A City Kinda Guy

The city is a beautiful place. It has a beauty of its own - something that it has undeniably created and that is undeniably unique and new - but sometimes it borrows from other, older worlds. Case in point is this cathedral, St. Mark’s.

This cathedral is in one of the most crowded parts of the city, but it’s built on the edge of a hillside that’s too steep and too unstable for construction. The hillside is too steep and too unstable, in fact, for anything but trees. These trees are mostly bigleaf maples, fast-growing trees that have succeeded the great stands of conifers that gave this city its fortune. Age has given them majesty, if not a claim on the land, and they hang on. They are the ragged remnants of the forests that once covered the land that the city covers now.

Perhaps they await the day when the streets and houses will be cleared away and the day when conifers will finally regroup and reclaim their land. Perhaps they await the day when they will die of old age, or the day when the city will cut them down. Perhaps they await the days in which they will live forever.

In the meantime, they surround the cathedral and isolate it. The cathedral rises from them with the ancient beauty of the lonely castle or the fortress, a Krak des Chevaliers or Newschwanstein Castle for the modern age.

A wider angle, however, would reveal that this forest is surrounded by houses, apartment buildings, freeways, factories, restaurants, towers, and people. This forest is surrounded by a bustling hub designed to keep people safe, wealthy, and happy. Who is left to seek sanctuary inside the church?

I don’t know, but the trees are closer to it than the city.

I’ve lived in this city for almost all the years of my young life. I’ve come to be slightly arrogant about my knowledge of it. “I know this city like the back of hand,” I chirp, while executing some complicated series of maneuvers to shave minutes off of car trips. Sometimes, in my private moments, I think that if I were blindfolded and dropped off anywhere in the city, I would not only know I was in the city, I would knowwhere in the city I was.

I know this city like the back of my hand.

Except I don’t.

I was exploring the other day, and what should I find but this:

It’s right by something I drive by every week, but I never even knew this building was here until I started exploring. It’s surrounded by trees but still! It’s the size of a city block. What do they have going on in there? Radionics? Satellite jamming? Ebola monkeys?

I decided to take a closer look. Camera in hand, I leapt off the main road and scampered down some stairs. My first obstacle was a railing, a dirt slope, and a road. Those weren’t much physically, but they had the power of the law behind them. The railing was there to keep people off the slope, and the street had no crossing or sidewalk. I hesitated. What if a police car were to come along? They’d turn on their siren and accelerate to ramming speed and I would have a criminal record. Beyond mens rea.

I did it anyway, sliding down the dirt slope and across the street. Actually, I walked across the street. Then I crept like a spider toward the facility. I managed to snap this shot:

Alert for security guards, dogs, and trip wires, I failed to notice the sleeping homeless person next to me. He started to stir, and I started to get nervous about being questioned for crouching on a dirt hill under a bridge. This building and its business will remain to me a mystery:

For now.

Don’t do it!

This is a canal that was dug from a river. It connect a series of lakes to the sea. There used to be train tracks along the side of the river (because it was so flat and level), and there still are. It’s just that they’re almost gone: filled in, paved smooth, and grown over.

The city was born from the railroads and canals, but now the railroads are gone and the canal is used for sailing. To the right of the canal are software development buildings; to the left are houses, houses, and a really nice saloon.

It’s very pretty.

A good thing has happened in the city. Someone has restored something that was destroyed.

A few weeks ago, the city’s anti-graffiti brigade received reports of vandalism on some underpasses in the zoo’s neighborhood. They went out and discovered that this vandalism was pervasive: entire walls had been covered with murals depicting strange animals and places. So they went to work and painted over these murals with the grey paint characteristic of their style.

As it turned out, the murals had been there for more than a decade and had been sponsored by the city. The call had been placed about graffiti on the murals themselves. The caller was mortified, the city said it would do better (though I’ve not heard from the anti-graffiti team), and I wrote something about it.

So a little bit of magic went out of the world. The underpass walls were soon covered with new graffiti, complaining about the attitude and ability of a government that would do something like this. Which was cool enough in and of itself.

However! As of a couple weeks ago, one of the murals - the one most colorful and best-remembered from my youth - has been restored.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

After:

After:

“Yet there is something impalpable and unpleasant in the human climate of such cities as Warsaw or Prague. The collective atmosphere, resulting from an exchange and a recombination of individual fluids, is bad. It is an aura of strength and unhappiness, of internal paralysis and external mobility. Whatever we may call it, this much is certain: if Hell should guarantee its lodgers magnificent quarter, beautiful clothes, the tastiest foods and all possible amusements, but condemn them to breathe in this aura forever, that would be punishment enough.” — Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

Every so often, one is confronted by a thing that is so antithetical to one’s ideas of comity, liberty, and good governance that one is morally compelled to speak out. This sign and its brothers, which have sprouted like mushrooms across the city, are such a thing.

Sometimes I pass a building that speaks to me. It’s hard to say what it is - some quirk or subtlety about it that eludes description. Some happy accident of land or architecture, or the clever mind of a particular architect, makes something beautiful. I don’t know the language of beauty, but I usually know it when I see it. I can at least hear its whisper, even if I can’t make out the words.

