Notes on Walking: Athens, London & Ottawa

By Ashley Alexandra:

There are two million cafes in Athens and each one is perfect.

In the summer, the city smells like hot garbage. But at 2am, sitting on our balcony, I could smell the bread baking from Takis’ Bakery just below. There isn’t a better smell in Athens. Except maybe for the scent of night-blooming jasmine along the Acropolis. It’s so sweet it nearly suffocates you.

It’s illegal to charge more than 50 cents for a bottle of water. It’s simply too hot to mark up such an essential item. Athens is hilly and exhausting. The sidewalks are fleeting. They drop off without a moment’s notice and all of sudden, you’re in the street facing off against bad drivers, the worst drivers, who are trying to kill you for daring to enter their designated space. How does anyone operate a wheelchair, or a broken foot or a pram in this city? They must stay home.

It’s hazardous, but rewarding to walk in Athens. Athens is all vistas and tableaus. No one in their right mind would tire of seeing the Parthenon suddenly appear, floating in the distance, when they turn a corner. So too, the crumbling storefronts that look like they haven’t been shopped in since 1974. Or the old men on a corner kafeneio sipping coffee and gossiping. I never tire of these things.

There are flowers everywhere in Athens. They grow wildly. Jasmine, Bougainvillea, Wisteria. Spiderwort, Lantana, Poppies. Flowers that would cost you $60 for a couple of blooms in a clay pot back home. There are Cypress trees and Monstera. Palms and Giant Aloes dotted all along the hills. Mega Aloe. Megalo.

I never wore sandals at night, for fear of cockroaches scurrying over my feet. Late night Athens is so very alive. You don’t see much public drunkenness in Athens, but everybody is gathering and drinking and yelling. Families come out at 11pm; children can finally use the playground equipment without getting burnt by the metal.

Athens is pink and fractal. You can walk to the ocean in an hour. Once I watched it snow on the Acropolis. It’s the best place in the world.

***

London is an international space station. It’s moody and orderly.

I hated London. I made playlists about wanting to leave and walked around angrily. There are so many private gardens and gated communities in London. Who do these Hampstead snobs think they are?

The public parks in London, though, will change your life. The best Christmas I’ve ever had was spent drinking a coffee while walking in Hampstead Heath. Reading the names of the various species of roses in Regents Park is a walking meditation. I’ve heard there are even dinosaurs south of the river but I never made it there. I have seen the parakeets, though. And the deer. But it's the foxes, nocturnal and elusive, that delight me the most.

Nobody looks at you in London. There is no unwanted eye contact. This is a city of anonymity - something I didn’t know that I desperately needed until I got it. The homes in London, curtains ajar, practically beg you to sneak a peek as you walk by - another simple, anonymous joy.

London is brise-soleils and bench dedications. Always remember to read the plaque. If you’re lucky, it’ll punch you in the gut.

London is a vortex. It’s 800 small villages that have nothing to do with each other and the architecture shifts accordingly. I walked from my home in Finsbury Park to my office in Bloomsbury. From overcrowded sidewalks to quiet gardens. On Holloway road, I walked past Turkish grannies rolling gozleme in the kebab shop windows. On Gower street, I walked past enough blue plaques for a year’s worth of history lessons, which all boil down to this: everyone who’s anyone has lived in London. London didn’t even have a Mayor until the year 2000. There is no centre. It does not hold.

London is a brutalist utopia. The Barbican. Alexandra Estate. Trellick Tower. Balfron. Brunswick Centre. Royal Festival Hall. These are places built for walking. The architects just didn’t plan on cars getting in the way. London is a refuge for the perambulating, misunderstood modernist.

It feels good to walk in London. It’s so easy to walk in London. It’s better to walk than take the Night Bus, certainly on a Saturday night. Just watch out for moped thieves. Don’t stand checking your phone at an intersection. Actually, just keep walking if there are no cars. Watch the traffic, not the traffic lights.

Bury me in Abney Park cemetery. Or in Highgate, next to Karl Marx and his maid. Or maybe just a bench dedication along the Parkland Walk.

***

Ottawa is just a concept. It could be Dallas or Calgary or Buffalo. Where is our vernacular? Why can’t I see it?

It’s difficult to walk around the city that you grew up in with fresh eyes. I walk past memories. Dull and stupid memories. There’s where I had my root canal (Carling ave). There’s where I skipped school and bought my first records (Lincoln Fields Mall). There’s where I almost got married (Hintonburg). Ottawa is an unwelcome memory palace.

If you walk one hour in any direction in Ottawa, you will inevitably hit unwalkable, ugly sprawl. It’s unwalkable because it’s ugly. It’s devoid of density. Every city has soulless suburbs, but Ottawa is drowning in them.

I don’t have to watch my phone or my bag in Ottawa. I can walk along the canal at 2am. The cars are still dangerous, but at least you can fight back here; I slam on their hoods when they try to cut me off.

There is a thick layer of ice along the sidewalks for five months of the year here. The city government doesn’t care about pedestrians. Helsinki has heated sidewalks. Ottawa has a transit system whose train tracks freeze in the winter.

Ottawa is fragmented and complacent. Everyone looks at you as you pass by. What are they staring at?

For an entire month last winter, nazis and white supremacists took over the downtown streets and occupied the space directly below my apartment. I threw ice at them from my balcony and gave them the finger as I walked by. I told my boyfriend that I hated it here and booked a trip to London.

***

Ashley Alexandra was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada. She has lived, worked and walked in the UK and Greece. She is a militant pedestrian and a strong advocate of participatory democracy.

Spring Grove

By Eugene Navakas: 

Winter:

Three mute swans live in this cemetery. We hear one before we see it. It flings itself forward against a stiff, stubborn sheet of surface ice, so fiercely, so indefatigably, that we wonder whether we should help. This is common winter behavior, our phones tell us, not to worry, but the force is so brutal and compulsive, the breast so soft and undefended, that we struggle to believe them. The swan’s face is unreadable. It makes no vocal sound. We’ve seen it in strange postures before⎯once, standing on the steps of a grand mausoleum, gazing into the tomb through a bronze veil of Arts-and-Crafts grape leaves, as if contemplating the past and future and all the world’s lost things⎯but it is, after all, an animal. There is a limit to our ability, however much we may refine it, to understand what it wants.

What we can do is walk. Every Saturday, for twelve months, with our boots we trace trails across 450 acres of hilly parkland devoted to the peculiar mix of feral nature and steady human memorialization. We aren’t the only ones. There are long, snaking funeral corteges for which we respectfully step aside and sometimes halt, arrested by a driving, rhythmic rumble leaking through the windows of a hatchback at the rear. There are joggers, whooshing past in suspended clouds of breath, cheeks flush with wind and cold and the heightened fluency of pounding, reliable hearts. There are even guided tours, groups of five or ten around a single, heavily bundled figure. Sharp mitten-dartings punctuate her recitation, before a familiarly grand mausoleum, about the Canteloupe King within. He grew rich, she says, by using refrigerated rail cars to ship Colorado melons nationwide.

Spring:

In March we turn and gasp at a great blue heron, portent of the coming profusion. It freezes at the lip of a pond, amid sunning turtles, and so do we. The turtles are red-eared sliders, the most popular pet turtles in the United States. They are also among the most damaging invasive species, outcompeting native turtles at great expense to ecosystem biodiversity and even human health, in the form of salmonella infection. The heron is a juvenile, more gently shaded than its maturer counterparts. Instead of blacks and whites, here suffuse more smoky blues and grays, fading as they extend from wing and impossibly sinuous neck to a long spearpoint of orange-bellied beak. The bird stares back at us, sidelong, from the black pit at the center of its banana-bright eye, then flaps up and out over green water⎯gliding, mouth open wide with seeming glee, until resettling, safer, on the far shore. The Eastern Redbuds show early signs of flower, but they’re barely intimations of the riotous, purple future.

Our asphalt path leads straight to May, beneath skies deep as ocean and the soaring, white-hulled wings of turkey vultures. Each branch, now, is fragrant color, sweet with bees. The Higan Cherries weep tears so cream they’re pink, so pink they’re cream, moody and intense as dreams. Around one bend, the stones themselves sprout flowers. Arcing, vibrant, lush cascades of custom, deeply felt bouquets⎯GRAMMY; a can of energy drink; a three-foot baseball; the wreathed photo-print of an ultrasound⎯dazzle gray- and red-granite monuments like stars. Thistles carved in sharp relief peek out behind the floral burst, below all-capped Scottish surnames. Each year, come Memorial Day, Scottish Travelers return to these stones, this parkland cemetery, to mourn and cherish their dead. If you search the digital record, you’ll find a contemptible archive of fear and bigotry, exoticized misunderstanding. An online business magazine tries to link the changing scope and luxury of the annual display to its own broad economic forecast. But if, for a moment, you breathe in the display yourself; if you pause, at respectful distance, on the trip back toward the sliders and the Weeping Cherries; you may feel a sharper, more familiar pang⎯something living, something lost.

Summer:

Summer is a season for the ears. What better place than a graveyard for hungry, roused life to fly shrieking from the ground? Here, specifically, over half a billion Brood X cicadas⎯roughly 1.5 million per acre⎯burrowed into the soil as fresh-hatched nymphs in 2004. For seventeen years, they fed on roots and tree sap less than a foot below the surface, until last week they tunneled up and out. The males broke through first, shedding skins and rapidly contracting tymbals, the clicking reverberators that, in chorus, sync into a jangly, hissing call loud as a motorcycle engine. The females heard that call, and now they’re everywhere. Pavement, grass, bushes, trees. Your car, your hair. Even the chocolate shop uptown, if you’re game for a crunch and can brave a mid-pandemic crowd. Their eyes are ladybugs, glossy red buttons with faint black spots for holes. Or at least that’s what we think their eyes are, until, much later, magnified, we spot the other three. Onscreen, inset like jewels on an igneous plain between submerged red moons, hides a tiny triangular trio. They’re called “ocelli,” simple eyes, and as far as we can see, they distinguish light from dark.

It’s funny how the greenest days, air thick with water, hot with sound, can also feel so full of death. In two short months, the cicadas will have come and gone, their seventeen-year regeneration restarted, today’s lively bodies in stacks like rotting blankets, warming future generations beneath the dirt. One of the most spectacular structures in these half-shorn, half-wild hills is a private Gothic Revival funerary monument built in 1870 in the style of Paris’s medieval Sainte-Chapelle. Its first interment was the English whiskey magnate whose fortune paid for its construction, as well as the transfer of his remains to marble catacombs eight years after initial burial in parts no longer known. On the second floor, above the crypts, sleeps a tall and narrow chapel twelve feet wide but thirty deep and thirty-four high⎯an austere, long-suffering space we’ll likely never see. While even on sweltering, swarming summer afternoons, the exterior remains a popular stage for professional photography, the heavy doors stay locked, the wrought-iron gates chained. Brides and grooms and Instagram influencers grin wide before the retreating flying buttresses of a family in disrepair. Just three Brood-X life-cycles after the building’s birth, the magnate’s granddaughter tried, and failed, to have it razed.

Fall:

It’s not hidden, but it takes a little looking to find the graves of Levi and Catherine Coffin, unmarked until 1902, when a memorial was erected in personal tribute by the city of Cincinnati’s Black population. During the forty-one years from their marriage to the end of the Civil War, the Coffins aided 3,000 enslaved people as they risked their lives in search of freedom. The Coffins’ home in Fountain City, Indiana became known as the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. Levi himself was often called its President. The landmark we use to return to this quiet, shattering spot⎯just seven miles north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon, the old, antebellum border⎯beckons only a few paces away. A fat, trunk-like branch radiates out like a sine wave from the base of a squat tree. It skims briefly above the trimmed, leaf-pocked grass, then dives, submerged, before again swooping back up. So much of Autumn feels between. Leaves turning, half-glorious, half-gone.

