy and because they have not had the widespread reach of American anti-Cuban material, excerpts from some of those speeches are presented here, interspersed with my own commentary. They are meant to act more as a parallel discourse than as a countervailing commentary. While it is true, that they can draw attention to a discrepancy between the ideal and the real, they also point to genuine achievements as well as noble aspirations.

These pages, it is hoped, give some hint of the richness of Cuban life, a fecundity jammed, again, to a significant extent by American efforts to isolate the country and to caricature its unique political, cultural and social dimensions. While the U.S. bombards Cuba with messages, threatening, hectoring and proselytizing, Cuban versions of itself and its interpretations of world events and tendencies don’t get a hearing of any kind in North America, unless one subscribes to Granma International or accesses granma.cu on the web. With globalization of an American-capitalist kind that has produced homogenization in much of the rest of the world, the idiosyncratic qualities of Cuba since the Revolution are even more worthy of examination, respect and transmission. In Orientalism, his groundbreaking work that in many ways launched postcolonial studies and strove to articulate a postcolonial sensibility, Edward Said pronounced on the dangers and distortions inherent in a Western imposition of meaning on the East. Surely, U.S. constructions of Cuba are no less pernicious; they may, in fact, be more deleterious given Cuba’s size, its proximity to the belligerent presence immediately to the north and its pre-revolutionary interconnectedness with the U.S.A. To that list, one could add the current constellation of political forces in Florida which dictates, in large measure, the direction of Washington’s policies towards Cuba.

I have lived in Havana for approximately three months a year since 1992, the epicentre of the “periodo especial” [special period], when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Cuba’s sponsor and ally, food, gasoline and electricity all but disappeared for a time from the lives of ordinary Cubans. I witnessed the seismic shift firsthand when, early in my time spent in Havana, I happened to be passing by the University of Havana Library. Just outside the doors was a large, unsightly pile of Russian language books dumped there unceremoniously by the staff. The special period’s duress may have begun; at least, though, there was the satisfaction of jettisoning a Soviet presence that many felt was joyless, arrogant, oppressive and, possibly even, racist. Traces of that occupation do remain, principally in the numerous Ivans, Liubas and Vladimirs registered in Cuba’s census. Freed from naming their children from such imperialist sources, many parents opt for such freewheeling monikers as Misleidys (my lady) or Roelvis (you’re Elvis) that augment the sense, readily apparent, of Cuban expressiveness and buoyancy. Not that politically-based nomenclatures are passé; there is always the chance of encountering a Usnavi (U.S. Navy) or, more in line with official Cuban sympathies, a Hanoi. Famously, a kid with that latter name in the early 1970s was a “one hit wonder,” singing a song demanding the release of American dissident, Angela Davis, then in a U.S. jail. When she was freed, one of her first stops was Havana where she appeared at a huge rally in her honour.

What It’s Like Living Here — Danielle Frandina in San Francisco

May 112011

photograph by Jessica Pezalla

When he was young (in the last century), dg had a thing for that 1936 (definitely before dg was born) Clark Gable movie San Francisco (with Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald). DG actually used to want to be Clark Gable when he grew up. Unfortunately, things turned out otherwise. But he did go around for a number of years humming that song to himself even though he lived in Ontario and did not see San Francisco until, um, 1969. But enough about dg. Here’s a lovely “What it’s like living here” piece from Danielle Frandina who actually lives in San Francisco and perhaps never even saw that ancient movie (forever twined in dg’s mind with SF)—a pleasant and striking contrast to the economic doom-sayers and the plate geologists who all see the state sliding into the Pacific figuratively or actually pretty soon. After reading Danielle’s words, I think we should all join Jeanette MacDonald for a rousing chorus or two of “San Francisco!”

What it’s like living here

From Danielle Frandina in San Francisco

I grew up in Colorado, and if you’re from the West, but not the West Coast, you’re born with an innate suspicion and resentment of Californians. Back in high school, my boyfriend wanted us to move there after graduation, but I refused, choosing the deserts of New Mexico instead. During the mudslides and fires that plagued the Golden State in the mid-Nineties, I remember thinking some very insensitive thoughts about Californians, something along the lines of, “They’re getting what they deserve.” In my mind, California was Los Angeles, and Los Angeles represented all that was despicable and embarrassingly indulgent about Americans. But eight years ago, I loaded up a borrowed car with little more than my clothes, books and music and headed to the Bay Area for the sweet shelter of my two best friends, the debris of my former life smoldering in the rear view mirror.

The Apartment

photograph by Joe Frandina

I live in a lemon-yellow building on Dearborn Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. It was built in 1910. This date matters. It means it was constructed after the 1906 earthquake, so I can’t gauge how the structure will hold up when another one of that magnitude hits. The Bay windows of my studio apartment face street-side onto three palm trees that guard a locally famous community garden, the oldest in the city. During a storm, the palms sway and shake so violently that it’s easy to imagine I’m witnessing a tropical storm. This sight always sends me back to the beach town of Mui Ne in Vietnam, where, as a lone backpacker, I was once bedridden for three days. In my fevered state, all I had the energy to do was watch the palm trees dance through the glassless windows of my bungalow as monsoon season really took root. Strangely, this is a soothing memory. I recall feeling no fear, no resistance, just letting the illness course through my body, being completely at ease with my surroundings and circumstances. I rarely feel that way. At ease.

My apartment is around the corner from what is now called the Gourmet Ghetto. Slow Foods Movement and Farm to Table restaurants line 18^th Street. To explain to San Franciscans where I live, I just tell them my street is catty corner to Tartine, arguably the best artisan bakery in the city. On any given day, at any given time, there is a line around the block to get in and order a Morning Bun or Croque Monsieur. And it’s worth the wait.

What It’s Like Living Here — Diane Lefer in Los Angeles

May 072011

Herewith Diane Lefer’s startling look at Los Angeles, the city where she lives. But this isn’t the Los Angeles of glitz and glamour, of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Diane’s Los Angeles has more in common with the LA of the movie Chinatown, a city of murky secrets and vast, ancient corruption. Finding her inspiration (she tells me to thank him) in Keith Maillard’s essay “Richland” recently published on NC, she takes an apocalyptic look at what is known as the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, now a toxic nuclear Superfund site. Diane’s view of LA is trenchant, bracing, and passionate. It will surprise you and sadden you, much the way we were surprised and saddened reading Keith’s memoir.

Diane is a dear old friend, also a constant reader of NC. You should also check out Diane’s story “The Tangerine Quandary” published here last year. In the intro to that story, I mentioned Diane’s work with a California prison inmate, Duc Ta. For readers interested in following the Duc Ta story, here is a link to Diane’s essay “Facing Life,” from Connotation Press.

—dg

What It’s Like Living Here

from Diane Lefer on Los Angeles, California

As a New York City transplant to LA some years back, I dreaded having to drive. I found an apartment a block from a major intersection where I can walk to most of what I need and have pretty good—at least for LA—access to public transportation. But once I got used to being behind the wheel, having a car liberated me. The New York subway system is such a gift to humanity, it ought to be recognized as such by UNESCO, but without a car, New Yorkers are confined to urban life. In Los Angeles, a short drive takes me to canyons, mountains, desert where I can cross paths with coyotes or turn back on sighting mountain lion tracks. (I also once cut a hike short when I encountered a Charles Manson lookalike not far from where The Family once lived.)

Some of my favorite trails are up through the sandstone and shale rock formations and cliffs in the northwest corner of LA at the Ventura County line. I long thought if I could ever bring myself to leave the center of town, this is where I’d want to be, in one of the residential communities tucked among the cliffs or at the base of all this fabulous sedimentary rock that was deposited 65-85 million years ago. I did wonder if I’d be able to find congenial company in an area where it seemed the main employers were the adult entertainment industry and various defense contractors. I haven’t met any porn stars, but whenever I headed up Woolsey Canyon Road to Sage Ranch Park, it was impossible to miss the Boeing checkpoint and guardhouse.

What It’s Like Living Here — Laura Catherine Brown in Manhattan

May 062011

Here’s a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” piece from a former student and old friend, Laura Catherine Brown, who lives, yes, in Manhattan. I can’t even date our first meeting. I was teaching novel-writing at the New York State Writers Institute Summer Workshop; Laura had lovely growing-up in upstate New York novel-in-progress about a young woman from a place called Ransomeville, about the death of a parent, unexpected pregnancy, and the struggle to find some moment of control in a world of poverty, limited chances and no support systems (since the Great Recession more and more of America has fallen to this estate; this is a must-read book against despair). That novel became her debut book, a fine first novel called Quickening, which Random House published 2000. Her shorter pieces have appeared in two anthologies, Before: The Big Book on Parenting, from Overlook Press and The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater with Seal Press. She has been a resident at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Djerassi Program, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Ucross Foundation, Ragdale Foundation and The Hambidge Center.

What It’s Like Living Here

by Laura Catherine Brown in Manhattan

Any time of day except, perhaps, early Sunday morning, I cross the threshold of my building and step out onto an obstacle course generated by people. In the swarming thick of it, there is no clear line where they end and I begin. We’re parts of an incomprehensible whole. The clamor and din, the grit and anxiety, the need for haste, all swirl inside me. Any time of day. Breathe it in, breathe it out. It’s enough to make me dizzy.

Approximately eight million people dwell in New York City, a million or so in Manhattan. Two hundred fifteen thousand of them pass through Union Square, my neighborhood, on a typical busy day. Considering the volume, considering how each person rules their individual space, a remarkable accord prevails, and somehow everyone negotiates, barely touching anyone else. Amazing how we manage that.

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What It’s Like Living Here — Liz Blood in Gunsan, Jeollabuk-do, South Korea

Apr 302011

Herewith a “What it’s like living here” essay & photos from Liz Blood who has taken an adventurous turn and fled her native Oklahoma City for the exotic wonders and mysteries of South Korea where she is now teaching (Liz and students pictured above). What is unique about this piece is that it’s about discovery and newness, not about a place Liz knows well or loves from habit, but a place in which she cannot even make out the words on the store signs. Everything is new, she feels awkward, nothing is easy. Going out to buy instant noodles at a convenience store is an expedition into the unknown. Liz’s words are fresh and revealing in their honesty and detail.

What It’s Like Living Here,

from Liz Blood in Gunsan, Jeollabuk-do, South Korea

Noodles

There are marks everywhere that you don’t understand—on cars, buildings, flyers in your mailbox. Squares, circles, upside down Y’s—sometimes it looks more like a game of Tetris to you than a language. This makes almost everything a real chore, but none so much as getting a meal. What will you order? How will you order? Are you even sure that’s a restaurant? When you first arrive in South Korea you don’t go out to dinner alone. Instead, you walk down the cold, granite steps of your apartment building, through the air-compressed sliding glass door (which you’re sure came from the set of Star Trek), and head out onto the street for the nearest convenience store.

As you leave your building—which is called Dreamplus, a fact you find funny since you’ve had so few dreams since coming to this country—you consider the sliding glass door and the ease with which it moves. Whooosh. It took you six or seven trips out that door to realize the sensor was above it and that, when the door wouldn’t open, a simple wave of the hand would suffice. All that jumping around and on and off the steps was unnecessary. Perhaps, one of these days, you will move with such ease, act right on cue. Like the door or even the children in your English classes, you will know the proper response. I’ll have a beer, the pork dumplings, and kim chi soup, please.

But, until then, you simply round your corner in Jigok-dong—the name of your neighborhood, which you say proudly because it is one of the only things you can say properly—and walk into the 7-11 to find a pack of instant noodles. You choose any one of the packages without drawings of shrimp or fish and place the noodles on the counter, not even bothering to listen to the cashier tell you the amount—the register’s screen points outward, the numbers glow neon green. You breathe easy and relish the convenience.

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What It’s Like Living Here (a Charticle) — Kate Reuther in New York City

Apr 022011

Kate Reuther is a former student of mine, a lovely writer. Between packets we used to exchange childcare horror stories, taking comfort in being wry and witty about stress and everyday domestic catastrophe. All our children seemed to have survived, so it can’t have been that bad. Now I just remember the camaraderie of those emails. This is an atypical “What it’s like living here” piece. It’s what Kate calls (apparently this is a new word, perhaps not an entirely new form) a charticle. Apparently, she tells me, there are also listicles, although I haven’t seen one yet. Kate is one of those rare creatures who enjoys teaching middle school. She is a graduate of Yale and the Vermont College MFA in Fiction program. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Brain Child, Salamander, and The Ledge. A life-long New Yorker, she lives in Washington Heights with her husband and two boys.

