Walking In a City

Driving in a new city removes you from understanding it. The best way to explore is to walk.

To drive suggests linearity, A to B, with fragments of people's lives whipping by in two-second intervals: A tree, a billboard, a fence, a barn. You can sit and play “name what you see”, but in a way, what you see has been predetermined by urban planners 20 years ago.

To walk where no car can drive is to venture into the white-hot underbelly of a people and to meander. It makes the soulless and the frictionless - a digital map, a roaring car, daytime radio crumbling in your speakers - bend the knee to human inefficiency: asking for directions, bumping into others, deciding on a path based on nothing but instinct - and opens up serendipity like an aperture in a prison cell.

In the days before Easter Weekend, Boston's sky looked like grey silk, billowing and hanging above grey, tall buildings. I had done the right things (Freedom Trail, Quincy Market) and the wrong (ordering a lobster roll from a very deep hole-in-the-wall spot; two vodka martinis on an empty stomach at The Langham). I visited parks, plate ware stores surely only accessible to the Boston Brahmins, and ate a cannoli while staring over the water. I made little plans, with only one plan: to walk.

As I walked, I started to file away different types of people: the local younger girls with their Barbour jackets and Le Pliages; the tourists, always in flocks and ponchos, coming in and out of historical buildings; the local store owners - older, quiet, all-knowing.

I never took the fastest route, and through trusting that my next step would end up being the right one, an ecosystem engulfed me, fed me, welcomed me, taught me.

A car would have gotten me from place to place, but nothing else.

Sometimes, to understand where you are, you have to waste a little time getting nowhere.