Our air comes quick, our tendons groan, as we lean ahead into the circuit’s final stretch. The trees buoy us⎯great oaks and beeches; sycamores; maples; a prodigious, solitary September elm, a national champion⎯as if a god would compete. Pixelated crests of red and orange, green and yellow, each shade just slightly tilted off of true, draw up our eyes to the spotlit, golden-hour sunbursts of hunting hawks. Closer to our feet, a labored scurry. A groundhog galumphs through underbrush and disappears. A frog’s twin bulbs peep up like periscopes above a dollhouse sea, then quickly dive and vanish. Around a corner, flustered scrabbling from a bewildered flock of spindle-legged turkeys, surprised from their leisure beneath the awning of a portable funeral tent. A mermaid rises from a harp atop a bed of kelp and conch and a guardian ring of dolphins. Louisa Lawson fished her out from marble in 1887. Now she decorates the tomb of the world’s once-largest manufacturer of architectural sheet metal. In the end, however, we return to the swans⎯which today, though on opposite sides, all share the same turbid, algal pool. There’s a kind of paradox to writing through the seasons. A temptation to squeeze shape from a cycle that never stops. We turn away and keep walking.

***

Eugene Navakas is a lit. Ph.D. turned TV writer who splits time between Oxford, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. His 2020 crime drama pilot script GALAPAGOS, TEXAS was recognized on Kyle's List here, and his dramedy pilot script EXPECTATIONS won the 2016 UCLA Extension TV Pilot Writing Competition. He also updated and co-performed a 19th-c. folk song about coral, which was featured on a podcast hosted by the Newberry Library in conjunction with his wife's academic environmental research here.

Sheffield General Cemetery

By Sarah Alwin:

Walking is a habit that I have come to appreciate more as I have grown older, being perhaps more naturally attuned to the lure of the motor vehicle and a slightly horrified witness to the end of its golden age. The first time I was allowed behind the wheel of my parents’ car was when I was seventeen in 1995. It was a Honda Civic which my mum had astutely insisted on buying over any other make as it had been Car of the Year in 1984. It was a terrifying experience for my dad, even though we were in the relative safety of a deserted car park near where we lived on the breezy West Coast of Singapore. In fact it had such an impact on us both that I didn’t actually learn to drive until I was almost 21 and my dad played no further part in it, having died not long after that first test drive, though not as the result of trauma from that event I should add. It’s one of my funnier, fonder memories of him: his pulling up the handbrake and telling me that perhaps this was enough and shouldn’t we head back for dinner, to which, shell-shocked, I agreed without protest. I have always liked to jump in a car, either as a passenger inevitably nodding off to the soporific rhythms of the engine like a milk addled baby or as the driver, the promise of excitement just round the corner, armed with an A to Z or roadmap. Even the routine commute to work has in the past had the appeal of solidarity and often hilarity generated by the car pool or when undertaken solitarily as in recent years, the moments of quiet, cocooned in the seal of the horseless carriage, speeding down the motorway, or, more usually, stuck in rush hour traffic.

Now middle age has allowed me to enjoy a walk more. I used to run, and felt good doing it. Until I didn’t. My knees and hips still protest at the damage done running daily in my thirties, and my body in its forties has so far appreciated a good walk instead. And so the whoosh and vroom of my wheels or the urgency of the run has given way to the slower, more wholesome pleasures of a ramble. I have a lovely friend who once told me that she was a committed pedestrian and even though I rolled my eyes internally, she really meant it so that I wouldn’t go out of my way to give her a lift and I do appreciate her turn of phrase. I am certainly not a committed pedestrian (yet!) but may be one day.

In this one respect — walking a round walk — I was quite well prepared for the UK brand of lockdowns in the pandemic, switching to daily walking once for an hour in that first iteration of restrictions with relative ease in comparison to all the other adjustments life had in store during those slightly surreal times. I rediscovered some windy snickets and lesser used paths in those bright days when the weather was just uncharacteristically gorgeous, cloudless, and un-English, walking for pleasure and release rather than to work.

During consecutive rounds of restrictions I found a favourite walk and a place of sanctuary and intense contentment. I avoided the more popular parks, eschewing them in favour of the quieter spots near my home. This takes me neatly to the Sheffield General Cemetery, or ‘gen-cem’ as it is sometimes affectionately known. It is probably my closest green space and woefully underused by the many people who live in the vicinity. My children have been going there for years, first to hobble round the gravestones when they were toddlers, and then latterly unaccompanied by me to meet friends for football in the often overgrown central patch of grass which flattery would call a field. It turns out that this open grassy area had many more graves on it until the 1970s when some bright spark bought up the land, wanted to build houses on it, cleared the headstones (but not the remains!), applied for planning permission, didn’t get it, sold the land for a nominal fee back to the council... In all, between the cemetery’s inception in 1834, its opening in 1836 and its closure in 1978, 87,000 people were buried there, which is hard to believe given its diminutive acreage.

The Gatehouse – Sheffield General Cemetery.

There’s a wonderful radio programme by Tania Hershman, Who Will Call Me Beloved? (you should definitely check it out on BBC Sounds) and I listened to it for the first time on my way to swimming, taking a shortcut through the cem. It was recommended to me by a friend, Shaun, who I have only met briefly, once, at a conference but he was so warm and kind and I follow him on Twitter, and he is somehow part of my life now, exemplifying the very best and most miraculous part of social media. The programme is beautiful and Hershman contemplates what she would like inscribed on her gravestone as she walks through and discovers more about the lives of the people buried in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester. The first time I listened to it I had just read Bee Reaved by Dodie Bellamy which is a selection of her essays about the death (and life) of her lifelong partner Kevin Killian. Bellamy writes so beautifully and disgustingly about everything, not just death, and this book stays with me in my head and my heart. Hershman’s is a moving programme which sits well in tandem with Bellamy actually, about love and living and remembrance and I have listened to it more than a few times as I make my way around the cem. I like the sound of Hershman’s voice: soothing and serious, reflective and exploratory. It’s a multi-sensory experience and I like the juxtaposition of other people’s lives in Manchester on the lives of those lying in the gen-cem here in Sheffield. I like to listen to podcasts on the way round or actually mainly French synthy pop or any kind of easy dance music of the reassuringly numbing variety so that I don’t have to concentrate on lyrics but can walk to a standard four-four rhythm and allow my deep fried brain a gentle haziness. It’s leafy and quiet and there’s always a sense of calm even if on the odd occasion you catch a gathering of fervent dogs and their walkers or the enthusiastically demented toddlers from the nearby forest school schlepping about in all weathers.

The cemetery is not a maudlin place for me; rather it is one for contemplation before work or unwinding after. Sometimes it is a cool, shaded route to Ecclesall Road for the bus or shopping, and other times it is the shortcut to the railway station or town. Mostly though it’s a pleasant and extremely short round walk, a way of recharging efficiently. It is beautiful in all weathers, especially in winter when the bright of the snow sets off the gothic and abandoned Anglican chapel at the top of the cem so dramatically. 