And then sometimes, there is a building that speaks loud and clear. This is the bedroom window of a house in the city:

This is the sign of an International House of Pancakes, which is a fine source of domestic and imported pancakes and pancake-like comestibles. They have locations in at least three countries.

This is their sign on the south side of the building. When I saw it, I thought it said “Tonal House of Panic.” That would be a pretty awesome name for a band, and an even more awesome name for a seller of pancake and pancake accessories.

Woodland Park is a park in the city. It’s very nice, having been created more than a hundred years ago by a man named Guy Phinney. Trees that were planted there in Mr. Phinney’s time have grown up, so the whole park has an aura of age about it that is rare in a city as young as this one. It’s on one side of a ridge (named after Mr. Phinney), and is large enough so that the city slopes around it in odd ways.

The city slopes around it but its roads do not, and so the city designers created a bevy of overpasses all around Woodland Park, in places where the hill was too steep to change, or where they needed to put an underpass for the smooth flow of traffic. These passes are old, old, old - you can tell by the quality of the stonework on their sidewalks and railings. It is solid and confident, like those Depression-era industrial powerhouses you still see in odd places.

Sometime later but still awhile ago, the city, or a group of rogue citizens, painted the walls of these underpasses. Being near the zoo, they were painted with animals, and each had a different style and different animals on it. I remember each one. When I was a child, my family approached the zoo from many different ways - so many different ways, in fact, that it seemed like there was no end to the underpasses of Woodland Park, or to the animals on those underpasses. Even so, I had a favorite, and would thrill with a secret delight when we passed by it.

Being an adult now, and possessed of many of the faculties thereto, I set out to chronicle these paintings. This one is my favorite:

Just a couple of weeks ago it had all the pictures I remembered. There was a background of vivid colors, like those in my banner except deeper and richer, like the colors you see in dreams, like the colors of artists who aren’t afraid. There was an enormous brown chicken in profile, an elephant coming towards you, glowing and just slightly out of proportion, and a golden monkey that was sitting with its head turned to look at you. Its eyes weren’t sad, exactly, but there was a soul behind them.

This next one is next to the zoo. It had zebras on it that were blended into tall grass. The zebras were painted in black, and the grass was painted in a pale green, but the strokes for each were identical.

There was a subtle transition in the background color, from a pale green to a blue. It looked like the zebras were on the edge of an African dawn that was too deep to be painted.

This one is to the south. I don’t remember what it had. You can see where they painted it over.

And so this is the only one remaining as it was:

When I first noticed that my favorite had been painted over, I set out to chronicle the others before they disappeared, too. I failed, for the most part. I was too late to take pictures, and my words have not described how beautiful I found them to be. Why did this happen? I don’t know. They weren’t dirty or anything, nor covered in graffiti. They were old, I guess, and they didn’t match, and that elephant was out of proportion anyway. I’m sorry they were painted over.

I am an efficient driver. It is a point of pride that I get from point A to point B as directly as possible, as quickly as legally feasible, and with a minimum of fuel burned. So I am terribly, terribly tense when I drive in heavy traffic or through unfamiliar streets. I am tortured by the gap between what is possible and what I am achieving.

What’s worse is when I am trapped behind an inefficient driver - someone who goes slowly for no discernible reason (even if there are no cars in front of them!), someone who leaves their turn signal on after they’ve turned, someone who pauses overly long at intersections. Then it is not the inscrutable nature of the universe or the human race that tortures me, it is one particular person. Onto them I pour my rage, my scorn, and my silent urgings to go faster.

I was recently trapped behind an inefficient driver: they were going very slowly up Aurora, when I wanted to be going very fast. Aurora is a street, long and straight. I saw them, a white minivan, climbing a hill about a quarter mile ahead, and I knew they were going to be trouble. Even at that distance I could tell I was gaining on them

Change lanes, you say? Pheh! Changing lanes is for cheaters. At once, I was upon them.

It’s a curious thing, following someone slower than you. I don’t want to tailgate (it’s bad form), but neither does my mind let me follow at a polite distance. So I was riding up on them, and they were keeping steady to their pace, and I was getting frustrated. I shifted slightly in my lane, like a man fidgeting in his seat, and looked ahead of them. There was nothing there but open road. I got more frustrated.

And so the miles passed. The exit I wanted was coming up - I engaged my blinker. The van did the same, and slowed down, if that were possible. It hesitated, briefly, on the lip of the exit, and then plunged in. I followed closely. My thoughts were rage, and scorn, and a charitable contempt for someone so obviously unsuited for the road.

Then the van turned, and I saw for an instant the face of the driver - a woman of late middle age, nervous: eyes wide, mouth tight, head darting between left and right, openly lost and searching for the correct way.

I’m usually a proud man, but there are moments when I’m ashamed of myself.

This is a charming sea port, one of the smaller ones in the city. I think it looks like one of those magical port cities on the Mediterranean, the ones that are nestled into cliffsides, the ones that have been around since Roman times, the ones that have blended into their surroundings, so that they feel like they belong.

This may be an artifice of the way the photo is framed. It’s still pretty, though.