REASONS TO GO	REASONS TO STAY
To live here is to constantly question my own sanity and I have lived here my entire life.	It’s not possible to leave anymore. I am permanently warped. I am ruined for anywhere else.
The subway — the pee-soaked man sharing my bench, the garbage heat, the windy grit in my eyes, the milky plaster leaks, the rat tunnels, the crush of sticky skin, the “Fuck you looking at?”	The subway — ancient engine of democracy and speed, dog-eared paperbacks, roving Mariachis, warm stranger’s shoulder, rocking me home after three gin and tonics.
I worry about the children, what this soot and hurry and perpetual tightness are doing to their brains. When they want to run, they run in a circle through the kitchen, past the table, past the television, and back into the kitchen. “Light feet!” I yell. They do not know what it’s like to run under an emerald canopy, or through a field, wheat without end, opening and opening and opening….	There are no children running through fields in the countryside. There are children playing Halo in finished basements. There are children drinking Malibu rum in the backseats of Dodge Durangos. There are children smoking Marlboro Lights in Chick-fil-A parking lots. There are children texting each other: MEET U @ MANIC PANIC. My boys are better off.
Green — When I unexpectedly find myself before a windowpane of trees or an undulating mountain range or even just a square of lawn, the clamp inside my chest eases open. Right now the only green I see are desiccated Christmas trees planted in dirty snow banks.	I get my green in concentrated doses, Central Park doses, friend’s sister’s East Hampton’s house for the weekend doses. And I appreciate green more this way, sighing like a character from a musical when the wind plays with with the winking leaves in the afternoon sun. If I lived with trees all the time, they would look like work, like a mess to dig out of gutters, all wet and black and rotten.
The possibility, no probability, of a washer and dryer inside my own home.	My parents failed to get out. When my mom got pregnant, they bought a house at the end of a dirt road inside a primordial pine forest in Warren, N.J. Every morning, my mother would waddle along my father’s crunchy tire tracks, sighing tearily in the shards of sunlight. No neighbors. She would have liked to make her excursion into a loop-walk rather than an out-and-back but the intersecting pavement was miles away and the woods were featureless, like black crosshatches. No elves. My mother walked until she reached the splintery remains of an orange plastic cone, abandoned in the run-off ditch, then she turned around, walked back to the house, and got back into bed.
The endless schlep – sweating inside of a matted, down coat, lugging a stroller up a metal staircase, bags banging my shins, bags bruising my hips, bags inside of bags in case I buy something and I need another bag. Sometimes I turn the bags upside down in the front hall of our apartment and litter the carpet with my burden: one mitten, a travel size bottle of Purell, a Ziploc bag of baby-wipes, a half-knitted scarf, an uncapped Cherry Chapstick, an aluminum water bottle (the earth!), a Ziploc bag of Pirate Booty, a Lawrence Block mystery, two chewed pieces of gum, a Lego alligator, a Ziploc bag of apple slices (brown), a plastic water bottle (the earth!), a wooden J train. If I lived elsewhere, I would leave it all in my car.	Where is “elsewhere” anyway? Not Westchester or Long Island or Connecticut – I’d be bored out of my mind. Not DC – bunch of wonks. Not LA – traffic. Yes, there is a middle, a big ocean-less middle, I’d get lost driving from the placeless place to placeless place to my women’s book club at Panera Bread. I need my feet on a grid, landmarks in the sky. And fuck Boston.
Scott – He is always so bruised, hunched, angry, disappointed, TIRED. If he can’t make it here, there is something wrong with this place.	Scott – He likes his supergeek job, his Muay Thai muscles, his Banh Mi bread, his collaborators from the land of jazz and gin. Scott is digging into the city wearing purple Air Force Ones.
People are jealous because I pay only $317 a month to park my car in a garage.	“New York City. Just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers and everything.”
Adventure!! A new color to the sky, new minerals in the tap water, new slang for soda pop and sandwiches, new tax codes, new friendly debates about the best route home.	I’d still be the same anxious, angry person, only disoriented, lonely, and hungry.
It will happen again.	It happens everywhere.
My sons running naked on a beach.	When I find a local like me, I want to run my tongue up under his jaw line, taste the brack of blacktop and cloudy hot dog water. “Do you remember ‘The G-Spot Deli’ on 86th and Amsterdam?” “Yeah, what were they thinking?”
My mother said, “Never hang your purse from the hook on the back of the toilet stall door; robbers will reach over and snatch it while you have your pants down.”	My mother said, “If you feel scared, go where there are people.”
There’s no nobility in pointless suffering. Arrogance is a lousy reward.	When I look at the sun through my closed eyelids, I see a ridge of red skyline. I think it’s the West Side, as viewed from the reservoir, my fingers gripping the old chain link, my thighs pink and goose-bumped in the February cold.
Bruce Ratner	Mariano Rivera
A porch, preferably a wraparound porch, with a pink jasmine bush, a string hammock and a weathered red stool we use as a table for iced tea. Glass pitcher. Plenty of ice.	How much space do human animals really need? Isn’t this better? Isn’t this enough?
I could spend my whole life debating this and never leave.	I could never leave.

—Kate Reuther

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What It’s Like Living Here — Mary Donovan in Wheaton, Maryland

Mar 242011

Mary Donovan

Here’s another delightful addition to the Numéro Cinq What It’s Like Living Here series, this time from VCFA graduate Mary Donovan in Wheaton, Maryland, which, yes, goes by many names, and is thus ambiguous, until you get to the charming details.

What it is and is not

Wheaton is many things, but it is not Silver Spring. Much less Kensington. Nor (god forbid) Washington, DC. If you live in Wheaton, though, you must reckon with these.

The US Postal Service makes you say “Silver Spring” as your City. The US Census hyphenates “Wheaton-Glenmont,” though Glenmont is a crossroads of strip malls and the end of a subway line. Just across Veirs Mill Road is Kensington, where the high school blasts its Friday-night-football and half-time tubas clear through your cottage. You’re not far from the border of Washington, DC, where you likely commute to work. Although when you travel you say “from DC,” every evening you’re relieved to flee its workaholic bosses and center-of-the-known-and-unknown-universe stance. Wheaton is also not Rockville, whose shared border remains mysterious and may involve the creek; you once mailed a card to friends you knew from woods walks and guessed their address as Rockville, but it was Silver Spring, which meant Wheaton.

Although Wheaton has no formal borders, everyone knows where you mean when you live there. Ah, near Wheaton Plaza, the first “shopping mall” in the 1960s. Near vast Wheaton Regional Park — you can hike miles of trails or ice-skate year-round or ride a horse or play (or watch) baseball as the sun sets. All those tiny places to eat – Salvadoran, Peruvian, Vietnamese — and you can walk to HMart? You’ve got Wheaton Regional Library, with robust programming for children and speakers of languages other than English, who are now the majority. You signed a petition called “Don’t Move the Wheaton Library!” when council members decided to “revitalize” by razing an historic area and building a brand-new library and chain stores. (They ran out of money when the Recession hit – you win – for now.)

No one knows quite where you mean when you (must) say “Silver Spring” with its 16 zip codes. Your next-door neighbor Bernice, a stalwart, 80-something daughter of “original” residents, mails you a Christmas card with “WHEATON, MD 20902” pressed by a forceful hand. (They deliver it.)

Wheaton, MD, has a strong feeling of the late 1940s-early-‘50s, when most houses – including yours and Bernice’s — were built: small, brick homes rising and falling through rabbit-warren neighborhoods for middle-class folk with, at most, one car per. Now these streets are choked with parked vehicles and you can only drive one way at a time. You may not have a dining room, or an upstairs, but you will have hardwood floors, thick plaster walls and solid brick construction. Store signs still feature the fonts – Art-Deco-meets-Space-Age — of the ‘50s and ‘60s. People your age – and you are not THAT old – reminisce about childhood trips to Hot Shoppes at Wheaton Plaza, home of the Mighty Mo and its Special Sauce, delivered to your car by a waitress on roller skates.

Claims to fame

Wheaton has the highest elevation in the Washington, DC area, and sprouted its first radio towers. WTOP has been broadcasting since 1939; you rely heavily on its traffic reports each morning. Wheaton also transmitted the very first television in 1923. A resident named Charles Jenkins built that first transmitter and got the first TV broadcast license – and invented the television set. People in the 1920s and ‘30s watched his “radiovision” and assumed everyone in the U.S. would remember his name.

The Wheaton Metro (subway) Station has the deepest escalator in the Western Hemisphere; only Hong Kong has a longer escalator. Kensington, with its antique shops and Victorian wrap-arounds, can only dream of having such an escalator.

Chuck Levin’s Music Center in the heart of Wheaton is a legendary destination for musicians in the Mid-Atlantic region. When your band needed its sound and light equipment in the mid-80s, you drove all the way from Virginia to Chuck Levin’s. When your Dad (in Florida) threw himself an 80th birthday party a couple years ago, Chuck Levin’s kazoos, shakers and harmonicas filled your suitcase.

HMart is not unique to Wheaton. Both Gaithersburg and Catonsville (near Baltimore) have them in Maryland. But people know where you live by “that awesome Korean grocery.” You can buy 21 different (frozen) types of dried fish cake, or a set of shot glasses whose box reads “Perfect for Today’s Modern Life” or the absolute-best deals on fresh and strange produce.

Roads named “Mill”

Wherever you live in Wheaton you live on or near a road named “(Someone’s) Mill” – remnants of grain mills in operation from pre-Civil-War throughout Rock Creek, the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and Sligo Creek.

Just say “I’m near” Veirs Mill, Kemp Mill, Plyers Mill, Newport Mill. People nod their heads, sure.

Flora and fauna

Your house and porch appreciate the shade of mature oaks (red, white and black). Yards feature azaleas, hydrangeas, lilacs, rhododendrons, crape myrtles, boxwoods, magnolias. These somehow survive icy winters and bloom in turn, just when you most need them. Your own vegetable yield can be iffy, but you can go to any of a dozen farmers markets on weekends. Plus HMart!

In your yard you spot raccoons, possums, squirrels, rabbits, and more rabbits. Deer venture away from the creek to eat only the heads off your tulips. Birds make the rounds of neighborhood feeders; gangs of starlings bully away sparrows, cardinals and mourning doves. Even starlings fear the iron beak of a red-headed woodpecker with black-and-white houndstooth markings, who travels solo. (You’ll hear him and his family pounding bark – like rapid-fire gunshot – while you climb the trails of Wheaton Regional.) You see goldfinches, but to date, not one oriole without cleats and a uniform.

In the Brookside Gardens of Wheaton Regional Park, you can visit the Butterfly Garden May-to-September and the “Garden of Lights” Thanksgiving-to-mid-January. Last year they began an “edible landscaping” project, foregoing flowers for vegetables and crops. Eggplants drew flea beetles but the okras were insanely happy and the sweet potatoes grew out onto the sidewalks.

Along the Park’s trails, it behooves you to look down and jump over piles of horse droppings (they have the right of way). You find it curious that you see chipmunks only in this Park, never in anyone’s yard, and you marvel how they achieve jet propulsion across your path, leaving only the after-image of black stripe on brown.

Maybe twice a month you see a fox there, and notice its vibrant red fur with ring of black on its chest — not the same brownish fox you see other times. You aren’t sure if these are differences in gender or ethnicity or family resemblance, or all three. The fox usually trots parallel to you for a while from fifteen yards away, so you can exchange glances. Once you saw a coyote, whom you didn’t register as “coyote” but “strange dog – odd-colored fox? – hey!” as you remembered reading of their increasing numbers along the East Coast. You miss your dog every day, your longtime eager companion for woodsy adventures; she would dive shoulder-first to roll around any ground cover trotted upon by fox or coyote. (Thus both of you once suffered from sarcoptic mange.) She is buried in Rockville, your ex’s choice and his to make; she was his mother’s dog first.

Speaking of dogs

Since you miss your dog every day but adopting one would be unfair with your DC commute (11-12-hour days R/T) you may arrange your activities around chances to encounter them. Your own corner lot has much more lawn than house and seems a message board for Wheaton dogs. (You may not be fully aware of this paw traffic until it snows.)

Loiter outside. Sophie and Billy, Springer Spaniels, live just across the chain-link fence. There has never been a creature – not a lover, nor niece or nephew, nor your own Cocker – ever happier to see you than goofy Sophie. Billy is geriatric with a fraction of her energy, but his tail whirrs just as fast. Catty-corner lives Bentley, a white dreadlocked Komondor, and further down Allison the elderly Basset and Christopher the Terrier mix. Out on the trails you’ll likely be rebuffed by Nellie (unless you’re wearing strawberry lip gloss) but met with enthusiasm by the King Charles pack (Kallie, Ottie and Netta) and their Golden Lab companion, Cozy, with a sinus tumor. You hope their humans don’t expect you to know their names.

Now and then you hear cats wailing at night below one of your windows. Neighbors have guessed they’re feral. One gray cat has tried to get through your front door twice (you are allergic). S/he is breathtakingly beautiful and wears a collar.

Water features

Along with the creeks and branches that promoted so many Mills, streams run under or along roads and provide a soothing sound when you pass by.

In the summertime, sudden violent storms can move in from the west. They are strong enough to down trees and knock out power and even issue “microbursts” of rain (2-3 inches in 30 minutes). These can overwhelm your back stairwell drain and soak your basement. After the sun comes out, your neighborhood fills with vans of ServPro folk hauling industrial de-humidifiers and fans inside, while other folk haul carpeting and laminate out to the curb.

If you sold your Rockville condo and bought your Wheaton house in August of 2008, you would’ve treaded water through the crash of the housing/financial markets in September/October. With enough homes in foreclosure or bought vastly undervalued, your own cottage is now “underwater.”

The Corner of Collins and Ivydale

In Wheaton, just for showing up you benefit from the spectacular hearts of your neighbors. You know the names of the humans across your road, next door and behind, at least. Only a few remain of “the originals” – first occupants like Bernice’s parents. (You will hear the term enough that it insinuates your dream, reminiscent of TV’s “Lost” – murky group called “Originals” — but it was only a dream.)

Don’t worry about going out of town for a few days. Without your asking, your neighbors will look out for pamphlets stuck in your storm door or newspapers delivered contrary to your stop request. They will take in a box from Amazon on backorder. You will do the same during their upcoming trips to Italy and Ocean City.

You catch up with news of life on any day warm enough for yard work, and you talk again about getting a list-serve going for yourselves. You should really have a block party or something. And you stop raking to visit with Allison or Christopher or Buddy or Moose from blocks away, but you forget again to ask the humans their names.

And they won’t know your name. But it won’t matter. You all know where you live.

—Mary Donovan

What It’s Like Living Here — Kim Aubrey in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Mar 062011

Kim Aubrey has already contributed a “What it’s like living here” from Toronto just as she was about to move to Saskatoon. This new piece actually seems better than the first, denser, more pressured, more engaged, even as it struggles with engagement, with the new, alien place. It’s fascinating to read the two together. But, of course, I also like this piece for the use it makes of my short story “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon,” which is, yes, based on a true story. I did run out onto the ice to help rescue a blind man and his companion dog. But in real life we actually managed to save the dog (in the story, it dies); I brought the dog to my girlfriend’s apartment to dry it off and warm it up; it knocked over the Christmas tree and ate two of the presents and then attacked the policeman when he came to take it into custody. No doubt this will distract you from Kim’s essay. Ignore me. I had a very interesting time living in Saskatoon—but this is Kim’s story.

What It’s Like Living Here

By Kim Aubrey

You ask what it’s like living here and whether I have read your story, “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon.” I read it last week, swearing out loud, “Shit, that’s a good story.” I’ve taken to talking to myself because I don’t know anyone here, except for my husband, Joseph, who’s at work all day. My experience of the place is limited, tentative, and your story has already begun to color how I view it. I’ve been planning to visit the Mendel Art Gallery, and now when I go, your narrator’s account of Mendel keeping his art collection in his slaughterhouse may conjure the sight and smell of blood.

“There seem to be so few people”*

You feel strange here. If the place you live shapes you, molds you in ways you don’t realize, subtly and slowly, Saskatoon has yet to work its magic. You’ve only been here for seven weeks in total, interrupted by a return to Toronto for the holidays and to New Hampshire to stay with your mother while she had a hysterectomy. You make yourself go out some afternoons, no matter how cold it is. Other days you stay at your desk, working on projects, answering e-mails. Or you ring your daughters in Toronto, consoling yourself that they are only a phone call away.

On those days that you make it outside, you walk the two blocks across three snow-packed streets to the South Saskatchewan river, where you can either follow the sidewalk and view the open and closed waters from above, or climb down the slippery hill to the Meewasin walking trail which stretches along both sides of the river. You could cross over to the west side on one of the bridges, but you are waiting for milder weather before venturing across on foot. Here on the east side, the surface of the river is frozen and seems like an extension of the trail, but beyond and under the ice, the river flows swiftly north to Lake Winnipeg.

“Beneath me the unfrozen parts of the river smoke and boil”

Corner Grocer

Outside, it’s minus thirty, but you kick off the covers three or four times a night, pull them back on. Your body’s thermostat is wonky. Heat blazes through you, a trial by fire, something being forged. Your period is late again. Maybe it won’t come. That doesn’t mean what it meant twenty or thirty years ago. It means the opposite now, your power to make a baby dwindling, some other power replacing it. The force of this heat kindles you even in the frozen depth of a Saskatchewan winter.

You hurry inside from a walk. Your knees and the tops of your thighs sting as the warmth floods back into them. You neglected to wear snow pants or long johns, or to wrap your scarf around your face, because you relish the bite of cold, the uncompromising crispness, hoping it will eat a clear path through your befuddled mind. You wonder how you’ll manage to make this prairie snowscape feel like home. When you first moved to Canada, your daughters helped to ground you, to root you in Toronto where you’d landed. What can root you now? You’re hoping the cold can tell you, or the tension between cold and warmth, desire and paralysis.

You gaze at the painting on your bedroom wall—an enormous hyper-real hibiscus. The yellow stalk of its sex casts a cool blue shadow against the lush red petals. When you were a kid in Bermuda, you used to strip the petals from the stalk to find the sticky heart of the flower, its hidden juiciness. You and your brothers would fix the small white cone to the tips of your noses to see how long it would take before the flower’s heart fell off.

What It’s Like Living Here — John Proctor in New York City

Mar 042011

What it’s like living here

by John Proctor

Every Monday and Thursday during the school year, I get up at 4:30 and commute via subway from Park Slope, Brooklyn to Grand Central Terminal, the Metro North commuter train from Grand Central to White Plains, and the Bee-Line bus from White Plains to Purchase, New York, where I teach at Manhattanville College. Having a wife and child while trying to maintain my pre-offspring reading and writing schedule can be difficult, and the train gives me a chunk of mostly unaccosted reading and writing time. Also, I’ve found that I’m rarely so aware – of my thoughts, of my surroundings – as I am at 5:00 in the morning in a moving vehicle that I don’t have to steer.

For the first time since I moved to New York City in 2000, I live in a neighborhood – Park Slope – that rarely makes me feel physically unsafe. It’s a popular site for movie shoots that want an “old Brooklyn” feel, but the only hint of crime that I’ve experienced are break-ins of my car if I leave it unlocked.

Park Slope, in the springtime

No matter the time of year, whether the waning days of summer at the start of the school year or the dark heart of winter when the second semester is just getting underway, I exit our three-story brick apartment building into a near-total darkness, broken up every 50 feet or so with the dim yellow arcs of streetlamps. Our block is mostly old three-story linoleum-sided buildings, with a sprinkling of ultra-modern condos that sit half-empty, waiting for the housing market to recover. We hope the market stays bad forever, so we’ll always have streetside parking. Some blocks near ours have actual gaslight lamps. These lamps seem to be in keeping with the “historic district” designation that Park Slope shares with Beacon Hill in Boston and New Orleans’ French Quarter.

What It’s Like Living Here — Cheryl Wilder in Raleigh, North Carolina

Feb 182011

Here’s a lovely, southern “What it’s like living here” piece from poet and Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate Cheryl Wilder (who graduated, got married and moved, all in the same year). Cheryl and dg both have an affection for tobacco, though they speak two different languages—what she calls “tobacco barns,” in the North Carolinian manner, dg calls “kilns” (dg grew up on a tobacco farm in Canada; Cheryl used to work for a wonderful North Carolina architect and visionary who published an amazing book of photos of, yes, tobacco barns).

What It’s Like Living Here

by Cheryl Wilder in Raleigh, North Carolina

Then

A New Home

You relocated last summer and for the first time in seventeen years you feel at home.

Let’s clarify.

Your son was born thirteen years ago and you never felt more at home than when you went to see him after his birth. He was born at 4:56 a.m. and you’d been awake for twenty hours. After a nap you walked down the hospital hall with three bands cuffing your wrist, a nightgown brushing your calves, and a thin blue sweater around your shoulders. A nurse wheeled your son away from the other newborns and matched one of your bands with his. In the dimly lit nursery you caressed his arm and cheek, watched his chest rise and fall, felt as if you knew him well. The quiet hush of machines lulled you as the rest of the world dripped away. The nurse asked if he was your second child.

Now

No, your first.

“You’re a natural then,” she said.

The best compliment you’d ever received.

Read the rest of this post

What It’s Like Living Here — Richard Farrell in San Diego, CA

Feb 162011

Ocean Beach Pier

And if California slides into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will…

-Warren Zevon

No Bad Days

A popular bumper sticker here reads “No Bad Days.” These words, scribbled in white, tiki-style letters with an accompanying copse of swaying palm trees, seem to capture a pervasive San Diego ethos. Bathed in incessant sunshine and aquamarine skies, it’s easy to believe in such a concept: that there could, conceivably, be no bad days.

But No Bad Days demands a fulltime attitude adjustment to keep up with its endless-summer cheeriness. No Bad Days implies lithe bodies, salt-spray hair and a fountain-of-youth refusal to grow old. It demands that you smile at strangers, sport flip-flops year round, and stuff board shorts and towels in the trunk, just in case. It constructs a dream landscape built on breakfast burritos, noontime margaritas and PCH kisses against a backdrop of spinnakers and sunsets. No Bad Days proffers paradise as if it was a tangible thing, a widely available commodity cast in bright ceramic tiles forever walling-off real life. A place where complexity reduces itself to surf reports and the nearest tamale stand.

But nothing is that simple, not even here. The false front of No Bad Days crumbles upon even the most elementary examination. Still, it’s an easy first-glance impression of life in San Diego.

Sunshine

The glorious contradiction of San Diego is the weather. Carbon-copy perfect days roll off with such an unerring consistency, such a dress-parade precision of seventy-two and sunny, that you soon begin to take them for granted. You stop noticing Christmas Eve rounds of golf, shorts in January, the last time you made your children wear jackets to school. You begin to believe that a daytime high of 61 degrees constitutes a cold front or that three hours of light drizzle equals a storm. You become so spoiled by the spectacle of beautiful weather that it stops being spectacular. I don’t know how this happens, but it does.

San Diego sunrise from my bedroom.

I grew up in central Massachusetts—a geeky, weather-obsessed kid fascinated by clouds. In summer I studied cumulonimbus giants towering above a northwestern horizon of sugar maples. I learned to read the clouds and the silver-backs of maple leaves, able (I told myself) to predict the likelihood of electrical storms as well as any meteorologist. I listened for the subtle sounds of winter storms, how icy stratus clouds acted like an echo chamber in the night sky, creating a certain pitched whirl from Beechcraft turboprops droning overhead, a haunting sound that seemed to forecast coming snow. Risking the wrath of the winter-weary reader, I hesitantly say that, at times, I wish for something other than relentless paradise. I long for dramatic weather here, for lightning, sleet, or a good old-fashioned Alberta Clipper to numb my finger tips.

The closest I get to that old feeling is when scorching Santa Ana winds howl down from the mountains. Sometimes, when the windows rattle at night, it feels a bit more like home.

There is an underside to our empyrean climate, a manic assuredness that sets in among the inhabitants, as if we San Diegans have forgotten how to endure nature, like we’ve crossed into some middle-zone paralysis of comfort and leisure. We think our weather, like our television set, operates on remote control and that we can simply pay extra for premium days. Perhaps we’ve lost some primal skill-set that folks in places like Worcester retain.

It’s also possible that the contradiction is only within me, some curmudgeonly itch that can’t be scratched by seventy-two and sunny. Perhaps my longing for occluded fronts and Nor’easters holds me back from partaking in No Bad Days—there’s always someone who wants to rain on the parade. But even after living here, off and on, for ten years, most days I feel like a polar bear swimming laps in a frosty pool at the San Diego Zoo, wondering when I’ll return to my real home, some place with gray skies, snow and rain, where a beautiful day still feels like a gift, like an unexpected moment of grace. It’s hard to notice grace when it constantly surrounds you.

I realize that this logic smacks of survivor’s guilt, the paroled New Englander unable to forget incessant winters, or hazy, hot and humid days, or the rich canvases of turbulent clouds. That young boy believed he was standing guard against rough weather like a sentry. In San Diego, the sentry sleeps.

But then I look out the window and see golden sunshine, off-shore breezes rippling through palm fronds, and I recognize the absurdity of my longing.

Point Loma

Sand

We live on Point Loma, a four-mile hilly peninsula that juts into the Pacific like a vestigial tail from the body of the contiguous United States. Four-hundred foot sandstone cliffs tumble toward the sea on one side and the bay on the other. Hiking trails along the aptly named Sunset Cliffs fill with gawkers waiting to spy the green flash or sea lions frolicking in the surf. On the bay side, warships glide past the Cabrillo Lighthouse at the end of the point, heading out for extended deployments, or coming back from the same.

