Of concrete canyons and crawdads

Hot summer days in the early 1970s usually found me barefoot, hair in a ponytail, wading in the creek near our house. The creek flowed down between two hills, in a shallow gully running beside a narrow flat section of field, once a dirt road over the mountains but by then grown over with blackberry bushes and tall weeds. The clearing around my house was flatter, so the creek meandered more, making little pools, backing up into stagnant corners, digging down in places until it was hip-deep on a 10 year old. Waterbugs skittered over the surface, and, if you sat still enough on a rock with your feet in the water, the minnows would come over and nibble on your toes.

Sometimes, as the locusts made their peculiar piercing sound in the still afternoon, I would crouch down, letting the water settle, then pick up a rock very slowly to keep the sludge from swirling up. A crawdad or two would rush backward from the sudden exposure, like little gray lobsters snapping their pinchers. If I was really quick, I could scoop the little ones up in my hands, watching them searching for a hiding place in my hand, until they rested still as their only defense. Game over, I would drop them back in the water, and move to something else – maybe playing baptism with my older sister in one of the deeper sections of the creek, or going up on the highway – a narrow two-lane going from no where much to not much more – to pop tar bubbles with a bare big toe. There were few children nearby, none within a mile, so usually I was alone but not often lonely.

Last week friends of mine visited from Memphis, and we went into Manhattan to see what could be seen. We walked from a subway station toward Wall Street, and at one point in the walk, we stood beside Federal Hall and looked down Broad Street toward the New York Stock Exchange. The buildings are very close together there, imposing edifices of granite, concrete, marble, brick; an American flag taller than my childhood home hung rippling over the front of one. The streets there are very narrow, and the gentle curve shut off the distance so I felt closed in, as if in a concrete canyon, unscaleable. People sat on the steps of Federal Hall while cars and trucks, taxis and a limo thrust their way through the tourists sauntering across the street.

For most of the day, we were captured in a swirl of ever changing faces and scenes. Wall Street gave way to Water Street and then the Staten Island Ferry dock; across from there a small house sits nestled between two skyscrapers, like one of my favorite childhood books, The Little House. I felt an affinity for that house, watching the world change into something its builders could not have imagined. We later walked through Chinatown, the tiny streets pungent with the odor of seafood and bright with silks and a Buddhist temple, finishing the day sitting in a noisy restaurant in Little Italy, eating gnocchi.

The day was exhilarating, as Manhattan always is, but by the time I left I was full. Many people find cities a source of energy, as if the constant stimuli flow through them like blood through the body, their very cells drawing emotional nourishment from the kaleidoscope of activity. I find myself becoming full, the banquet of experience beyond my ability to take in. I need process time; I need a hot afternoon with locusts and crawdads, no people or cars.

I wondered, for a while after moving to the northeast, if it was a matter of sophistication – was I too much of a country rube to appreciate the finer things of life? I came to realize that it is a question of comfort, of what you are used to, but also of temperament. Even in the country, I would always carry around a book in my back pocket – Nancy Drew, Echo comics, biographies and, later, The Phantom Tollbooth or a romance novel where a kiss at the end was pretty hot stuff. I would sit under a tree, curl up beside the creek or, sometimes, hide in my basement bedroom sprawled across the sheets. Now, in this faster, more hectic place, where nothing is slow, people are everywhere, and nature is either carefully orchestrated or ruthlessly killed, I get tired. There is no place for my insides to rest. It’s like a modern painting where the eye moves constantly until you turn away, exhausted and not quite sure what it was supposed to mean.

Others love it, and I’m happy for them – someone has to live here. I also know, after 22 years away from the home of my childhood, I couldn’t go back completely. Some of the city is a part of me now; my pace has quickened, I would become impatient when I couldn’t find a restaurant open, or I had to drive 70 miles to a bookstore. But still, I know some day before very long, I will again seek out a place where I can lift rocks to find crawdads, where traffic is rare enough to safely pop tar-bubbles, where the locusts sing and in the long dusks of summer, whippoorwills call as the grass gets too chill for bare feet.  ¶ 8:09 PM 0 Comments