The Anglican Chapel looking extra Gothic in the winter.

Another wintery snap – the cemetery is teeming with life all year round.

Recently, long overdue works have begun to shore up the foundations of some of the structures in the cemetery: repairs to the catacombs, walkways, and some of the more sumptuous and overwrought memorials. This work has disrupted my walks, taking me on different paths as JCBs and workmen close down familiar routes. The voluntary team from the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust who tend the cemetery so dutifully continue their talks and events with good cheer and so it happens that I attend one at the start of August on a bright, hot afternoon with my mother who I have not seen for three years to find out a little about the history of the gen-cem and its inhabitants.

The ongoing works to the cemetery … sometimes taking me on different paths.

The catacombs were not that popular as a final resting place – they were an idea borrowed from France that didn’t travel so well. Nonetheless work is being undertaken to avoid their collapse here.

The loveliest thing about this tour is that it reminds me that Sheffield is a place not only of industry but also, necessarily, of subversion. There are many beautiful monuments to the big names of the men who were cornerstones of the economic success of this city, but most pulsating, poignant, belligerent of all is the more modest grave stone of the Chartist and agitator, Samuel Holberry, who died in York Castle at the tender age of 27 after being made to work the treadmill illegally, a punishment which sounds barbaric and desperate. Peter Wingfield, our volunteer tour guide, tells us that in death, Holberry became a martyr and 50,000 people came to the funeral, which was a big deal at a time when the entire population of Sheffield only totaled 150,000. The Chartists were trying to secure the vote for working men. It is so moving to see Holberry’s headstone which is in the non-conformist section of the cemetery and today reads as urgently as ever: a utopian, idealistic epitaph. 

The Samuel Holberry grave

His headstone reads:

SACRED
Is the Memory of
SAMUEL HOLBERRY

WHO AT THAT EARLY AGE OF 27 DIED
IN YORK CASTLE, AFTER SUFFERING
AN IMPRISONMENT OF 2 YEARS AND 8
MONTHS, JUNE 21st 1842,
FOR ADVOCATING WHAT TO HIM APPEARED
TO BE THE TRUE INTEREST OF THE PEOPLE OF
ENGLAND
VANISHED IS THE FEVERISH DREAM OF LIFE:-
THE RICH AND POOR FIND NO DISTINCTION HERE,
THE GREAT AND LOWLY END THEIR CARE AND STRIFE
THE WELL BELOVED MAY HAVE AFFECTIONS TEAR
BUT AT THE LAST, THE OPRESSOR AND THE SLAVE
SHALL EQUAL STAND BEFORE THE BAR OF GOD:
OF HIM, WHO LIFE, AND HOPE, AND FREEDOM GAVE,
TO ALL THAT THRO’ THIS VALE OF TEARS HAVE TROD.
LET NONE WHEN MURMUR ’GAINST THE WISE DECREE
THAT OPEN’D THE DOOR, AND SET THE CAPTIVE FREE.

Also of SAMUEL JOHN, his son who
Died in his infancy.

This tablet was erected by his bereft widow.

I love the ornate language, particularly the line vanished is the feverish dream of life, which I will later embroider onto a tote bag in the evening while watching Netflix or cricket. Many founding fathers of Sheffield, and great men and women are buried here. But this is the one final resting space that feels the most remarkable to me, and I was glad to have taken the time to attend the tour if only to know about this grave. The Sheffield General Cemetery Trust started as the Friends of the General Cemetery and is run entirely by volunteers. They are cool people.

We leave Peter and the rest of the tour at the refurbished non-conformist Samuel Worth Chapel, where there are teas and cakes laid out for weekend visitors. He tells me quietly and generously that if I want to know anything more I can come and find any of them by the main Gatehouse on Tuesdays, as that is when the volunteers meet to garden and tend to the grounds. You could bob down there too if you are in Sheffield and want a moment of quiet and a gentle, shaded walk. You might see me stalking Holberry’s graveside or haunting the gloomy Anglican Chapel before work.

You can find out more about the Sheffield General Cemetery and the work of the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust here: gencem.org

***

Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

Inches

by Mellisa Pascale:

I’ve lived here long enough to know that for a forty-minute walk, I should start northeast on Henry Avenue. In July, the full green boughs of the sidewalk trees reach out to each other like hands, shading ramblers from the searing afternoon sun. I march past the brick rowhomes, past the single stone houses, past the empty university grounds, and onto Henry Avenue Bridge. All the while, cars rumble by in noisy vrooms. 

After the bridge, a flat rock to the right marks the start of a narrow trail leading into Wissahickon, a 2,000-acre park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Almost as soon as I enter the woodland, a sound like crackling fire draws my eyes up and to the left. A deer lopes away, her tail flashing white as she’s swallowed by thick green brush. I imagine her fleeing deeper into Wissahickon, perhaps north through the long march of trees to golden Andorra Meadow, or maybe east down the valley to the rocky banks of the rushing creek, which is where I’m headed.

As Henry Avenue recedes behind me, the hiss of cars is gradually exchanged for the swish of leaves and the gossip of birds. In another life, it was birds, not deer, that I paused to admire: a fantail’s splayed feathers winking from a silver beech branch, or a kea’s emerald wings soaring in shadowy vales, the varied avian life that had ruled New Zealand’s gnarled terrain in whirrs and cries. But that’s another story. How to summarize New Zealand here, so you’ll understand? I don’t even know what verb to use. Traveling seems inaccurate, since the highlight of my trip was the seven weeks spent not traveling at all but hiding out with books and boots in Te Anau, a lakeside town on the edge of Fiordland National Park. Backpacking has two meanings: it could indicate that I bought an expensive oversize pack to go tramping in the backcountry or that I bought an expensive oversize pack to go from one hostel to another, and each of those is somewhat true but also somewhat imprecise. And wandering isn’t the right word either, for I’m the kind of person who likes to know where she’s going. Suffice it to say that I was once in New Zealand for a longish spell and that every walk in Wissahickon calls forth fragmented memories of heavy boots, quiet mornings out the hostel door, and walking and walking under the trill of birdsong, walking and walking routes with markers.