The small community of Ocean Beach where we rent a house is an eclectic blend of families, retirees, surfers, homeless and medicinal marijuana devotees, all coexisting in a weird, welcoming balance. OB stands in stark contrast to the cookie-cutter San Diego suburbs where we used to live; it still feels like “Old California,” whatever the hell that means. I suppose it means that you can be a full-time surf bum here, a student, a homeless vet with a cardboard sign along the road, or a bio-tech engineer with a No Bad Days sticker on your S-class Mercedes. OB, like many beach towns, fights a losing battle with gentrification, as multi-million dollar homes crowd out surf-shacks.

Ocean Beach Sunset

Greasy spoons abound in OB’s small commercial district: Hodad’s sells thick, meaty burgers for less than ten bucks in an open air café; South Beach is legendary for its fish tacos. Newbreak Coffee is my weekend hideout, a beachfront shop where they don’t yet enforce the ‘no shoes, no shirts, no service’ policy in spite of a sign in the window. Try rolling into Starbucks with sandy feet.

Shorelines

It seems impossible not to obsess on real estate living in San Diego. You scrap for every over-priced square foot. Neighbors’ walls are so close that with a good stretch from your bedroom window, it’s possible to flush their toilets. You learn to live with less here, and to pay a lot more for it. What you give up in back yards and privacy you recoup in sunshine.

We rent a small house less than a mile from the beach. Neither of my kids enjoys the year-round chilly surf yet. My daughter Maggie prefers to gather lemons and oranges from trees in our backyard in order to sell fifty-cent cupfuls of freshly-squeezed on the sidewalk. Maureen, my wife, makes killer guacamole from our two avocado trees. Five year-old Tom cares for none of it; he wants only endless games of tackle football with me in the front yard. He will have no memory of diving into snow banks for Nerf touchdowns, but I have no memories of citrus trees, so perhaps it’s a wash. Snow is exotic to my children; they shiver in a stiff breeze. They’ve only lived in California and Andalucía. Sunshine and waves seem their birthright. Maureen grew up in Michigan but can’t imagine living in the cold anymore. Apparently only I worry about the limitations of paradise.

Estuaries

The San Diego River forms the northern limit of OB and Pt. Loma. Homeless people shelter beneath the many bridges which cross the river into Mission Bay and Mission Beach. I imagine San Diego a good place to live if you’re homeless, but this logic falls into a No Bad Days way of thinking. It’s simplistic and naïve. The complexity of their problems eludes me, but I admit to being more likely to part with a buck or two on a rare rainy day. Ocean Beach has always been considered ‘homeless-friendly.’ This is a good thing. Not every community out here is.

The San Diego River, though reduced to a mere shadow of its former self, still cuts through the heart of the eighth largest city in America. It offers an urban sanctuary to thousands of birds and a colony of wild cats. Scores of the birds feed in a tidal estuary: osprey, pelicans, egrets, terns and the majestic Great Blue Heron nibble in sandy bottoms of tide-pushed sloughs. The river, so woefully damaged by a century’s worth of human diversion and manipulation, steadfastly refuses to die, and in a final, defiant act, it feeds and protects the marginalized: cats, fowl, and humans without homes.

Undertow

Before moving here, I’d heard that California was a car culture. I used to think this meant that Californians were more ‘into’ their cars than other places—bikinied blondes soaping up low riders, GTO’s and little deuce coups. What it means, in practical terms, is that we spend more time in our cars than we should. San Diego lacks effective rail systems, and the county sprawls. Our communities are scattered like distant organs and connected by a vascular system of freeways—massive ten lane arteries that wreak havoc on the greater body and soul when they clog. I’ve learned to stash books in my car, in case all progress stops. Three hour traffic jams are rare, but have happened here.

If our freeways are the vascular system, then San Diego’s skeleton is the military. Within a ten-mile radius of my house, there are seven separate commands. Navy-trained dolphins practice detecting explosives on the bottom of ships. SEALs train on the golden beaches of Coronado Island. Fighter jets rumble in the sky, launched from the airfields of Miramar and North Island. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers, massive cities unto themselves, moor quietly along the harbor when not deployed. Guided missile cruisers, destroyers, frigates, submarines and shallow draft amphibious assault ships sail in and out of the bay. Distant booms from howitzers at Camp Pendleton, some forty miles north of the city, sometimes rumble the earth.

Maureen has been on active duty for almost fourteen years, though so far she’s managed to avoid deploying to a combat zone. We are hoping to keep that streak going.

Marine Corps Recruit Depot

The closest base to me is the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. There, young recruits endure thirteen weeks of dehumanizing boot-camp designed to press the men for the horror of war. (Female recruits train only in South Carolina.) At the end of their training, I see these newly minted PFC’s, red and gold chevrons blazing on their olive sleeves, proudly linked arm-in-arm with mothers and girlfriends. Their ramrod straight postures and starched uniforms betray no weaknesses as they enjoy a lull between the hell of training and the much greater hell of combat.

Sometimes, I see these Marines again, at the military hospital where my wife works as a physician. Many of these young men come home battered, dismembered, limbs gone, bodies scarred and burned. One of the great crimes of these recent wars was the decision to shield the public from the casualties. An unspeakable horror hits me each time I see these “Wounded Warriors,” often waiting in line with my daughter at the base McDonald’s, trying to explain to her why some young kid has high-tech prosthetic devices in place of legs, his hair still shaved high and tight.

Desperados Under the Eaves

I do wonder what life would be like without bad days? That bumper sticker ineloquently fumbles toward a utopia, but it also masks a sunshine-induced, willful ignorance. No Bad Days epitomizes a beach culture of paradise and boat drinks, but hides a switching-off of the heart, a refusal to empathize with people who might, in fact, be having bad days. It turns a dream into a blind-eyed arrogance and makes paradise seem possible, but only for the elect.

San Diego is a beautiful place. My wife and I want to raise our children here, but I don’t want them to be fooled into mistaking the dream for reality. What will ultimately make San Diego home for me? I don’t know for sure, but it will certainly include good days and bad ones.

It rained last night and has been showering this morning. San Diego is beautiful when it rains, as rare as those days are. The beaches clear out. You can find yourself almost entirely alone on Sunset Cliffs or down along the San Diego River. The city seems to slow a little when the sun takes a break, and I prefer it that way.

—Richard Farrell

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Rich Farrell and family

Richard Farrell is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group of students who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work, including fiction, memoir, essays, interviews and book reviews, has appeared in Hunger Mountain, New Plains Review, upstreet, Descant, and Numéro Cinq. He teaches at Words Alive and the River Pretty Writers Retreat in the Ozarks. He lives in San Diego.

What It’s Like Living Here — Anna Maria Johnson and Steven David Johnson in Cootes Store, Virginia

Feb 022011

photo by Eliza Grace Johnson

Here’s a gorgeous “What it’s like living here” essay from NC contributor Anna Maria Johnson and her husband, the photographer Steven David Johnson. Anna Maria Johnson is a writer, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA student, and a lovely artist in her own right. She was a co-winner of the NC Rondeau Writing Contest last year, and who can ever forget her amazing Novel-in-a-Box Contest entry? This essay is Anna Maria’s first post on Numéro Cinq as an official Contributor—we hope for many more like it. And it’s also the first time we’ve had a husband and wife team work together. It’s a wonderful addition to the growing Numéro Cinq “What it’s like living here” series.

What It’s Like Living Here–Cootes Store, Virginia

Text by Anna Maria Johnson, photos by Steven David Johnson

(Author’s Note: The locals pronounce this place “Cootes’s Store,” though the green road sign omits the possessive.)

At home on the Shenandoah River, North Fork

Home. What’s it mean? By age twenty-one, I’d lived in twenty-one places and thought home was a place I’d never find.

John Denver’s song “Country Roads” refers to western Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River. This northwest corner of Virginia is where I now live, along the river’s North Fork, which runs parallel to Route 259, my road. When I travel alone, I sing the old folksong, “O Shenandoah,” and ache to be home.

Home, for me, is family: a husband and two daughters. But increasingly, “home” is becoming a specific 2.3-acre plot of land with dilapidated sheds, gardens, woods, meadow, and a white farmhouse with a front porch.

Our farmhouse. Its wood plank bedroom ceilings, steep stairs, foot-thick walls, and hand-made plank doors with old-fashioned latches hint at the log cabin our house used to be—and still is, beneath its vinyl-sided exterior and dry-walled interior. The bathroom, an aging plumber told us, was installed only in the late 1960s or 70s; he remembers doing it. The back kitchen was probably added then.

My husband, Steven, wanders down to the river nearly every day to photograph his friends—mink, herons, deer, cattle, water snakes, starlings, swallows, kingfisher, and once, three otters.

What it’s like living here — from Sarah Seltzer in New York City

Jan 272011

Sarah Seltzer is a New Yorker, a Vermont College of Fine Arts student (and a dg Workshop Survivor) and a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to numerous online news sites including Huffington Post and Daily Beast. She’s also a member of the growing NC community—see her entry, “A Short Craft Lecture,” in the first ever NC Erasure Contest.

What it’s like living here

By Sarah Seltzer in New York City

Broadway

You sit in a brick-oven pizza place on that brief spit of Broadway where the subway roars up onto a rickety rail, then back beneath the earth. It’s November, and damp. For three years, you have been living a happy, cramped existence in an apartment around the corner. You and your husband have heard the 1 train roll by at intervals each day like receding and advancing ocean waves.

But, with help from friends, you have spent the day moving books from this apartment in Morningside Heights to an airier one below it in Harlem, and you’re dirty and exhausted, ready for the ordeal to end. You yawn over your food, spinning dreams about your new home and speaking of nothing., Halfway through the meal, you notice, four tables ahead, forgotten family friends who have known you since you were two months old and their daughter a month further into the world. Their presence makes you think of the things that have faded from your life.

This happens often in the city. Now you smile and stop at their table, and launch into a game whose parameters you know: grad school plans and publications, marriages and quips about law firms. Inevitably, you will report on the encounter to your friends in the bodega where they’ve been huddled, waiting. You will muse about friendship and why it is lost, when it can be salvaged. You’ll recall the vivid aliveness of a relationship that has become a ghost: lying on a carpet listening to the Beatles or before that, playing pirates in that gnarled tree in Central Park, or after that, smoking a joint in a playground near Stuyvesant town.

Small town

Your world feels cramped, the past everywhere, woven into a thick web. You are living in the titular town in a 19th-century British novel. He went to high school with her; his summer job was at her dad’s company; her best friend from Hebrew school was his roommate.

You realize at these moments that you have settled less than two miles from where you grew up, that you haven’t even made it across the bridge to another borough, that you are tightly bound to this span of Upper Manhattan by more than geography–by culture, by comfort, by family, by inertia. You see time change the face of avenues with which you are as intimate as a country girl is with ridges and rivers. You bore people by telling them what used to be here; crack vials in the playgrounds, delis and pizza places as nondescript as they were delicious, blight and character.

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What it’s like living here — from Lynne Quarmby in West Vancouver, British Columbia

Jan 242011

Lynne Quarmby is a gene biologist who runs a research lab at Simon Fraser University and lives in West Vancouver; she’s also a painter (see five water colours earlier posted on NC), a musician and a big-time outdoorswoman. DG briefly attended Simon Fraser in the summer of 1969 as a graduate student in philosophy. That summer he won the British Columbia 5,000m track championship, climbed the Lions (the twin snowy peaks you can see in the distance from downtown Vancouver), and went to San Francisco and hung out on Haight and Ashberry (where nothing much happened). Lynne’s “What it’s like living here” essay reminds him of the past (although it was summer and it didn’t rain much, and he lived on campus on top of Burnaby Mountain and didn’t have to commute). Vancouver really is one of the most gorgeous cities in the world, with English Bay out in front and the beaches and the ships and the great bridges and the snowy mountains just behind.

Rain

The one thing everyone seems to know about Vancouver is that it rains. It’s true. It is raining now, as I look from my 4^th floor apartment in West Vancouver across English Bay to Kitsilano. The glow of streetlights at 11 am this January 7 morning emphasizes the daytime darkness and feeds the sense that the soft rain will continue unrelenting for weeks to come, socked-in, drizzling, misty, foggy, dark and wet. When days are this dark melancholy seeps in – you’ve been forgetting to dose with vitamin D to compensate for the lack of sunlight (and thinking too much about the lack of research funding). But Vancouver is a coy place. It relents, the clouds thin and lift and you thrill to the spectrum of grays – oyster, pearly, mousy, leaden, silver. It’s 3 pm and the continuously changing light makes it difficult to stay focused on the lecture that needs to be written. I relent and head out for a walk, knowing that I will be up late working.

