A City Kinda Guy

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 know where 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:

So they’re not all restored. I’m so grateful to whoever restored just the one that I don’t know what to say. Thank you, whoever you are, for returning something that was lost, for restoring something that was destroyed, for taking back something precious from the past and from thoughtless acts. I’m going to smile because these murals exist, and then I’m going to smile again because they came back. Or rather (I should say), they were brought back. Thanks, denizen of the city! Thanks, citizen.

“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.

Why?

In short, because it is antithetical to the soul of America. In short, because it is poisonous to the soul of America.

The land? The people? The Constitution? No one can truly say what America is, no more than one can truly say what a man is. Each man has his qualities, though, and so does America. They are trust, openness, freedom, and a suspicion of power.

Someone once said that if you want to be alone, really alone, you must either move to the deep wilderness or to a large city. They are right, and part of that is because of the American soul. Walk around an American city today and take in what you see. In general, no one cares what you are doing, no one is watching you, and no one stands ready to question you about your activities. Policemen wander through the public sphere occasionally, and they do subtly change its character. People become tenser and more purposeful, and the atmosphere is less joyous and free. This is the exception, though, not the rule. We are Americans, we are America (or part of what it is). We are a good people, and we believe it of ourselves.

This sign takes the opposite view. It views Americans as lawbreakers, and encourages them to be suspicious. It encourages them to inform on each other, and so it seeks to transform the American soul from what it is now to what it would be if it were watched constantly by the state. Cleaner, maybe, but gloomy. Stronger and unhappier.

Some of the soul of America has crept into mine over the years, and so I am angered, frightened, and repulsed by this sign. Always before, I would feel angered, frightened, and repulsed by these things, but my speaking out would be confined to mutterings in my car and inexpressible emotions when I got home. Now I have a place to vent my spleen and express my rage, and I am grateful for it. Explaining my repulsion has made me think through why I am repulsed, and I no longer feel so helpless.

May this sign be recognized as a dreadful mistake, and may the man who made it be the one to destroy it! He has done harm to the world. I mean, who wants to live in the kind of city this billboard advertises? The state patrol, maybe, but probably only when they’re working.

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:

Next to it are some new townhouses (outside of the picture). The townhouses are almost assuredly worth more than this house on the open market. It makes me happy, though, that there are still houses like this in the city, and that there are still people who would create things like this.

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.