Commuted

Trapped in traffic, cocooned in my car, crawling along at a brisk walking pace for up to three hours each day, I often ask myself why I spend so much of my life getting there.

A small piece of the answer lies on the island of Manhattan, where I was confined for eighteen straight months in my early twenties.

I lived in a tiny bedroom within a rent-controlled apartment illicitly shared by five roommates. From this little box I sallied forth each workday, scrambling down the narrow stairs to the street below, dashing a hundred yards to the subway station, descending into the network of tubes until I scrambled up another set of narrow stairs, walked a ways down an underground passageway that led to the basement of my office building, catching an elevator up to my floor, scurrying down the hallway into another little box called my office and then, when the day ended, reversing the whole procedure.

And so it went day after day, my life encased in an enclosed network of boxes and tubes. Along the way I became increasingly skittish and stressed, my ears deafened by the constant assault of the city’s roar, my body constricted by the omnipresent urbanity towering over me. It all happened so gradually I didn't notice what was happening until after I finally left Manhattan when, freed from my cage, I started to breath easier, my jaw unclenched, my muscles relaxed, my ears listened again. I realized I’d been living in a human Habitrail.

I grew up on the edge of suburban sprawl, the city on one side and the country on the other. At the time it seemed like the city, but it wasn’t anything like Manhattan, offering that blend of concrete and dirt, mall and farm and smog and manure you find in the fringe suburbs. Neither city nor country, nor endless sprawl, it offered something in between, a visible line of demarcation between man and nature, a feeling that you straddled both.

Today I work deep inside a major city but again live on the city's edge, overlooking a wilderness area. Countrified environs aren’t usually found close to a major city, so I have to drive a ways to get there from here. But when I finally get home at night, and see the city lights sparkling in one direction and the stars sparkling in the other, with the crickets chirping, the owls calling and the coyotes howling in the distance over a kill, and above it all the silhouette of a hawk outlined against the glare of the city, soaring on air while looking for his dinner, I feel released from confinement, my sentence commuted until tomorrow, when I point my car back to my hunting grounds.

Comments

[gatsby]

have you ever taken on a long narrative?

[Jen]

Hello, I'm new to your blog, found my way here through "A Sort of Notebook." Heard this was a good read over here, and it certainly is! I look forward to coming back and reading more. Thank you!
-Jen