In Wissahickon, my feet know the way down the valley to the creek. 

A level dirt path, the undergrowth tickling my ankles as I pass the place where the deer once stood. Right, the trail dips and smooths out where mountain bikers usually storm through, but there’s no one today. Left, and my feet think a little harder as rocks and roots pock the descending terrain. A runner passes me, and then I almost catch up to her, my sneakers well-worn by this puzzle of a path. The lower we descend into the gorge, the louder the sound of rumbling water.

Eventually, I step onto Forbidden Drive, a wide gravel track following Wissahickon Creek. Together, track and creek bisect the long park, ribboning from the city limits in the north down to Philadelphia’s Wissahickon neighborhood on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Wissahickon is derived from a Lenape word meaning “catfish creek.” The catfish population has declined, but trout, bass, and sunfish flit through the cool, muddy waters, shaded by oak trees and American beeches. Crossing a stone bridge, I take a second dirt trail ascending the other side of the valley. Sunny tendrils stream through the trees, alighting flecks of schist embedded in the ground. All around, birds warble in the brush and branches. Wissahickon is home to buntings and thrushes, ducks and herons, woodpeckers and cardinals, over two hundred species of birds. I try not to picture myself somewhere else. This park could take my heart if I would let it.  

After coming home from New Zealand, Wissahickon was where I went to prove myself. I would spend three hours on the trails, pretending I was still the person who’d spent eight hours on her first big peak, three days on her longest backcountry tramp. Or I would spend three hours in Wissahickon pretending I was no longer the person who, prior to New Zealand, had considered a twenty-minute walk to be an extravagant lunch break from the office. Dimensions had always been everything: How long did I have to work to save enough money to travel? How many months would I spend in New Zealand? How far could I go when I got there? And when I came home, how much walking was required to keep up with the habits I’d built while away? Walking had been a vessel for connection, and the more I walked, through green farmland or over a mountain spine, the stronger my bond with the land had become, the stronger I had become. Now that I’m back, exploring Wissahickon, I can’t shake the feeling that if I stop walking I’ll float away.

Further north in the park, there’s a bridge that I used to cross on my three-hour rambles—Fingerspan, a covered, steel structure dotted with holes. From inside, I loved how Wissahickon became a mosaic of greens and bronze and blue-sky pieces wrapping around my tired body. “When I think of a bridge,” said Fingerspan’s architect Jody Pinto, from a nearby information placard, “I think of a reaching, a touching, a connection.” True to this vision, the narrow bridge bent over the gap like an appendage sprouting from one side and digging its nails into the other. Whether lingering inside Fingerspan or observing it from without, I could think of nothing but the strange bridge, and where I was.  

But it’s been a while since I’ve felt like doing that particular walk. My lungs are shabby, neglected, by the time this end of the trail spits me out at Rittenhouse Town, remnants of a seventeenth-century paper mill village. The woods at my back, ahead is an old stone barn and creaky picnic tables. Smaller buildings, more Rittenhouse relics, are visible through an outcrop of trees. Everything is still and quiet. Last week, I sat down to read at one of the picnic tables. Mosquitos had gnawed my bare limbs as sweat dripped down my back from the humid summer evening. I’d propped my elbows up and held a book in front of my face. Suddenly, my eyes had caught a fragment of a twig moving across the table’s grey wooden slats. It had scrunched itself up in an arc and then released its body into a flat line. Not a twig. The inchworm was just long enough to cross the gaps between boards, and he performed his strange glissade in an unbroken rhythm across the table. Anytime he hovered in his bent form, he looked like a miniature Fingerspan Bridge. 

Today, taking a seat at the same picnic table and facing out, I entertain the unlikely idea that I’ll see the inchworm again. The mosquitos are absent, and a steady gust breathes cool relief into the stuffy summer afternoon. I can still picture the inchworm’s peculiar gait: scrunch, release, scrunch. Only ever going as far as the length of his body. And I wonder if every time I reach for something, I’m going the same distance that I always do, whether it’s New Zealand or Wissahickon, three hours or forty minutes, the deer’s haphazard flight or a worn route. At the picnic table, I scrunch up my legs and swing them between the bench and the tabletop. I pull out another book. I don’t see the inchworm again. 

***

Mellisa Pascale’s essays and travel guides have been published by TulipTree Review, City Creatures Blog, Passion Passport, Matador Network, and other publications. She holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and will soon begin studying for her M. Phil. in Medieval Language and Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She is working on a travel memoir. Find her at mellisapascale.com

Walking cities with my mother

By Anandi Mishra:

Earlier this year during the covid-19 lockdowns in Delhi, I realised how much I had always loved walking not knowing why so. Flipping through old photo albums, I found photographs of myself walking in various cities. A friend or a boyfriend, always someone clicking me from the back, as the city spread itself out before me. Consuming walking nostalgia from the pre-covid era, reading different kinds of writing about walking, listening to podcasts about it, eventually I started dreaming about it. In one of those dreams, an ancient, grainy visual played. A memory from my childhood returned. My mother walking five or six steps ahead of me, as we both made our way to the nearby market in my hometown in north India, Kanpur. Watching her walk, always trying to keep pace with her, I had memorised the vision – always her walking, walking ahead, walking to or from, and me trying to follow, match her stride. That’s when I remembered how she was the one who had taught me mapping places on foot, implicitly, all throughout my childhood. 

As a working woman in the 80s and 90s of north India, my mother defied several social odds. She was married, had two kids, an extended set of in-laws to take care of and an entire household to run, yet she chose to work. In addition to that, bereft of any personal vehicles, and due to the general plight of public transport in Kanpur, she walked to most places. So much so that walking became an extension of her personality. As I started going to school, she took me along, to accompany her on most such walks.

In those times (as now) to most people, walking was the very antithesis of existing in a city as a woman. It meant a certain slowing down, attentive step by step discursive engagement with the immediate surroundings that we were meant to avoid altogether in the first place. While on such walks, several times, men shouted at us telling us to hop on their cars or bikes, or to talk to them – but my mother carried on unperturbed, too consumed in the pleasures of her walk to respond to anything.

My predominant memory of walking with my mum when I was little is how fast she walked. Walking with her, I too quickly learned to look both ways and to run across the street, pace myself out of a thick crowd and never get lost.