Balcony in the sun

The Sun

2 PM Saturday, January 8. I sit outside, soaking up sunshine. The surprise arrival of this sunny day demands attention. The sun shines directly onto my building, and because the heat is absorbed by and radiates from the concrete building, my balcony is warm. I’ve eaten lunch outside in my shirtsleeves, absorbing the warmth, absorbed by the view of sky & sea. I watch the freighters at anchor as they swing with the flow of the tide. One steams into port for its turn at the docks. The seagulls cry. A lone kayaker paddles up the coast. I am watching through a curtain of rain. At this moment I am the pot of gold at the end of someone’s rainbow. I look across the bay to the city – whose rainbow? I close my eyes and focus on the warmth of the winter sun. I breathe deeply and slowly, savoring the air – cleaner than we deserve, refreshed daily by the mountains and the sea breezes. It is all too much, and soon it will be gone again. How long can I sit here absorbing paradise? About 30 minutes. If you were here perhaps we’d sit for a while longer.

The Lions from Sky Train

The Forests and the Mountains and the Sea

It’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve driven the 15 minutes up the mountain directly behind my apartment. The open area around the parking lot is a zoo. Families with sleds, tubes, dogs, and kids running wild – everyone is manic with the sunshine. We all act as though the sun never shines in the winter, that this is remarkable, spectacular, something to write home about. And it is, even though it isn’t really all that unusual. It is my first ski of the winter and I feel awkward as I set out cross-country into the forest. Within 500 meters I find a deep quiet and feel the peace. I try to ski high enough for a view across the ocean as we roll away from the sun, but I am too slow.

Cypress Mountain

The Commute

West Vancouver is a small town; a city distinct from Vancouver. Here I walk the seawall to wherever I need to go – yesterday 0.5 Km west to the village of Dundarave where I picked up a roll of quarters for the laundry. Frequently I see seals, but on this walk I saw a sea otter. Later I took my backpack and walked east 1 Km to the village of Ambleside to buy groceries from Mitra’s, a Persian market. There was a heron fishing in the intertidal. There are usually bright scooters, occasionally bald eagles, and always seagulls. Last week I watched a seagull swallow a starfish. Perhaps next weekend I will walk a little further to the sailing club to ask about kayak rentals. During the week I leave this idyllic community and commute to Simon Fraser University where I am a professor of Cell Biology.

Although it takes twice as long as driving, I commute by public transit. I take a bus over the Lion’s Gate Bridge, through Stanley Park into the city (by which we mean downtown Vancouver) where I disembark to a chorus of “thank you” “thanks” “have a good day” – riders here acknowledge the driver as they exit the bus. Buses that pass you by because they are out of service or full announce “Sorry” on their destination screens. From downtown I take the sky train out of the city. Twenty-five years after Expo ’86, riding the sky train still feels futuristic. It is a clear day and Mt Baker, a large (inactive?) volcano about 100 Km southeast in Washington State, hangs in the sky like a rock & ice metaphor for our big brother to the south – always there even when we don’t see it. Out the north window, although small & distant the snow capped coastal range captures my attention. The people-watching is fabulous, but the listening isn’t. It helps to have a great set of headphones – every commute is a movie and I get to choose the sound track.

Bookclub Dessert

Lemon meringue pie
Bus with standing room only
Serve “transit rider parfait”

Lion’s Gate Bridge and Stanley Park from the seawall in front of my apartment

The University on Top of Burnaby Mountain

Tuesday January 11. This morning I delivered a 2-hour lecture to ~70 Molecular Biology & Biochemistry majors on how cilia – those tiny rod-like structures that protrude from the surface of almost every cell in your body – function as cellular antennae. In particular, I was reviewing for the students some recently published data that (almost) reveals how urine flow through the collecting ducts of the kidney causes cilia to bend and send signals to keep the cells small. When this flow-induced signalling pathway is defective, as it is in patients with Polycystic Kidney Disease, the control of cell size and division is disrupted and ducts bellow into cysts. We work through the evidence to decide whether there is causality behind an intriguing correlation.

After lecture I stop by my lab. We are feeling a little lowly these days because last week we learned that my application for the renewal of the federal grant that funds our research was not successful. The application scored in the “excellent” category but research dollars are short. The reviewers raved about the proposal, but they want more preliminary data to demonstrate that our ideas are on the right track. I’ve had to give notice to three people. Today I have only 30 minutes to spend in the lab because I am on the examining committee for a thesis defense this afternoon. When I get to the lab I find everyone waiting expectantly. There is excitement because Laura has obtained a new result.

Laura loading gel

Laura is a self-confident third year graduate student who isn’t yet sure whether a life in science is worth the sacrifices. She prepares a slide for me and we go to the microscope. She doesn’t tell me which sample is the control but the result is so clear that it is obvious. All through the thesis defense I jot notes. This new data is a big boost for the renewal application and I am trying to decide how it affects where to put our efforts over the next six weeks. It is important to only do experiments that can give us informative results before the application is due; it is also important to do the key experiments. Which key experiments are most likely to work and to work quickly?

Wednesday, January 12. SFU gets a snow day while the rest of the city goes to work. More commonly we go to work like everyone else and then get stranded on the mountain when the roads close. I make sure I have snow boots with me so I can walk the 45 min down the trail into the rainy lowlands and catch a bus home.

The Future

Friday, January 14 the rain is back in spades. In the evening I decide to go for a swim – in the summer that would mean the ocean, but tonight I pull up the hood on my raincoat and head across the road to the Aquatic Centre. It feels good to be in the bright light, listening to families splashing in the play area next to where I swim lengths. As I leave the Aquatic Centre, Brenda is arriving. A fellow resident of Surfside Towers, Brenda is in her 50’s, or maybe 40’s – it’s difficult to tell. She is about 5’2” and has puffy features with small squinty eyes. Brenda speaks in a mumbling nasal voice, but her manner is caring and gentle. I learn that she swims every Friday night. She tells me about the sauna and the steam room – I’d missed those. After running home through the rain, I arrive at our building at the same time as Steve who is returning from an event at the Legion. He is a tall man in his 70’s with a dignified carriage and a gracious manner. Tonight he is in uniform with medals on his chest. At first Steve doesn’t recognize me (we’d met at the Christmas party). Then he sees that I’ve been swimming. He tells me that Brenda swims every Friday night. On our way up in the elevator he pushes “G.” It is nice, he explains, for people coming home in the evening to have the elevator waiting.

Shades of gray from my balcony

Tomorrow I will take the ferry to visit friends on Bowen Island. I’ll break my mostly vegetarian routine to share a meal of wild venison. We’ll talk of recent shows we’ve seen in the city – whenever Bela Fleck or Chick Corea comes to town we’ll all be there. We may try out the new Sauna they’ve built of driftwood.

—Lynne Quarmby

What It’s Like Living Here — Gwen Mullins in Chattanooga

Jan 172011

Here’s Gwen Mullins writing about life in Chattanooga (where once I spent a dramatic couple of hours wandering along Missionary Ridge and imagining the amazing battle that took place there–I’d just driven up from Americus and the Andersonville prison camp: part of my Civil War pilgrimage). Gwen is a former student of mine, just graduated at the winter residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s a fiction writer, but with this graceful essay and her recent contribution to NC on story plot, you can see she as dab hand at nonfiction as well, a woman of letters.

—

Your whole life

You have lived your whole life here. Your life entire spent within thirty (fewer, really) miles of country along the kissing corners of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama. The Tri-State, they call it here. Or Tri-County, for the hospital.

You have traveled a little, but only a little. Some places stand out as bright, clear spots outlined in black in your place memories: San Francisco, Miami, Venice, New York City, New Orleans, Anchorage. Places that seemed exotic but are not. You long to visit other places: Nantucket, Kyrgyzstan, Milan, Edmonton, Indianapolis, Cupertino. You tell yourself you can read about them and in reading, you will be there.

Scenic City

This place, the Tennessee Valley, is overwhelmingly green. Neither bright nor dark, but only green. Green for long stretches of spring, summer, and into autumn. Until recently, even the winters were green. And the rivers run brownly green through the green hills you call mountains.
See Rock City! You’ve seen the signs. This advertising genius of Garnet Carter and Clark Byers resulted in 900 painted barn roofs by the 1950s. You‘ve seen Rock City. Better sights come from the bridges, from Raccoon Mountain (the mountain with TVA generators jammed deep in its belly), from all the forest parks. They call Chattanooga the Scenic City because it is. You avoid Ruby Falls, the Incline Railway, Rock City, the Delta Queen riverboat, Point Park – anything that charges admission. You love Chickamauga Battlefield, Cloudland Canyon, Missionary Ridge, your own backyard and front lawn.You can buy See Rock City!-barn-shaped birdhouses painted in red and black in the souvenir shops across from the Choo-Choo. Yes, there really is a Choo-Choo, only now it’s a Holiday Inn. You remember how in Italy they all seemed to know the Glenn Miller song, how they would begin, “Track Twenty Ni-ine” in their lovely accented English. You wonder at the power of song, of words that transport, that tie the world together.

The old freight depot houses your husband’s office. It is LEED certified, green in the new sense. Yesterday he turned in his notice, so you suppose it’s not his office anymore. You are proud that your city has the first LEED-certified movie theatre, The Majestic. This is part of the downtown revitalization, the focus on the new green. You agree when some people call it gentrification, but you love the new restaurants.
You avoid eye contact with the Jamaican man with the dreadlocks and tangled gray beard who sometimes sleeps in the engine building where the electric buses now spend the night. He sells perfumes and bent metal figurines, and if you ask, other things.

You tell visitors that the Walnut Street Bridge is the longest pedestrian-only bridge in the United States. You are pretty sure this is true. On this bridge families stroll, cyclists bike, athletes run, photographers frame shots, but no vagrants dwell. From here you can see the other bridges, the Tennessee River, the aquarium, the art museum. You love the way the wind whips your hair on this bridge, how it’s always a little cooler here than the rest of the town.

You know, as does everyone, the best fried chicken is on MLK across from the university at a joint called “Champy’s.” You love that the city schools and churches hold fish fries under canopies in parking lots every Saturday in summer to raise money for choir trips and cheerleaders’ uniforms. Down the street a ways from Champy’s is a bleak building with a red-lettered sign that says, “Memo’s” and underneath that, “Chopped Wieners, Pit Bar-B-Q.” This sign has always amused you, but this is not a part of town where you stop.

Heritage

You flinch and are quick to defend when others who do not wish to lay claim to this land call it backward, or racist, or ignorant, or poor. And then a waitress asks you who your infant daughter’s father is even while she sits between you and your husband. She asks because your daughter’s skin is more mocha than cream.

And then you stop at the gas station in Marion County next to Big Daddy’s Fireworks Warehouse, and you note the Confederate flags for sale, the barefoot two-year-old wearing a heavy diaper and chugging steadily from a clear bottle of greenish soda while his young mother buys four dollars in lottery tickets and three dollars of gas.

You walk among the azaleas on the Cumberland Trail on Signal Mountain (which is not really a mountain, but a big hill and a town who whose inhabitants named it Mountain) and remember how your small, bent grandmother, the one you called “Nanny,” put her thumbprint in the middle of each biscuit so it would rise. You try not to remember the words she used to describe her new neighbors when they moved in across the street. You think instead of how she would hold your hand and point at the hang gliders drifting on the currents and you cried out for the joy of flight. You did not know the story of Icarus then, and your grandmother never did.

You smirk that school children (except perhaps those from Sand Mountain just across the Alabama state line) are no longer required to go to the moving diorama called the “Confederama” as a “history” field trip. They have re-named the attraction but are fooling no one. You hear they are shutting down due to tax issues and you are glad.

And sometimes you walk through the cemetery next to the university. Half of the cemetery is Jewish, the other half Confederate. Both are peaceful, both are green.

This is just what you do

You surround yourself with funny, smart people who eat sushi (because that’s a sign of progressiveness here) and start to think that this world used to be divided by color but now it is all just green, and beautiful, and it is a world where you are happy to bring up your children.

You smile, greet, and nod at strangers, and they smile back. You make gravy with the pan drippings from pork sausage blended with flour, salt, and milk. And just a little black pepper. You press your thumb in the center of biscuits so they will rise properly. You pull to the side of the road for funeral processions and wait until they pass. This is just what you do here.

Your spouse who grew up in Newark tells you other places are not so green or so welcoming. You stop thinking how much you want to leave this place, so you buy a bigger house and its associated mortgage. You plan to travel, you even take some of the trips you have planned. You think about going to one of the eleven Protestant churches within two miles of your home. You admire the view from your veranda.

And the cost of living is low. You know this because your New York and Miami relatives (your husband’s relatives, actually, since your family all lives here) have told you how much their tiny condominiums cost and marvel at your square footage. You are pleased and embarrassed, as if you chose to live here for the expense savings.

Your whole life, so far

You remember the progressiveness is a veneer, and you accept that the men (except for your husband, whom you always remember is not from around here) wait for you to exit the elevator first because you have a uterus. You are, after all, the boss of many of these men, and that is, for here, progressive enough.

