Emperor of the Sidewalk
I go on a lot of walks. Nearly every evening, I walk around the neighborhood. Adding up the miles over the years I’ve lived in DC, I could have walked to California and back by now. But I don’t walk to California. Usually I walk the same loop. I don’t want to ask myself where I should go. I want my legs to move and my mind to wander. That is a lot of time to spend on the same sidewalks. I wonder when my footprints will show up in the concrete. How many footsteps would it take?
Life has reached a fallow period lately. An in-between period. No travel, no work projects. Planning to move halfway across the country in a couple months, planning for other big things, but not yet. Now there are whole evenings of in-between. The in-between has stretched into the empty present. So my evening walk is often the most exciting thing that will happen all day.
If you could see my footsteps, you’d see a lot of jumping from curb to curb. Lately I’ve been obsessed with walking on raised curbs. If there is a raised curb, I will walk on it. You often see dogs and young kids walking on these curbs. What do they know that we don’t? So I tried it, and I’m hooked. Up there, you can see more, feel more. It’s like walking a tightrope with very low stakes. It makes your legs feel strong and makes each step feel deliberate. It announces to every passerby: This is my city and I am walking here.
I’m currently learning about lost cities. Ancient cities that have been covered in ash, buried underground, left behind. Pompeii is the most famous and the most stark. It was a city. Then there was a volcanic eruption. Then there was no more city. It was hidden for one and a half millennia before being dug up and rediscovered. Now, it is a great area for archeological study about life in the ancient Roman empire. Archeologists study the things that are there and the things that are missing, and through the missing, they create stories. Grooves in the street pavement must come from wheeled carts with identical construction, suggesting standard production. The street curbs have curiously uniform chunks missing near their corners. But only on the right, not on the left. This suggests right-hand traffic, with carts that turn too quickly into the curb.
I listened to this audiobook about lost cities during a full day of walking on Black Friday. DC is not known for its shopping, so I felt I could safely walk through the busy parts of town without being mowed down by bargain-hunting masses. “A city does not die,” said the narrator. “It is always in transition.” Aside from Pompeii. Pompeii died. It died at least twice. First after an earthquake. Then, the volcano. Mount Vesuvius was ready to be empty. But the Roman Empire still survived. Until it didn’t. Where was the line?
I had to pause the audiobook because people were doing the cha-cha slide at the White House. Let me correct that: people were watching the cha-cha slide at the white house. An elderly local man was playing it from a speaker and very lazily moving his feet left and right. Two tourists were cha-cha-ing behind him, having a great time. And about fifty people had circled around them to watch. Had they never seen the cha-cha slide before? I became one of them, boggled at how many people could think it was interesting to watch the cha-cha slide. When the song ended, four people clapped. Two kids put money into the tips bucket.
The author of the book about lost cities (who shares my birthday!) says they are most interested in studying everyday people. Not the great rulers of these lost civilizations but the people most often overlooked, who keep a society running. Not to create a grand theory of civilizational change but to learn about what civilization can be. Not why, but how.
At the Lincoln Memorial, there are plenty of raised curbs. This makes for great walking. I like feeling tall. Taller than everyone else. Or at least taller than what I used to be. I was walking on one of these curbs when, nearby, two kids started play-fighting. I watched from my curb perch, feeling like a Roman emperor presiding over a gladiatorial show. The older and bigger one kept karate-chopping the younger one and the younger pretended it hurt, but I saw him smile. The younger fell to the ground and convulsed happily.
But I felt a presence to the left. There was a nine-year-old girl with a fistful of popcorn, walking on the curb behind me, now blocked by me. She shoved popcorn into her slack mouth as she waited patiently for me to keep walking or get out of the way. I chose the latter. I stepped down from the curb so she could continue her catwalk. Then I got back on the curb to keep watching the show. The older of the two kids was now chopping off his brother’s neck and the young one was spitting and moaning with death.
Then a voice came from behind me, a scratchy young “Excuse me.” Yet another young child was walking on the curb, telling me to get off. My curb! She wore a bright pink puffer jacket, hood over her head, but I could see her smile and drool as she waited for me to move. To these children, it was not an option to simply get off the raised curb, take two steps down, and get back on. They were walking on a curb. I was in their way. Case closed.
I was dethroned.
My husband and I are moving away in a couple of months. How will our lives in DC be excavated when we’re gone? I don’t think there are many stories to tell about my routine evening walks, where I enter the dark night and search for something. Search for what? On one of the bridges I cross, two of the streetlights have gone out. The next night, they’re back on, but two further down are black. Sometimes they all flash like strobe lights. I look for a pattern and find none. How will I remember this quiet period? I already know I will look back and yearn for it. For the abundance and luxury of a free evening with nothing to do but walk. This fallow period of our lives.
But a fallow period is not empty. When farmers leave their fields unseeded for a season, they are letting the land replenish its nutrients. Invisible processes of bacteria and chemicals are churning beneath the surface. Important work is happening. You just can’t see it.
What I don’t want is for these quiet evenings to disappear into a void. Or if they do, I want to be there too, exploring the void, peeling back the surface of… what? I don’t know. And I don’t know what I can learn in the dark. But I’ll keep walking until I find it.
-Denise
PS: I have a new interview published in The Creative Independent. I really enjoyed interviewing Aram Mrjoiam, editor in chief of The Rumpus, about literary chemistry and what a literature-themed dating app would be like. Among other things. Read it here: Author and editor Aram Mrjoian on getting the details right
PPS: Today’s cat photo features an accurate depiction of how I spend most evenings these days, when not walking:
