Cities

The other day I had a sort of déjà vu moment, as a car passenger in the rain. It brought me back to driving around Olympia, one of the larger towns I've lived in. I had only a learner's permit, so I wasn't able to drive on my own, and thus never explored the perimeter of the populated area. Because I couldn't picture the limits of the city, I never felt quite right about my own place in it. I didn't realize that until now.

I've never lived anywhere else that felt that way. In every other place, I have driven or walked or biked to the edges, and known where things ended and the rural places began. Even living in Spokane during college, I knew the city well enough to know where I was in it. I had been to the southerly ends of the South Hill, and far beyond the north end many times. I knew where it ended in the west, and how it gradually melted away in the east, toward Idaho.

Part of this is geographical knowledge, and part of it is having control and freedom. As a kid, I was free to bike and wander all over the small town where we lived. I knew all the edges. But as a teenager in Olympia, I didn't have the time or the freedom to wander so widely. Also, it was often rainy, which is not the best for biking. I walked a lot, in our neighborhood and downtown, but that covered only a small portion of the populated areas.

I always enjoy visiting cities, even enormous ones — London, Paris, Mumbai, New York, Toronto, Quebec, Seattle, San Francisco — but I have no desire to live in one. It would take so long to wander the streets and find the perimeter, and meanwhile things would keep changing before I had the chance to memorize them. I enjoy walking the same streets each day, seeing the same houses and sometimes the same people, never being more than a few miles from woods and fields and empty spaces.

In a city, it's easy to blend in and just observe, but a city is also

"this place of endless intersections where people never meet."
— Underground Time, Delphine de Vigan