You encourage your daughter to consider universities in Chicago or Ithaca. You try not to analyze the feeling that settles on you when she applies to schools in Nashville. Are you disappointed? Are you relieved? You remind yourself that your life is not hers, that her life will not be yours. She will leave this place, or maybe you will.

You reprimand your son for talking like a redneck, or, when the mood strikes him, like a gangster. You do not examine what you mean by terms like “redneck” and “gangster.”

You try not to flinch when your short stories are compared to Flannery O’Connor’s not because they are good, but rather because they are occasionally southern and you are female. You do not point out the irreverence inherent in them. Flannery was, above all, a godly woman.

You finally admit your deep weakness for sad, old country ballads, and you think of writing one before realizing you already are. You see the hills you call mountains everywhere you go, hemming you in, holding you up. You cannot escape the sound of the train’s whistle. You are bathed in green.

— Gwen Mullins

What It’s Like Living Here — Michelle Berry in Peterborough, Ontario

Jan 152011

I’ve known Michelle Berry for years, in a way. I’ve only actually met her once in person. But I put an hilarious Michelle Berry story in Best Canadian Stories in the days when I still edited that annual anthology, and I have been a fan of her work since. She’s energetic, comic and prolific, with a list of books as long as your arm. A new novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life and a new story collection I Still Don’t Even Know You were both just published last year. Michelle lives in Peterborough, Ontario, where I spent a couple of years in the Triassic (eons ago). I worked on the local newspaper, the Examiner, first as a general reporter, then as sports editor (this is, of course, why I am indisputably qualified to edit Numéro Cinq). I had my first short story published in the venerable Canadian literary magazine The Tamarack Review while I was working in Peterborough. A murder I covered as a reporter (and many of the settings) made it into my first novel Precious (the character Blythe Aschroft is very, very loosely based on moi). So it’s a special pleasure in all ways to offer Michelle’s “What it’s like living here” piece. I remember this place fondly. I can’t count the number of times I’d be working late in the newsroom, and a group of us would head out to watch the lift lock (okay, maybe the town wasn’t that exciting in those days) in the moonlight with a couple of beers and a burger.

What’s it like living here….

Good question.

Where is here?

In Canada? Specifically in Peterborough, in Ontario? In my squished, laughably-compact home office? Or in my head? I live in all of these places. The inside of my head is often stormier than Peterborough — although not so much in the summer. And, although my mind should be as vast, if not vaster, than Canada, it often feels as full of things-needing-completion as my cork-board, calendar-strewn office. My mother says that keeping up with my schedule (two really active kids, writing-in-process) is like trying to catch a train. From my perspective, it sometimes feels more like getting hit by a train.

Outside my second-floor office window there is a tree. A gorgeous, immense, old tree. I’m not sure what kind it is—oak? yes, an oak—and it doesn’t really matter because it’s a magical thing. Over 200 years old, this tree takes four adults to wrap our arms around its trunk. Because it has insignificant leaves, this tree isn’t as beautiful in summer as it is in the winter when it’s bare and stark against a cold sky. It sometimes looks like the tree from Poltergeist, the tree that sucked the little boy into the gory insides, the one that bashed through his window in the storm. It’s an incredibly inspiring and dramatic tree. A perfect view across from which to write.

Peterborough is a town about 2 hours North East of Toronto. Population 78,000 or so (probably more since we got a Costco. A chicken or egg thing—Costco brings people or people bring Costco? I don’t know. I’m not a member. They won’t even let me in the front door.). So, let’s say population 80,000. A sleepy town? Perhaps. But you should see our new Mall, Lansdowne Place. It’s a sight. Now we only have to drive forty minutes down highway 115 to Oshawa for The Bay. We’ve got every other store you’d want right here.

Peterborough is not only about the shopping. It’s about the lift locks. And the summer. Peterborough County is cottage country. All the rich Toronto folk drive through on the way to cottages that are so big they need cleaning staff. Boats going through the locks are even bigger than the cottages.

liftlockswinter3

I’m not jealous or anything. Honestly.

Who needs to clean two houses?

I live near the downtown. Near enough so I can walk when I go out for dinner. Which I rarely do. I’m not sure why. Laziness, I guess. And lack of money. And the wine is cheaper in my kitchen. I live in an area called The Old West End which is made up of mostly young families in big, beautiful, old houses. I have two porches in the front of my house — one off my second floor office, one off the living room. I sit on these porches in three seasons as much as I can. I watch the kids play on the street, or the people walking their dogs. I read. Or just stare. At the tree, mostly. Sometimes I feel as if I’m in a 1950’s sitcom – Leave it To Beaver – the neighbours all calling back and forth across the street, coming over clutching snacks and wine, or coffee, joining me on my porch. It’s idyllic. Small townish. And makes me nervous. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. How is it possible that my eleven year old can play flashlight tag in the hot summer evenings until way past dark, running back and forth between people’s back yards (with their permission even!), or my 14 year old can hop the back fence to her friend’s house still wearing her pj’s late on a Saturday morning. Isn’t this 2011? It feels a lot like my late 1970’s childhood in Victoria, B.C.. My mother sits on my front porch and comments through the laughter of a street full of hockey players or basketball players, that it feels like her childhood too.

We live a forty minute drive from the lot where we park our car, get into our Boston Whaler, and boat five minutes to our small cottage on an island on Upper Stoney Lake. If we’ve gone up for the weekend and it starts to rain, we head home. No need to be slaves to the weather. We watch the sun set from our bedroom window, hear the deer snorting in the bushes, listen (of course – this is Canada) to the loons’ cry, the sound of speed boats drifts on the wind on the lower side of the lake.

In the winter we build an ice rink in our back yard. Kids come over to skate, impromptu hockey games start up and end and start up again. Twinkle lights dot the fence, a spot-light for night skating, a few Christmas lights on the clothesline. My seventy-year young parents skated on Christmas morning this year, my mom used a hockey stick as support to propel her along. I can watch the rink from my kitchen, stirring a sauce, boiling noodles, sipping wine. I can see the dog jumping onto the ice, sliding, the kids shouting at him to get off, laughing when he skids into the boards.

This city is full of paths. Old railway tracks turned into walking trails. Jackson Park and the Rotary Trail, paths that take you great distances through forests and beside rivers and lakes and canals, up past the Trent University. I’ve seen huge snapping turtles on the paths. There are bear warnings every so often. Mostly there are a motley series of dogs – big ones, little ones, ones wearing coats or boots. Once I saw a dog in sunglasses. And another time I saw someone walking a ferret on a leash. You can X-country ski on these paths. You can bike all the way to Lakefield where you can fill up on ice cream at Hamblin’s and then turn around and bike back.

Peterborough’s downtown core is typical of southern Ontario towns – two one-way streets, George and Water. Rows of stores, some out of business, boarded up, others thriving. We have a clock tower, a movie theatre, an amazing jewelry store and a few really great coffee places. Among other things, of course. Like restaurants: Japanese, Cajun, Belgian, Korean, Mexican.

A Santa Claus parade winds its way down George Street every year and you can show up right when it starts and still get a good spot to see everything. There are floats and dogs and clowns and the occasional truck which, for no reason at all, is part of the parade. A local motorcycle shop has a wild float that blasts music and lets off huge bursts of smoke and noise. One year a group of men danced down the street wearing purple and we still don’t know who or what they represented.

The thing about this city is the people. We aren’t stuck in traffic all the time, our houses are fairly inexpensive, there are spaces in the local sports leagues and the piano teacher has free days in her schedule. So we’re generally a happy folk. People have parties and get-togethers and go for walks and travel together. One family rents the local arena for a holiday skate every year and the whole neighbourhood shows up. Stress is here, of course, but it is comparably less than, say, Toronto where I lived for seventeen years. I haven’t had a conversation about directions, about how to easily avoid traffic and get from one place to the other, since I’ve moved to Peterborough. That’s not saying it isn’t a bitch to get around in the summer. The cottagers move their traffic jams here along with their swimsuits. But my husband likes to tell his Toronto-family that his commute to work takes only four minutes every day, no matter what.

I know what is going to happen, though. This happened to my parents. My kids will move. No sane high school graduate would want to stay in Peterborough. My children will move to Toronto or Ottawa or Montreal. They will go off to school, maybe start families, elsewhere. I’ll probably follow them. My parents followed me. It took them twenty years and I had to move away from Toronto before they would do it, but eventually they came. What’s interesting about this place, however, is that these kids seem to come back after they’ve started their own families. We have many friends who grew up in Peterborough, who moved away, but then came back to raise their children the way they were raised. To spend winter weekends at Devil’s Elbow ski hill, racing, or summers at the cottage. To spend Fall and Spring biking the paths.

Every time I sit on my front porch it’s inevitable that cars will drive by the big tree and then stop, back up. People will get out of their cars to stare at it. They walk up to it. Touch it. Wrap their arms around it. They take pictures. My neighbour jokes about putting a little money-bin on a post by the tree with a sign that says, “Save the Tree.” He wants to see how much money he can collect. But it makes us all proud to watch the cars slow down, to watch these people stare in awe at this tree. Because it’s so old. Because it’s steady and strong. Because it weathers all weather. And no matter how busy my mind is, this tree always reminds me to stop for a minute to admire it.

I’ve been told that this tree will last another hundred years.

Which is good. Because when it falls, it’ll hit our house.

—Michelle Berry

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What It’s Like Living Here — Jeanie Chung in Chicago

Jan 132011

Jeanie Chung is a Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate and one of dg’s former students. She was a dream of a student and a dog lover, so she and dg had things to talk about besides writing (see current dog in group photo at bottom of essay). Jeanie’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in upstreet, Madison Review, Stymie and elsewhere. Her author interviews have been published in Writer’s Chronicle and Rain Taxi online; her interview with Aleksandar Hemon will be out in Writer’s Chronicle this spring. She used to be a sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Now she is working on a novel-in-stories based on her experiences covering high school and college basketball. See also her essay in Drunken Boat.

What It’s Like Living Here

from Jeanie Chung in Chicago

Part 1: The second city

Welcome to Chicago. We’re so happy you’ll be staying for a while. You see, so many people view us as nothing more than an airport, a place to change planes between coasts. We used to have the nation’s busiest airport, though now it’s No. 2.

Yes, it seems we’re always No. 2. It’s even our nickname: the Second City. We don’t mind. Second is just fine for us, thank you. In fact, we prefer it. We wear our runner-up status like a sensible winter coat. Sure, it’s puffy and ugly, but screw you: we’re warm. You can see our second-city pride in our malapropism-spouting mayor, our crystalline lake — filtered by invasive zebra mussels! — that coastal visitors take pains to point out is lovely, but does not smell like the ocean or have tides like the ocean, but they guess that’s OK because, my goodness, who would have thought that such an interesting, vibrant city could exist in the Midwest, of all places? Our embrace — well, the embrace of some us — of a baseball team whose unofficial motto is a cheerful, “Wait ’til next year!” We could be the capitol of Flyover Country, but really, that title should go to a city in Iowa or Nebraska. We’re too big to be properly insignificant.

What it’s like living here — from Renee Giovarelli in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Dec 292010

Here’s a lovely, exotic What it’s like living here essay from Renee Giovarelli who graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts last summer. Renee travels the world for an NGO involved in reforming land and property rights. But she also writes urgent, passionate essays about the places she visits. Her essay “The Bad Malaria Shot,” which she presented at her graduate reading in the summer, was a finalist for the Wasafiri 2010 New Writing Prize.

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The Apartment

I don’t notice what it’s like living here when I’m here. I sit down to write about place, and I only recall conversations.

I’m at a small wooden blue built-in table in someone else’s apartment kitchen. The kitchen is small but bright, full of the high-desert sun. Sitting here, writing, with no kids, no husband, no groceries to buy, bills to pay, dogs to feed and walk, bird cages to clean, I am a different person. I will only live in this apartment for three weeks. But while I’m here, I will work, I will write, and I will spend time with friends. I will not juggle anything else—only those three things.

When I come to Bishkek to work, I live in someone else’s apartment—never the same apartment, it depends on who, in the network of friends and relatives of my co-workers, needs the money. This time I’m on the fifth floor of a Soviet-style building, which could be any building in the city—no elevators, uneven stairs, the smell of cooking mutton in the stairwell.

For these three weeks, the owner and her family have moved in with a relative in the same complex–one building over. There are three buildings, all five stories high, all facing a common yard. The yard is dirt with a swing-set and a few benches.

“It’s not going to be that clean,” Zina says. “They’re Kyrgyz.”

Zina’s Kyrgyz but she calls herself a marginal. She blames the uncleanliness on the Kyrgyz’ nomadic ways. Zina is my interpreter and friend. She found this apartment for me. The apartment belongs to someone she knows, but the connection is never made clear. I will pay forty dollars a night to stay here, and after three weeks, the owner will have enough money to take care of her large extended family for months. The owner will owe Zina a favor—the Kyrgyz accounting system Zina calls it.

