On the Influence of Place on Place
Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.
I took a coach bus from Boston to Manchester, New Hampshire. I don’t normally take buses in this country-either I have a car or I ride the train. New England was once my home but is no longer; after only a year, I recognize its beauty as transient; I perceive it as a place existing in contrast to other places: hilly, richly wooded, old. These strangenesses, combined with the impact of ugly fluorescent-on-blue patterned fabric on seats and ceiling, too-cold air conditioning and an uncomfortable narrowness of seats palpably not on an airplane, rendered in me a displacement.
When I glanced up thus detachedly from drowsy study of my lap as the bus wheeled sharply out of a park-and-ride lot in Londonderry, NH, and a low hillside knotted with bleached shrubs spun into view, I found myself for an instant transported to roughly equivalent conveyance pulling out of a dusty motel parking lot on the outskirts of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. In a moment that low stucco wall would appear: the one with the graffiti mural of the feathered serpent. The pickup truck in the next lane would pull away and be replaced with another 30 years older, half its size. The blood in my head would begin to expand from the altitude. And the unconscious potbellied man encroaching on my elbow room in the seat beside me would become, though dressed wildly differently and dreaming in a different tongue, perhaps no less inscrutable.
Manchester is a run-down city, an old mill town. I had considered it an ugly city. Between brown concrete high-rises, gradually, imperceptibly, the empty brickworks refill with boutique manufacturers. Absent windowpanes are replaced with new glass. Massive raised highways, long since displacing streetcars, divide and circumvent.
I disembarked and walked for miles to destinations I’ve visited many times, always by car. Again, the exhaustion, the pack sweaty on my back, enforced a mindset I have previously reserved for foreign lands. Permitted the abundance of time and necessity to traverse the city on foot and at length, I discovered neglected Victorian graveyards, ponds, hillside neighborhoods in need of paint, an overgrown railroad track, bridge abutments enriched with graffiti. Between the Piscataquog and Merrimack rivers I found the city’s old French-Canadian quarter, untouched by urban renewal, the main street lined with pawn shops, barber poles, diners. I visited the library. I sat in empty parks on rusted benches, reading.
The impatience and familiarity of home would have prevented me doing any of this.
All of which is just to say again, I guess, that in order to come home, you have to go away.