This was in the decades before we knew of the concept of the flaneur or flaneuse. Now as I try to recall those formative experiences of walking, Walter Benjamin’s writing comes to mind. “The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls…. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.” If not in the same length, breadth or depth, but my experience of consuming the city was somewhat the same. 

*

As we entered the twenty first century, the danger of getting lost and disconnected in technology loomed large. People fretted on the urban dweller’s dependence upon it and that it would mean an erosion or indefinite derailment of contact with others and nature. We were afraid that humans would be another notch removed from consciousness as the individual will no longer touch or be touched by what once was most natural. These fears eluded me, as I continued walking even into my late twenties. 

I experienced a strange joy in being alone on the streets of various cities, at odd hours, walking with my phone in hand. I used the phone to record what I saw around. I wrote, took photographs and videos. It was not as though I was lost, but as if I was losing myself to the city.

Benjamin writes about this: “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest…”

This was similar to the meandering walks my mother took in her days. She would walk from

her office to the bookstore, to the temple and nearby sweet shop in the vicinity. Ambling, she would take in the surroundings, nod and wave and say hello to her friends and acquaintances who ran several of the businesses, who she had made friends with over the years. While accompanying her I had learnt these primal pleasures of walking, measuring a city up and down by putting one foot in front of the other.

To be able to call a place my own she taught me, required that we first stray into unfamiliar streets, at strange hours. The shock of the new, she said, will be disruptive at first, but it will also break the insulating, silken lining of culture and grooming, allowing me to sink my teeth into a new way of exploring a place. 

In walking thus so, we were able to transcend the immediate relationship of mother and daughter, and model a companionship as co-walkers. In pacing the city of my birth up and down, one foot before the other, my mother set an example for me before any of the modern day flâneuses, implicitly giving me permission to navigate my (or any) city on my own terms and make a place my own. Her constant insistence on walking, became a part of my body, culture and daily routine the way, as Garnette Cadogan writes in his seminal essay “Walking While Black”, “home became home”.

When I learned of the word “flânerie” it gave meaning and shape to my ways of reading the city by walking on foot. The Berlin flaneur Franz Hessel while writing about flânerie and flaneurs had said that they perceive passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. The more I read the more I unearthed the connections between flânerie and being a woman, and how female flânerie is a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. 

In her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London Lauren Elkin elaborates on that: “Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness. Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote.” 

That my hometown barely had any “walking infrastructure” did not deter my mother. In the remove of her strolls, she found solace. In sauntering, strolling, wandering, promenading, she created her own time. And I imbibed these learnings from here. To not rush through a walk as a commuter, or as a morning passenger running behind their bus.

In that way, all cities were immensely walkable. I loved pacing up and down the various soulless parts of towns, observing what was happening. Dull sidewalks were akin to the stage of a theatre. I saw people going about their odd jobs, sketchy businesses, small works, toiling away idiosyncratically. Watching people navigate through traffic, and other humans became my way of spending idle time. I invested hours in walking the sidewalks in big cities to get a broader view of how people live on the roadside, how the city is stitched together, the history and the present colliding at all times. On a drab day, walking through the melee of people that were always thronging the streets became my way of knowing my place in the world. And in the lockdown it felt poetically justified to remember that I had learnt it all from my mother.

***

Anandi Mishra is a Delhi-based writer and research communicator who has worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. Her writing has been published by or is forthcoming in the Harvard Review, The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Popula, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. She tweets at @anandi010.

Winter Spell: A walk through Heptonstall

By Anna Evans:

These grasses of light
Which think they are alone in the world
These stones of darkness
Which have a world to themselves
– Ted Hughes

In my hand a shard of ice. I trace the shape of its perimeter. A prism hastily frozen and troubled by wind and rain, trapping air and all the falling elements of the earth below. It has a solidity, a texture that hints at the colours of the land beyond its edges, of green and brown, opaque, and patterned. The mesmerizing quality of looking through where the rain froze into earth in crystals of reflected light. On its surface bright scatters of light like carvings, as though initialed or drawn in delicate lines of white silver.

It is cold when we walk here. The spell of winter freezes over ponds and parts of rivers. The ground is held silent, the saddened grass still, nothing moves. In the winter when the light is always fading. The icy cold brings respite from the valleys running down with rain, from eroded riverbanks, the wind that batters fragile skeleton trees. Each frozen puddle lies in trails from rising rivers. The muddy ground is packed in tightly, ready to move again.

From this ground to the dark stone of houses. A steep hill leading upwards to the village perched on a hill, notable for the preservation of its narrow lanes and cobbled streets, windswept and shaken by the elements. Walking through the lanes past stone cottages with slate roofs and chimneys, stable doors of different colours. In the centre of a little square of cobblestones and paving stands a tree with lights and decorations. The village inns are lantern-lit, inviting.

In these quiet times there are words and pictures to bring it closer. Instead of going there, I am picturing the journey to Heptonstall along the road that travels from Mytholmroyd to Todmorden. The familiar stone of the houses and winter trees, the shadows of the hills, seem to blend one into the other.

The poet found in this landscape a mythology of stone and water; the words to write about a time already vanishing, the remains of Elmet. The haze that hangs across the valleys, the mist of rain. In the smoke from the mills and chimneys of factories, the ceaseless damp that made its way into the stone, to turn it black. In the weavers cottages are the histories of the lives that passed through; the blackened walls that absorbed their voices. We walk along to the old church its ancient frames laid open, exposed against the sky, underfoot uneven tombstones. You wrote of the ruined frame of the old church as the ancient bones of a giant bird that landed.

In the graveyard, we find the headstone marking barely thirty years in letters plain and black. Contested little stone that makes its claim to the land, far from home or fanfare. On a hilltop resting place exposed, with its pantheon of wind and rain and harsh elements, among stones you walked. In the poet’s eye only stone remains, moving outwards, ever outwards from the stone of a grave. A singular line to the empty moors and dark skies, forlorn, firm, and resolute. Marking a life turned inwards. You picture dark swans, wings beating, take flight across the valley; not one but many now, their wings spread wide in shelter, over hills and beyond to the crest of an ocean. 

High crags and lines of trees look down to the emptiness of hills, bleak and featureless. The grass seems hardened and scrubbed, it waves and ripples in the wind, unyielding, made to survive the elements. Sometimes you perceive the landscape as nothingness, where everything feels unfixed and even the land is temporary, drowned out by wind.