What it’s like living here — from Robin Oliveira on Cougar Mountain, just outside Seattle

Dec 162010

Here’s a lovely “What it’s like living here” piece from Robin Oliveira, former dg student, Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA graduate, winner of the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and author of the novel My Name is Mary Sutter.

For a complete list of “What it’s like living here” texts, click here.

What it’s like living here

By Robin Oliveira on Cougar Mountain, just outside Seattle

You live on Cougar Mountain, the first mountain on the right as you leave Seattle. The children—your reason for moving to the mountain—have moved out, and yet you cling to the house in which you raised them, unable to let go of the memories. Cougar Mountain hovers between wilderness and civilization. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night to yapping coyotes surrounding and terrifying some poor mammal they then eat. Before they die, the animals cry, a sound so human you leap from your bed and peer out the window. Black bears sprawl on the hillside behind your house, watching passing cars. Startled deer wander in the former meadows houses now occupy. They seem puzzled, these animals, incapable of altering their patterns in the face of encroachment. One day, on a bike ride, you gut out the steep climb from Puget Sound to the top of Magnolia, a hill long ago urbanized. A cougar has been spotted in the park, where for days, the fields of tawny grass camouflage him. You wonder what ancient memory has led him back into the city. You are sad when the park rangers capture the animal. Where do they take it? You don’t know. Maybe to your mountain, where the historical society exhibits pictures of the old days, when men hunted cougar for sport, then hung them upside down and posed beside them. Another day, flames shoot above the red cedar and Douglas fir behind your house. You turn on all the hoses and water the roof while your husband and neighbor attempt to douse the advancing fire. The flames lick thirty feet high; you breathe smoke; embers fall onto your shoulders and into your hair. Then the fire trucks arrive and unleash a spray of white foam that in two minutes extinguishes the blaze.

Now that the children are gone, you have all day every day to work. In your office, you turn on a sun light to ward off S.A.D., seasonal affective disorder, which struck you down about the middle of the nineties, fifteen years into your interment under the drizzly menace that is the Pacific Northwest sky. With the fake sunlight bathing your retinas, you write. Ten thousand luxes a day are the prescription for your well-being—about thirty minutes worth—but you indulge and keep the light on all day. When the real sun breaks from behind the clouds, you play hooky. Microsoft money has littered the mountain with mansions of ridiculous dimension, but you climb on the paths above them, through preserved corridors of wilderness, where it is still possible to meet a cougar or a lone coyote, so you carry a stick. You climb until you see the fingerling glacial lakes that strike northward and the snow-topped Cascade Mountains, coolly indigo against the eastern sky. To the west, the Olympic Mountains shimmer jagged against the western horizon. If you had a pair of binoculars, you could see the Space Needle floating beneath them.

What It’s Like Living Here — from Adam Arvidson in Minneapolis

Dec 142010

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colors are not. They are psychological spaces; red, for example, presupposing a hearth releasing heat. All colors bring forth specific associative ideas, tangible or psychological, while blue suggests, at most, the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual nature what is most abstract. — Yves Klein

Winter

You meet a girl. A local girl. They all seem to be local girls. You trudge through the snow between her apartment and yours in the middle of the street, because the sidewalks are unreliable—some already cleared by ambitious homeowners with powerful snowblowers, many still buried in the drifts. You don’t think it strange anymore when the first snowfall of the year happens in October. The public radio station devotes a whole hour to discussing the impending event, and listeners call in to ask when the earliest measurable snowfall occurred or what was the most snow the city ever got in October. You learn that talk about the weather isn’t just small talk here; it is a well-researched discussion, full of personal opinion, documented theses, and bold predictions. You surprise yourself by enjoying that October snowfall, the way it hangs in the trees still spangled with the yellow and orange of autumn, the way it lays on pumpkin patches like a blanket on a bed of marbles, the way the people immediately commandeer it for their own fun: the making of six-foot snowmen, the strapping on of actual skis to replace the versions with wheels that the die-hards have been training on for weeks, the dangerous racing on sleds down the park hills toward the not-yet-frozen creek. You marry the girl. You snowshoe with her under the gnarled bur oaks in the park near the house you bought together. She pauses, smiles, her winter coat bulging at the middle with your first-born. You drive past the lake near your house on the way to pick up the new storm windows you ordered, and you are struck by the blackness of the water—a bottomless void in the white world.

Spring

This is called the City of Lakes. Minneapolis. The Lakota word for water; the Greek word for city. There is hardly any private waterfront here. Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, Nokomis, Harriet, Hiawatha, Minnehaha Creek, the Mississippi River: The big houses stare at these waters across public swaths of green through which meander slow parkways, bicycle trails, walking paths, and lush plantings of trees and shrubs, lovingly maintained by the parks department. You move here for a job. You are a young landscape architect and there is a deep legacy here. In 1890 H.W.S. Cleveland laid out these 40 miles of waterside parkways. In 1930 came Theodore Wirth, the parks-builder, who made the nation’s northernmost public rose garden, wild bird sanctuaries, sledding hills, swimming beaches. His son Conrad, who grew up in a house in a park near Lake Calhoun, became director of the National Park Service in the 1960s and went on a building spree himself: visitor centers, trails, scenic overlooks: all you expect from National Parks today. Conrad’s son Ted, who visited his grandfather often in Minneapolis, built his own firm in Montana and designed park systems for the world: Riyadh, Kuwait, Nigeria. You are new here, and an anomaly. Everyone is from here and few leave. You walk the trails around Lake Harriet in 45 degrees in shorts and a tee-shirt.

Summer

You fall for a girl. A blue-eyed Norwegian redhead. A girl with a family who have lived here all their lives and have a cabin up north. The natives all have cabins and have left the urban lakes for other lakes. Minnesota. Land of 10,000 Lakes. 10,000 shards of summer sky reflected on the ground. Lakota for sky-tinted waters. The lakes become grass-tinted as the temperature rises, choked with algae feeding on the phosphorous you pour on your cabin’s lawn. You mow to the shoreline and dump sand for your beach on the reeds and arrowheads growing out in the water. You break the silence once broken only by loon calls with the scream of Jet-Skis. You campaign for a Constitutional amendment to forever protect your right to hunt, fish, and trap. You sue the government to let you shoot wolves. You marry the girl. And the family. You sit in traffic on Sunday afternoon on Highway 169 heading back to the city from Brainerd, your little boy, facing backward, unhappy, his lake-blue eyes squinched tight and soaking wet. Then you sit in traffic on Monday morning and make plans for another weekend at the cabin in just five workdays.

Autumn

The summer construction season is ending and you attend grand openings. The Walker Art Center, lightning rod for anti-NEA conservatives, is featuring Eiko and Koma: a Japanese couple lying naked in a gallery in a bed of feathers – for a month. You sit politely and watch them move at glacial pace, then file out without a word. You wander the halls of this giant steel cube, designed by Swiss architects Herzog and deMeuron to resemble a folded bit of paper cut through paper-snowflake style. You watch the videos of how Yves Klein made his artworks: naked women bathing in International Klein Blue paint, then pressing themselves on canvases leaving the blue outlines of hips, breasts. You stare into his untitled blue squares and are pulled inward. Across town is the Guthrie Theatre, another grand opening, designed by Klein’s countryman Jean Nouvel. It sits above the river, a cobalt hulk at the scale of the hundred-year old General Mills and Pillsbury grain silos that stored the flour that built this city. You walk out on the skybridge, a cantilever stretching out toward the Mississippi River. You think it an unnecessary extravagance but that it offers an incredible view. The river rushes hundreds of feet below you, hemmed in by locks-and-dams and the ruins of original sawmill and flourmill races. To your left the water slides down St. Anthony Falls, once the most quickly eroding waterfall in the world, now a concrete flume. To your right the river curves from view through the gorge, the only place it is limited so tightly. Mississippi. Ojibwe for Great River. The leaves are changing. You are pretty far north, exactly half-way from the equator to the pole, and the summer light at 10 PM will soon give way to winter darkness at 4:30. You flee the city one last time to take the dock out of the water, pick Honeycrisp apples, navigate a corn maze.

Winter

You marry a girl. A girl with eyelashes long enough to catch snowflakes. A girl who stays fashionable in winter: sweater, scarf, long coat, tights, chunky Sorel snowboots. You buy a 1200 square foot bungalow near a lake in the city and you don’t meet your neighbors until spring. You move your car from one side of the street to the other and back, over three successive days, every time it snows, to let the plows clear the streets. Every storm is compared to the “Great Halloween Blizzard of 1991.” Your two-and-a-half year old son thinks a big lizard came to town last night. The city around you is dark but alive, grumbling about the slush, the chill, but reveling in the new possibilities of skiing on the creeks, cuddling up near the heat of coffee shop hearths. White Christmases are guaranteed. Your father-in-law takes you ice fishing, something you always thought pointless and boring, and you find there’s a certain Zen-like peace to it. The augur drills down into the lake to reveal a cylinder of blue, into which you drop your hooked minnow, weights, bobber, and you wait. After hours interspersed by sips of whisky, handfuls of canned mixed nuts, bites of sandwich warmed in foil on the propane heater, your bobber plunges downward. Your rod spins and you raise a crappie, speckled like a lake full of augur holes, cold and firm. You kill it with a blow to its head and hold it in bare hands like a chunk of ice, then toss it out of the shack to freeze. You learn that crappies taste better through the ice. You notice that the heavens and earth have reversed. The blue lakes of spring have iced and gone white. The hazy hot cloudy sky of summer has gone crystalline blue. Even married into this place, ice-caught crappie in hand, you will never be from here. But you will find it hard to leave.

—Adam Regn Arvidson

What It’s Like Living Here — From Glenn Arnold in Edmonton

Dec 102010

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Merge Right (or Left)

I’m on my way to see the play Studies in Motion, the true story of Eadweard Muybridge, the man who more than a century ago tried to stop time through experimental photography, but couldn’t stop the tragic entropy of his own marriage. As I sit in my car, alone again, waiting to merge in a construction zone, I remember the essence of an old joke. An Edmontonian stuck in traffic comments to his friend that it’s a nice place to live, and will be even nicer when it’s finished. This frustrating and seemingly endless road construction hints at a deeper truth. The city is always building, always inventing itself, but it’s never clear what it’s trying to become. There is always progress, but what is the goal?

The city is confused, juggling multiple and conflicting personalities. Edmonton is isolated and extreme. It is the northernmost, major city on the continent, and on a map, it sits apart from the other Canadian cities that huddle around the American border. My life has been filled with long, contemplative hours behind the wheel, the endless patchwork of farmland and prairie mesmerizing me as I try to get somewhere, maybe to see her, maybe someone else. This sense of isolation is fed by the severe climate: temperatures typically range between -40C and +30C. People here have a sense of grim survival, gladly spreading their blankets on the flattened grass in Hawrelak Park in July, battling mosquito mobs, just to absorb a little of the solar radiation that will be such a rare commodity later in the year. In deep winter, the sun is a weak orange orb, low in the sky, limping across the horizon for barely seven hours a day. In my days as a cubicle drone, sunlight was only a vague dream. Now it’s a little better: my office has a window that provides me a thin hope that I might survive the coming darkness.

Work Will Save You

People here like to think they are friendly and helpful, but sometimes, harder sensibilities prevail. Edmonton is an industrial city, a centre for the oil industry. Not the oil executives, though: the pressed-white shirts, the money, reside in Calgary, a fact that only helps feed the city’s inferiority complex. No, Edmonton is the service centre for the real work, a place where looming, skeletal refineries greet visitors from the east; where a gravel pit and fogged windows once provided the necessary seclusion for my young, urgent flesh to press against hers, only to be illuminated by a policeman’s light, a memory that was once a hot ember but is now a cold stone; where endless industrial parks of cinder block and corrugated steel circle the perimeter; where, from the clearly inferior position in my Honda, I must peer around pick-up trucks driven by real men. Work matters here; idleness is a sin. The first thing anyone you meet will ask you is “What do you do?”

Culture Frenzy

In a city of immigrants, one’s roots are celebrated: the annual Heritage Day festival attracts hundreds of thousands of people, all eager to sample spicy ethnic food and over-amplified traditional music. Every year, I navigate the mass of humanity that swarms Hawrelak Park, melting inside the red plastic tents as I search for the perfect curry. Where you come from seems more important than where you are. Similar numbers of people are attracted to a variety of summer arts festivals. In August, the Fringe Festival transforms Whyte Avenue into a seething, chaotic display of alternative theatre and street performers. This year, while munching on some unidentifiable, deep-fried morsel, I gave $20 to a New Zealander who was juggling basketballs while riding a ridiculously tall unicycle. This guy deserved some reward for traveling so far to such a remote place just to entertain me on another empty afternoon. An artistic feeding-frenzy consumes the city between June and August, an expression of the urgent need to pack as much culture and activity as possible into the few available warm months.

