March 13 2004, 01:00 AM Point To Point

I would not consider myself well traveled. Indeed, the farthest West I have ever been in the low berg of East Liverpool Ohio; the southern-most I have ever been is some ones of miles south of Arlington, VA, and that was only because I was lost and trapped on the wrong side of 66. I have done better in the north and east categories, standing in the edges of the cold Atlantic at the end of Cape Breton, watching shadows edge against the horizon. I hope to do better than this before I am done. In the meantime, I take some comfort in the somewhat self-serving notion that I am deeply travelled.

Very far back in life, I was given a habit for taking slow roads. My senior year in high school, due to quirks of scheduling, circumstance, and a state mandated truncation, my good friend and I would be free of school on Wednesdays somewhat before noon. There was no element of truancy in this, just a product of strange times. The background facts are the rituals that developed: we would escape to his house, where I would eat a bowl of raisin bran, and then to my house, and he would eat a bowl of yogurt and granola. There are reasons for that, but it doesn't change the nature of the thing. We would then pile into his car again (with whomever was coming), pick a town on the map, and go.

The rules were simple: the town had to be small, the route could not include limited access thoroughfares, and we had to eat dinner there. In the same way that the modern green signed tree lined American highway kills the soul, the weird twisty ways that ghosts still use to go on holiday can ignite things, spark conversation, give rise to connection. There was a high "look at that" factor; we took notes at 45 miles per of odd handmade signage, weird buildings, llamas. We went on roads that still owned a place in what they wove through, and they somehow never failed to serve up surprises. At the end of that, we would find ourselves in a diner made from a pinioned caboose, or eating squash and haddock by the sea on a porch, or splitting a hot apple pie and wedge of cheddar four ways on the hood of the car in an orchard, fighting off the cold wind as the sun went down behind the hills. They were not all brilliant, those trips: many were iffy, and some disasters. But we saw a tremendous amount of New England much closer than I imagine most would, not just because of the way we went, but that we took care to watch it slide by.

In New England, the stunt is possible; there is stuff out there, hidden between the cities and big towns and middling towns. Hole in wall places that serve a four-story hamburger without apology. That sort of thing. The scenario is less likely here where I am now, but we try, and we make do (in our present situation, the anchor point of discovery seems to be the soft ice-cream stand, and we do most of our explorations in warmer weather). In the immediate environs, we have taken to investigating as best we can the alternate routes, the odd alleyways, the unknown ways from here to there. We do it by car, and we do it on foot. I try to walk where I go when I can, and I sometimes try to find as many routes as is reasonable to keep the experience fresh. In a curious effect to the opposite, I have found myself very intimately acquainted with my most often walked routes, and I have begun to look forward to taking them again. I do believe it is this: I know them well enough now that the slow pace at which they change has become open to me, and I can see the shift of things. It is somewhat comforting.

The other day on the train I was a faceless person in among all the other faceless people. I will be clear: I was not doing anything that seemed to attract any attention. I was somewhat tired, and in my own turn my eyes fell on this person or that one as we were jostled here and there, but I was discarding the information as soon as it met me. I was coming out of the reverie of that hum as we pulled into a stop, not mine, and a young woman kissed me on the cheek and disappeared into the haze of commuters with a laugh and a wave. I have no idea who she was, or even what she looked like, but I know I must of looked past her a dozen times while still on our way.

When I am in the car and driving, I find I build a mental map of the streets I am on as an orthogonal schematic, all turns on either side of forty-five degrees mixing in my mind to a left, right, or no turn at all. It takes some juggling to reconcile this view with the spatial map I keep along side it, but it gets me where I must go. The effect is less pronounced when I am a passenger, but it lingers. It is when I walk that I grasp the subtlety of the places I go: the imperfect geometry of the joins, the low rises and slopes, the tenor of the grit and trash thrown to the wayside by the traffic. It is at that speed that I have the best hope of understanding how I go, if I am paying attention.