Drawn in lines the brooding sky, the hanging cloud, the dark constant of the horizon. The moorland furrowed dark and light with grass and rock. Then the line of the crag, a crater curves through and cuts into the landscape precipitous. The dry-stone wall piled up as if taken from the side of the valley and abandoned here. 

In the shelter of the moors, in the winter spell, the light is always fading. Narrow roads lead upwards, disappearing suddenly up impossible ascents, to the villages and farmhouse on the hills; the drear sweep of cloud, or mist: of still. The cycle of rain to river to clouds to hills. Weavers cottages stand tall at the side of the valley and low dark terraces in rows. In the still of winter it is almost possible to sense the residual smoke hanging across the valleys from abandoned chimneys and textile mills. A place caught in time and held by its lines of canals, the stone that trickles down from hill into valley. 

Even a fragment of ice has an accidental quality. As I hold it in my hand attempting to give it a significance, it has begun to melt very slowly. Tiny amounts of water receding from its edges; the shape it has become already changing. I lay it down once more on the cold and frozen soil, already less than whole, so it can continue its existence with every other part of earth and water that lies along the ground I walk. From its edges, moving outwards. 

The landscape leaves its marks, draws its way through my veins, like the road running through tree-lined stretches, where trees tunnel over us. This is how I remember it, etched in, and layered with buildings. The dark river, which is high at this time of year, winds through Hebden Bridge. The town is lit by lights, winter blue. In my hand a shard of ice. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

These streets are life: Withington

Photo: Gursh Nijjar

By Andrew Edgeworth:

Borders are many things; physical, lines on a map, constitutional, binding. But most are psychological. There is a contrast where borders are concerned and while they may not all be manned by armed guards and Government backed, society ensures they remain in place.

In a springtime induced fugue I set out to clear my head, a walk through a neighbourhood I’d come to know over the past twelve months or so. Leaving Ballbrook Avenue I headed on to Palatine Road; the birthplace and home of that great Manchester institution, Factory Records. A blue plaque of commemoration is hidden from all but the most observant. You can still see the spectre of the irascible Tony Wilson on the squalid balcony, gazing down at you, fag in hand. 

In the grounds of one of the horrendously named apartment blocks, (Mottram Manor, Barry Court) the corpse of a cat lies in the undergrowth. The locus delicti unknown, but it had undoubtedly come to rest here in its final moments. In fairness there are worse places to call it a day than under a juniper bush. Had it been run over or poisoned? Who knows? It was not a time to tarry. 

It is here that the Christie hospital seeps into Didsbury gradually, like expanding foam. Every new piece of it is shinier and grander than the last. Progress is signposted by disinfected metals and floor to ceiling strip lights. At one of the many entrances are groups of smokers waiting for death on the pavement, their chemotherapy drips in tow.

The Christie is a non-smoking site

I struggle for a collective noun, the scene neither suburban nor hospice, presents a moral dilemma which forces me onwards. 

Adjacent to me, residents of an anonymous halfway house patrol the pavement in various states of unease. Cigarettes and alcohol hold sway.

Just beyond them the inmates of a nursing home stare on blankly from secure balconies. A vast complex with hourly blue light visits. 

St Cuthbert’s Church stands on the corner of Marriott Street and its foodbank is now just as much a source of salvation. Money is tight and time tighter.

CONFESSIONS: Saturdays: 11am-12pm

The penitent queue stretches back down Palatine Road every Monday lunchtime, and seems to get bigger by the week. In years gone by it would have made the front page of a national newspaper. Now we all put our heads down and shuffle past it on the opposite side of the road. 

Cross over the road my friend, ask anybody but the Government for a lend. 

But the faex populi are not welcome in Didsbury. The needy are an unwanted nuisance in the Tory version of Chorlton. They want their upcycled tables made from unwanted pallets. Just as long as there is still sufficient parking for Range Rovers outside of hipster brunch establishments. Withington is now a little too close for comfort. 

The crossroad with Wilmslow Road and Burton Road mark the unofficial, official start of Withington. An open air theme park for all walks of life, tightly crammed into a place that is different things to different people. Mamucium begins here!

The former White Lion pub is now a Sainsbury’s Local where kind students often sit on the ground outside with the local indigents sharing fags and sandwiches. Long-term cash machine tenants asking about that bizarre concept – spare change. Contactless payment now limits reward. 

The old Scala theatre has been demolished and replaced at the behest of Britannia Group and is now a vulgar set of flats complete with an out-of-place Costa coffee shop on the ground floor. 

Like all apartments they are mandatory luxury – you are no longer allowed, nice or mediocre apartments. No definition exists however. Opposite is yet another set of luxury apartments, balconies affording uneasy viewing for overpaying residents. A strategic reinventing of the local is underway. Old shopfronts have been replaced by bike rack balconies. In Didsbury blocks of apartments (never flats) are given names that couldn’t be further from reality; Alpine Court, Didsbury Gate, Larke Rise. Not so in Withington – they are only allowed a number.

On the main drag a commotion ensues at the bus stop by the now derelict municipal building. A hugely obese man is destroying his walking stick by repeatedly smashing it against the bus stop pole whilst shouting “BASTARD BUS DRIVER” at the top of his voice. The local pedestrians and motorists, despite being at very real risk of injury from flying pieces of cheap timber that are now flying around at all angles, remain oblivious to his protest. The 43 bus adds insult to injury by stopping at the pedestrian crossing a few yards further on. With no stick left he furiously shakes the handles of his wheeled walking frame. The obscenities continue.

Withington high street (Wilmslow Road) is much the same as many others that have suffered in recent years. There is not the spendthrift clientele of the South Manchester ‘villages’ to make it fashionable. The retail sector look is eclectic-poverty, trapped between eras and demography. An Eastern bloc supermarket peddles super strength lager, while charity shops appeal to the classier end of the market. Other businesses have been there since time immemorial and cling on like barnacles to a sea wreck. A laundrette that still runs on 50p pieces, the locksmiths with less life than a deadbolt.

The former bank is like all others in similar locations – derelict. Above the shop fronts, boarded up windows are strewn in graffiti, while at ground level slum dog estate agents prey on low income renters and those in full-time higher education.