Too Much History Coming Down

History here waits like a prisoner on death row. Buildings more than fifty or sixty years old are often viewed as liabilities, more likely to be torn down than preserved. New buildings imply progress and wealth; old buildings suggest inefficiency and poverty. Architecture is functional and anonymous – best not to stand out too much. There are exceptions, of course. The new Art Gallery of Alberta stamps a striking presence on an otherwise humdrum downtown. I love spending a few hours with the works of Picasso, Escher, the Group of Seven, or even Warner Brothers’ animators, then relaxing on the on the roof-top patio with a dark and bitter coffee, watching the traffic below. A lazy afternoon at the gallery was something that we once shared, when time mattered, when our hands would find each other’s even if our eyes were locked on the canvases.

Who Am I?

Edmonton may wear a blue collar, but it wears it on a lab coat: the city has been trying to reinvent itself as a centre of knowledge and research. The University of Alberta, home to dizzying variety of programs, is still a place I will gravitate to on a Sunday afternoon, wandering empty corridors seeking out hidden passages, then later, sitting and reading a book while sipping my Java Jive special. I spent four years as an undergraduate here, and I am always pulled back, like a marble spinning down a funnel. The campus, a sprawling jumble of architectural styles, seems aloof as it overlooks the broad river valley, the largest continuous urban green space in North America. The North Saskatchewan River, sometimes a slow moving, dirty green serpent, sometimes a haphazard, geometric collision of ice chunks, was once the boundary between two cities that became one. As the largely undeveloped valley sprawls across the entire city, it pushes away at the edges, seeming to reject any identity that is imposed on it. It is easy to get lost here if you leave the trail, and I have been entangled many times in the dense and unforgiving growth.

Weather Approaches

The play will be starting soon, but I am still waiting to merge. The light has faded now, and the sky is beginning to threaten, to tease with a few snowflakes, a hint of the long chill that will soon arrive. As I stare at the road signs, cells raw from the recent implosion of a twenty-year marriage, heart cracked, self-confidence shattered, immobile but unable to stop time, I consider my uncertain future and think that, yes, this city with no true identity, no definite goals, no sense of history, belongs to me.

It’s going to be a long winter.

—Glenn Arnold

Glenn Arnold lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where it goes to -40 in the winter and there’s more oil than in Texas. Glenn took the photos of himself and the art gallery. His son Craig Arnold shot the street view, the refinery and the gorgeous cityscape down the valley.

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What it’s like living here — from Natalia Sarkissian in Milan

Dec 032010

This is Natalia Sarkissian’s second “What it’s like living here” piece. The first brought us the shocking news of her son’s illness. This one delivers the aftermath, hope and dogs and gorgeous cityscapes from Milan.

What it’s like living here

By Natalia Sarkissian in Milan

December, 2010

Dear DG:

You ask about Nick, his heart, the operation. He’s pretty much himself again; kids are resilient that way (their mothers and fathers less so). We’re picking up where we left off before we put everything on hold. Not easy these days with life everywhere often a challenge:

“Camera da Letto” means refuge

The alarm rings in the pearly gray of morning.

White sheets—from a transatlantic trip to Macy’s in Boston—slide like silk as you stir, your dreams of sand and sun on the Sound dispersing with the squeal.

You reach out an arm. You fiddle with a button. Silence ensues.

You blink in the shadowy room. Then you light the alabaster lamp from Volterra, the one you bought on sale years ago when Rinascente department store revamped and unloaded merchandise—60% off. Now a milky glow shines encouragement on your side of the bed.

Don’t move quite yet. Study instead the India-ink drawings of cocktail parties and frivolity facing you—the ones you sketched when you were twenty and going to be a painter. Then contemplate the alcove where your desk sits piled with papers, the old dresser loaded with a tower of books. You’re a mother, a part-time translator, part-time English teacher and when time permits—writer—now. A translation project (small) awaits. A lesson plan (a doctor wants to converse in English for an hour) awaits too. Not much money, but at least it’s some. In the afternoon you’ll do homework with Chris. And then there’s that novel you’re writing.

Sigh, and say, “first things first.”

Kick the sheets back.

Slip into your jeans, your t-shirt, your sweater.

Turn off the light: a mound still snores gently under the white sheets from Macy’s.

Tiptoe: the mound, in the old days (how many months of joblessness is it now?) used to be up first, shaving and showering before a day directing strategic sales in a large multinational. Now, if roused, the mound remonstrates.

“Cucina” means good morning

An old-fashioned door from the twenties (two panels, with glass, bolted across the middle with a brassy lock) bars entrance to the kitchen. On the far side, a six-month-old beast whimpers and jumps and the doors rattle and shake.

“Come girl,” you say, releasing your as-of-yet-un-housebroken pup from her nightly exile to the tiled floor and newspaper inside. Tail wagging, she hops and jolts, somersaulting with joy.

“I love you too,” you say, patting, but rushing. Bladders are small, muscles are weak, minutes are precious.

Seize the leash, grab a parka, open the front door. Step out onto the marble, lock up, press the button. But then wait for the old-iron-bird-cage elevator to crank up to four.

Say, ‘accidenti—goodness,’ when you note a spreading yellow stain beneath your wriggling puppy. And then louder, ‘cazzo—fuck.’

Across the landing the neighbor lady—up early too—flings her door open.

“Not again!” she cries, her hands on her hips, her feet stuck in felt slippers, her white hair in scruffy clumps about her gray face. “Aren’t you going to scold her?”

“Yes,” you say, and you do, but your heart’s not in it, not when you’ve got a disapproving audience. Apologize again. Say, “she’s just a puppy.”

Promise to clean up when you return.

When the neighbor lady says, “things were fine before you went and got that dog,” and then slams her door, you shrug and step into the elevator. You know things weren’t fine before you went and got that dog. You know you went and got that dog to help things be fine.

Decide you’ll walk her long and languid.

“Parco delle Basiliche e Le Colonne di San Lorenzo” mean survival

A green expanse stretches from the Basilica of San Lorenzo to the Basilica of Sant’Eustorgio where, according to legend, relics of the Three Magi once were conserved. At one time infested marshlands, the land was reclaimed and fashioned into a park in the twentieth century. Students eat their lunches here on sunny days. Children swing from monkey bars in the afternoon. Along the park’s fringes, fashionable establishments serve elegant food on iron tables in vine-draped niches at midday and in the evening.

You used to have aperitivi here at sunset when brick buildings glow red. You haven’t had an aperitivo here, or anywhere, in months. Nor have you watched bricks glow as the sun sinks.

Nearby stand sixteen Corinthian columns, Roman ruins of the 3^rd century. They were moved here in the 4^th century as part of the construction project of San Lorenzo. Survivors of Roman Mediolanum, Barbarian invasions, Austrian invasions, World Wars, and urban re-edification, the columns symbolize survival against all odds.

You like to walk Wendy here, in this piazza and park strewn with evidence of survival, of rejuvenation.

This morning, cars rush by at 7:30, their taillights fuzzy red globes in the early morning fog. The green 94 bus wheezes along, leaving a wake that tastes of petroleum. Thick and gray it clogs your throat. You cough, cross the street, enter the park, your dog pulling on her leash, a flock of pigeons in her sights.

“Area Cani” means leashlessness

In the midst of the park of the basilicas a fence encloses trees and grass and muddy patches: a dog run.

Open the gate, release Wendy.

Throw a ball, toss a stick.

Soon Signora Mastini and her beagle arrive.

“You’re here early,” you say to Signora Mastini. You watch the dogs roll together in muddy orange leaves and enjoy their nips and jumps and yips.
“Volunteer work at church today,” says Signora Mastini.
“Volunteer work?”
“The homeless. I feed them. I clothe them. So many these days. So many.”
“Oh,” you say, inhaling the damp smell of autumn rot.
“Single men. Divorced men. Family men. They lose their jobs, can’t pay the rent, then they’re out on the streets.”
“Oh,” you say, “oh.” You zip your zipper against the chill.
“Did you know they fight over clothes? Winter jackets are in short supply. But I’m never worried. ‘Basta!’ I say. ‘Cut it out, or I’ll throw you out.’ They always listen. They can’t afford not to.”

Yes. You nod.

Then whistle. You yank Wendy away from her frolicking friend.

“Come on, girl,” you say and shut the gate. You can’t afford to think about homelessness. It isn’t looming, is it?

Walk. Then walk some more so you won’t think.

“Via Torino” means thoroughfare

Cut around the perimeter of San Lorenzo, then through the Carrobbio, an old intersection where the Roman Ticino Gate once stood. Walk north, along via Torino, a shopping artery that connects San Lorenzo to the center of town. Admire a door spray-painted by a graffiti artist but ignore the attractive shop windows up and down on either side. Forget what you don’t need and can’t have.

Pause in front of S. Giorgio al Palazzo, an 8^th century church, the name of which comes from a no-longer-extant Roman Imperial palace built by Diocletian. The church houses a cycle of paintings by Bernardo Luini and a late medieval relief of St. George and the Dragon.

Decide to view St. George slaying his dragon. Consider it good for morale.

The doors are open for morning mass, but a frowning man in a cleric’s collar says you can’t enter with your dog. Even if you carry her. Even if you fit her in your bag.

Traipse north. Stop while a concierge washes the sidewalk in front of her apartment building. Enjoy the hiss of her hose on the pavement. Approve of how,
with deft flicks, she sends debris sliding to the gutter.
Wait until she finishes spraying. Squelch past, listening to your rubber soles slapping against the wet. Then stop again.

Consult your phone. The battery’s low, but still, it’s enough. Scroll and find it. Piazza San Babila, 3.

Walk where your directory tells you.

“Piazza San Babila” means shelter

Piazza San Babila, with fountains and gardens, surrounded by porticoes filled with boutiques, long considered the ‘salotto buono,’ or the living room of the affluent, perches at the crossroads of the swankiest streets of Milan: Via Montepoleone, Corso Venezia, Corso Europa. Lined with neo-fascist buildings, it’s named after the venerable brick church that oversees the bustle at one far end.

Head here, to this piazza, at 9 am, your little dog following.

Quit Via Torino, cross Piazza Duomo, traverse the pedestrian walkway of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, still silent, still empty of tourists and street vendors. Ignore Rinascente, Pollini, D&G as you go.

Forget what you don’t need and can’t have.

But as you near Diesel boutique, nod at a middle-aged man with a sleeping bag in a shopping cart. When he asks you for money, hand him a euro. Realize you think you’re buying distance, you think you’re buying time.
“Nice dog,” he says when Wendy sniffs his feet. “I had a dog once.”
You smile and nod again but he doesn’t.

A few steps further, a young couple, sitting on cardboard, plastic bags filled with old clothes strewn around them, eats breakfast from McDonalds. Wendy barks and the woman spills coffee on her dirty pink track suit.
“Shhh,” you say. Eyes averted, you hurry your dog past.

Still further, nearing the piazza, an old man with a grizzled beard and gray hair sprawls in the doorway. Think: when the shoppers disperse, the dispossessed find a night’s worth of relief.

“No, Wendy,” you say when she starts to growl, “Piazza San Babila has many faces. Right now it still means shelter.”

You know that soon, when the stores open, the men and the woman will be made to move. Maybe they’ll go to Signora Mastini for a hot lunch and to fight over shoes.

“Ufficio di Lavoro Interinale” means temp agency

Rounding the corner, you’ve made it. San Babila, 3. But although you search, you can’t find the shelter you seek.

The temp agency. Where your phone says it was. It used to be here. You’re sure it was here. Wasn’t it here? Hadn’t you been here, seeking a job once, not so many years ago?

A fashion house occupies the offices here now.

You perch on a granite bench facing a fountain to rest. You’d imagined a listing for which he was qualified. Something more substantial for you.

No matter.

“Let’s go home,” you say to your dog. “We’ll get on the computer. It was crazy to try legwork. Things have changed.”

But then, you think, maybe legwork wasn’t crazy, after all. You walked to escape when you first started out. Now you’re energized.

Wendy wags her tail. She likes legwork with you. You stick her in your bag, sneak her through the turnstile, carry her onto the metro, ride the red line home.

“Cucina” now means hope

The mound is out of the bed and no longer a mound. He’s in the kitchen, making espresso. He’s bright and cheery. And he’s wearing a red tie. Wendy hops and jumps when she sees him and he scratches her behind the ears, laughing when her pink tongue flicks against his hand.

The kitchen seems different now. Full of light, you think.

“I’ve got an interview,” he says, straightening, stirring sugar, his spoon clinking against the cup. “A second interview.” He smiles. His eyes are green and his teeth shine.

“A second interview?”

“That head of operations job in Cairo.”

“Oh my God,” is what you say. “Cairo? Cairo?”

You don’t want to hope too much. But still, for him—for all of you—you do.

–Best,

Natalia

—Post text and layout by Natalia Sarkissian

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