When I was in college, I worked at the front desk of my dormitory for a time. I had many responsibilities, but among them was renting out pool balls and cues to people who wanted them. One day, a gentleman came in from the law school, which was next door. He said that he was missing some balls, and asked to see ours. I was young and naïve, and so I showed them to him. He immediately grabbed the two he said he’d missed, stepped back, called them his own, and said that possession granted him the assumption of ownership.

And he left.

I hate conflict. I avoided it as much as I could when I was growing up, but this was too much. I headed down to the pool room after I got off work - picking up one of my friends along the way - and there was the man who had robbed me. One of the balls he had taken was near to me, and I grabbed it. He grabbed the other one, and we argued while his friends watched, silently. I was shaking. I didn’t want to get into a physical confrontation, so eventually I left with my friend. The ball he still had was an eight-ball anyway, and we had spares of those

A partial victory, and also a partial defeat.

Years later, the other day, I was walking through a nature preserve. It used to be a garbage dump. Actually, it used to be a nature preserve, and then it became a garbage dump. Then they spread dirt over it and planted wild seed, and now it’s turned back into a nature preserve. It’s a wetland again, next to a lake, and the whole thing is high grass, ponds, marshes, and occasional stands of cottonwoods and willows. Birds rest there on their spring migrations. Pheasants and coyotes and geese live there, too. You can see the freeway across the water.

There is a gravel path that cuts through it, and I was walking up from one side. Down from another side came a man, perhaps sixty years old, with a gimlet eye, an air of authority, and a dog trailing about fifty feet behind him. Unleashed dogs are prohibited in the park, because they chase the birds for fun and blood, and the birds have nowhere else to go for miles around. I’ve seen people with dogs romping freely through the park before, and the worst I’ve ever done is give them a dirty look. I don’t think they’ve ever noticed.

Approaching that man, though, I felt different. I felt myself to be in the right and felt him to be in the wrong. I took another step, and I knew I was going to say it. It burbled out of me like bubbles out of a deep 

“Your dog should I really be on a leash,” I said grimly.

The man eyed me. “He knows how to behave,” he said.

“This is a bird sanctuary,” I said, and never breaking my pace, and then we were past each other.

Another partial victory. At least I’d made his day worse.

I look back at those now, and I regret not standing up for myself more - or more exactly, not standing up for my university’s property, and not standing up for those weary birds. I should have kept with that man until his dog was leashed. I should have wrestled that last ball away from that law school student. I failed to do so.

,kkmkABBBBBGN R1EW

There are many things I love about this city, but there are also many things about it that are wrong. There are many things which I feel besmirch my city’s honor, and for these, justice and my emotions have demanded a channel in which to vent their spleen.

I wonder sometimes, if I meet those men in other circumstances, if they will remember me and resent me. And then I wish I had punched that law school student in the mouth.

Le Mensonge? Tiens, tiens! - Ha! ha! les Compromis! Les Préjugés, les Lâchetés!

I love this city.

When I was a child, I wrote an essay that talked about my experiences in the wilderness (on camping trips with my family) and in farm country (on road trips with my family) - each of these had their charms. I can still remember isolated bits of country or farmland that were so beautiful they would make me cry to see them today. I don’t remember where they are, how we got to them, or where we went after. They are cut off forever from any map. They are cut off forever from any change. They will never be developed or destroyed. Each of them is a like a little valley of paradise, and only some of them will I ever go back to. Some of them I could drive through right now, and I wouldn’t recognize them from memory.

In that same essay, I also talked about cities, and the joy you find in each one. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I haven’t changed much in all these years (except getting more physically coordinated, slightly), and I can imagine what it is. I don’t know how to explain it - I probably explained it better the first time around - but there’s a special magic in a city. You can find it in odd places or snatches of music, or when you come back from somewhere away, you drive around that hill, and you suddenly see your downtown sparkling there in front of you. You can find it walking through a busy neighborhood, or in a stranger’s smile when hold the door for them, or in some dark jazz bar on a cold and lonely night. The soul of the city touches me at odd times.

When you come right down to it, I said that I was a city kinda guy. I was then, and I am now.

Especially this city. It invigorates me. It is home. Living here is a grand adventure. When I go back to the places I went to as a child, everything is just as good now as it was back then - better, even, because now I am stronger and freer and more awake. When I go someplace new, I am bolstered by the memories and love of the places I have been. Every morning is the dawning of an age, every evening is the dawning of another. I get along with the people, I get along with the buildings, I get along with the plants and the animals and the very air itself. It speaks to me, and I speak to it. I love this city.

A cynical, ironic (good God, I hate the things those words mean) explanation would be that I was born here and grew up here, and so am used to it. It doesn’t usually do any good to ignore the cynics and ironists (though sometimes it does a great deal of good), but it does do me good to rebut them. I like to think that some parallel city kinda guy, who lived in a universe where he was born elsewhere, would still find his way here eventually, like a salmon returning to his stream to spawn - or else that he would always live his life with a vague dissatisfaction of place and a restless desire to search. I like to think that our love is destiny.

Whatever it is, or whatever you want to call it, I’m glad I live here.