Place
I’m currently heading up to Yankee Stadium. I haven’t double-checked what street I’m on. Probably should do that. A cop car woop-warbles past as I take a left to cut through the raised brick fists of public housing. A discarded mattress and various trash propped up against the side of a hip-high iron wrought fence.
It’s quiet out. And the public housing in this area is more extensive than I remembered. But I was in a completely different borough the last time I was here. I was listening to Laura Marling light a wild fire while wishing I felt like I had enough time in the day to try my luck in a game of pick-up at Tompkins Square Park. Two small dogs come around the curve of one of the walkways with faux-wrought iron fencing that cut through the complex to interrupt the reverie within the reverie, pause, and then rush away in the opposite direction. I can’t see where they’re heading.
It’s important to name the thing. It’s important to name the thing that isn’t here. It’s important to name the fact that I’m walking down a paved road on the Grand Ridge Trail in Issaquah, WA — that the trees are flushed with a light green and there’s maybe a single bird half-spinning its song in the immediate vicinity like a hand half-heartedly spinning a top; that I don’t know the name of the bird; that there are curlicues of other bird song off in the distance, merging with the notion of distance in such a way to add flares to the horizon line; that we can see moss running up the side of one tree in an almost full-carpeting effect; and that we don’t see or hear any evidence of anyone else on the trail with us.
We don’t see anyone in Montreal either. We’re taking in the giant sea slug-like shapes of white snow stretched out across the roofs of parked cars. We’re dragging our boots through the snow and cursing with a smile as our flesh comes up against bursts of brazen wind. Fifteen degrees below. I think of the Expos games I used to see here, the marionette I bought here, and I wonder what they would make of the cold. Would the marionette hide themselves well? Would Andre Dawson or Gary Carter cast a cautious eye in the direction of the Stade olympique?
The snow swiftly dissolves as we arrive in Logan, West Virginia. We’re standing over a bridge looking out onto a river, our eye moving to the right to pass over the jungle gym-like set up of an electricity station of some kind, and continues on to take in the road, a nearby McDonald’s, and the arching humps of the mountains behind all this.
I don’t mind crowds, I think as I make my way back to the center of the town and off the bridge. I don’t mind empty spaces either. I’m just as happy pushing my way to the bar to order a drink as I am disappearing into the woods. The American Legion, a passing sign reads. Post 19. Home of The City of Logan. Shawnee Island. I make a note to look up the latter when I have the chance.
Giant letters a few steps later: “BOWLING HALL.” Fall Leagues Now Forming, a nearby sign reads, and I wonder who would be interested in spending a bit of time here with me as I competed in a bowling league in Logan, West Virginia. F. might play along for a bit, but she’d be just as interested in finding folk musicians to play with as she would be in a bowling league. I don’t know what C. or S. would think of driving up from Texas to bowl in a town with an estimated population just north of 1,500. They might do it, but only if they could get deep into character — only if they could hire a detective to double-check and make sure that the politics surrounding this particular bowling league had no echoes or similarities with the cutthroat, opaque brutality of the bowling league as depicted in the film The Big Lebowski.
I double check the time. It’s 11:14PM in the city that I’m in and 5PM in the Central Station in Leipzig, Germany. A female voice is muttering something far away in the echoing caverns of the station, which feels (and looks a little bit) like a blend of King’s Cross London and Union Station in D.C. The neon feels a bit more German, though: Leipzig Zoo, Leipziger Messe …
I’ve never been to Germany, I think as I walk through Germany. That should change. With a name like Fleischer inherited from a Roma gypsy from Transylvania who later served in the Philippines with US forcers and another Grandfather who survived being a prisoner in Germany nearly ninety years ago; with historically decent rent in Berlin, solid art, and infinitely more sane politics; with the crisp air waiting for me as I leave the station and looming walls of graffiti in the distance, how could I not? How could I not be here?
Because I’m in Kyoto. I’m waiting to cross the street. I am standing around wearing a Golden State hoodie and a Red Sox hat in an attempt to express via fashion the fact that I was born in California to parents who had lived in the Bay Area for twenty-plus years but was raised a New Englander. And that both are true. Or that everything is true. Or that everything is always true.
The light changes, I cross the street, and I’m …
… back in London. We’re currently walking by one Victorian row house after the other. The light is low, gray, and angled. It’s winter light. Even with the season, however, the line of houses comes across as the kind of thing we’d file away if we were researching the opening shots of a film adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, even if the houses we’re walking past are outside the NW1 postcode. “Like the flap of a wave,” Woolf wrote. “The kiss of a wave.” I take a deep breath of the air, look up …
… and pause when I see the street signs for Third Avenue and East Fordham. Weren’t we just — I look down. A few women with shopping bags in their hands speaking Spanish to each other. A tank of a man walking past wearing a full enough coat that it seemed to double as a throne. The slow whipping cat tail of wind.
I don’t know if a Golden State hoodie makes sense here. Still probably layers season, if I’m to judge by looking at everyone else around me. Still probably the kind of thing where you wrap a scarf enough times around your face that you’re straining your neck a little bit as if you’re peering over some sort of parapet.
The pivot here — the thing that removes the crucial jenga piece from the scaffolding of this short essay — is the fact that this isn’t happening. It’s 12:17AM and I’ve returned to my bedroom in the city that I’m in to plug my laptop into an outlet. I’m playing with the Don DeLillo barn effect and using it as a coping mechanism, as a tool of survival, and as a way to somehow plan — as if there are existential radishes from a new and exciting frontier boiling beneath the water of this evening’s engagement.
By the way: in using the phrase ‘Don DeLillo barn effect,’ I’m referring to a scene in the novel White Noise featuring “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA” that culminates with the phrase, "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
I use the phrase ‘playing with’ because I don’t know if what these characters say in White Noise is comprehensively true. Even if we acknowledge the structural reality of the ‘barn effect’ — that we are witnessing a way in which passing a certain threshold of enough accumulated collective attention produces not just a story, but history; that is, a certain inevitability and inviolability of reality (see: internet, the) — we’re not addressing the strange, subtle, small-seeming phenomenon that doesn’t feel exclusive to myself alone that a place can still manage to maintain its ‘sense of self’ even in the face of a Barn Effect. If you go to Boston to see Cheers, you will still feel Boston beyond Cheers. If you go to New Zealand to see Lord of the Rings, you will still feel New Zealand beyond Lord of the Rings. If you go to Atlanta because of Atlanta, then you’ll probably be roasted before being whisked off to see and feel Atlanta.
To feel the ‘true’ nature of something behind the thing that grabs our attention is a strange thing, even if we ignore the optimism inherent in that sentiment; how a place still feels like a place, even if it’s far away, even if it’s in quarantine.