Side alleys are not to be ventured down without purpose, the realm of backstreet MOT garages and taxi companies, a permanent haze of oil and cigarette smoke. It’s back-street traditional. Big men in dirty overalls. Big doors and big dogs.

And no ‘High Street’ is complete without boozers. The Victoria is your classic pub where anybody may be unwillingly plucked from the street at any given time to take part in karaoke. Leopard print and lipstick. Flat caps and vapes. Pints of cheap lager and even cheaper bitter. An eternal happy hour where nobody smiles. 

Albert Wilson’s is a more eccentric place altogether. A Sillitoesque corner bar with ceilings seemingly lowered by the weight of time and an uninviting doorway. Mysterious but not to the point of curiosity. 

Students and young professionals choose instead to seek out the safety of familiarity. A vegan café and a hipster bar with monosyllabic names where there appears to be a requirement to dress as if you’ve fallen through the sale rack in TK Maxx to be accepted (my generation of student was nowhere near as adventurous. We were just boring).

The street is now dividing slowly. To the East runs Egerton Crescent with its record store cum coffee-shop and post office. To the West is Copson Street. Another border is slowly materialising. 

The initial impression of Copson Street is one of pound shops in stiff competition, their wares taking over the pavement, an industrial scale operation for entire families each morning. The constant battle of tat outdoing tat. An entire oceans worth of non-recyclable plastic.  Plant pots, shopping trolleys and reusable food containers in a battle for passing trade attention.

More commotion. A man stood by the open door of a scaffolding flatbed truck energetically screams into a phone while inexplicably pointing to the directions he has taken to what is clearly the wrong address. 

I went right down there and then left back there…

I move on in exasperation, passed the mandatory mobile phone repair shop and bookmaker, complete with its FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) promising to ruin yet another life. 

The hub of the street in question however is undoubtedly the location of greasy spoon which sees the denizens of Withington flock daily for a bonne bouche. Come rain or shine the locals huddle at bolero style tables on the pavement, most of whom appear to the victims of widespread hypodontia. A sea of shipwrecked mouths pleading for a willing ear. 

At the various grocery shops care workers of African descent fill shopping trolleys and suitcases on wheels with groceries. Students count change in their hands with a lamentable decision to make over one avocado or a packet of rice. 

Behind the retail sector, Victorian terraces run parallel to the main thoroughfare, gated alleyways act as a honeypot for fly-tippers. Six to a house or split into quick-fix flats, MDF warrens that give fire safety officers sleepless nights.

Nearby, on Mauldeth Road West, a ghost-bike is chained to a lamppost in tribute to Harry Sievey. A local musician and son of Frank Sidebottom creator, Chris Sievey, who perished when his bicycle collided with a car in 2017. 

But these streets are life. Withington is real life, not the show home façade of its snooty neighbour which looks down its nose at it from behind electric gates.

Withington is slowly evolving. High house prices have meant that the people who once fled it are now buying up property. No matter how ugly the new facades of apartment buildings are, investment is there. Once thriving, it hopes to thrive again while Didsbury watches on uneasily.

***

Andrew Edgeworth is a former journalist who has been writing fiction since 2013. He was awarded the 2017 Origins flash fiction prize was runner up in the 2019 Splash Fiction competition. His work has also been published by Fairlight Books. He lives in Manchester with his dog, Orwell.

Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

We walk across the fields to the old village just before tea, and we see that the stork has returned. The nest is on top of the brick chimney above a workshop that is now an art and community hall between the supermarket and the Schloss. But the stork is in the fields, taking languid strides across the rutted ground, while a hooded crow watches on from a safe distance.

Another returnee to the village: the artwork that stands in the middle of the pond, part of a 42-km walking route that links Wiesenburg with Bad Belzig. The artwork represents all the lost and abandoned villages of High Fläming. Those destroyed in the Thirty Years War or left as ghost villages as industry shifted, swallowed by the forest. Each winter the artwork is taken away to protect it in case the pond waters freeze, and each spring it is brought back. The lost villages found once more. 

In the Schloss gardens, the anglers sit along the banks of the ponds, easily maintaining social distance with their umbrellas and low stools, trailers pulled by bicycles and plastic bottles of water and beer. 

At dusk I watch the bats dance between the houses above the gentle orange glow of the street light. I stand on our driveway and look up and down the street. A number of houses are empty. Shuttered and waiting for someone new. A generation change, our neighbour said. 

The new house that we pass on our walks is beginning to take shape. Walls and and a roof. Windows and doors to come. The old tumbledown shack that was the only structure on the once-tangled and overgrown property now has a shiny new big brother. 

The path through the forest follows the old dry valleys formed by the last Ice Age and leads us to the next village. It is there we spot the first swallows of spring, pinging this way and that as we walk down past the houses with their neat gardens to the sandy track out the other side. We’ve never been this far before, and the path leads up to a lookout point that offers as close to a view as you’ll get in Brandenburg without climbing a castle tower or a wooden walkway high above the trees. 

Our neighbouring house has been gutted, the remnants of the old lives lived between those walls piled up in the garden. The things that were left behind when they sold it. Old travel cases and trunks. Hunting trophies. Garden gnomes. The new neighbours are working on it around their jobs, on evenings and weekends, working hard and making good progress. The kids play on piles of sand as the adults pause for a beer and we say cheers across the top of an overgrown hedge. 

In the window of the village library, closed since March, there is a line-up of books: Albert Camus’ The Plague. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. David Wallace Wells’ The UnInhabitable Earth. The librarian has a sense of humour.

In the garden the cherry blossom comes and then the cherry blossom is gone. 

On a walk along the art trail we come to an open door on the edge of a field. In the middle of the 19th century the village of Groß Glien had 42 residents. Now all that remains of the village are the ruins of the church foundations a few steps from the work of art, enclosed in a tangle of brambles and young trees.

At the top of the Hagelberg, a five kilometre run from our house, I’m at the highest point in Brandenburg and the smallest Mittelgebirge in Germany. Or perhaps it is the second highest. It seems that there is a debate, involving places on the borders with other states and rumours of earth movers in the middle of the night in order to take the crown. No matter. It’s so peaceful on the hill it is hard to imagine this is the site of a bloody battle that, in 1813, took 3,000 lives. 

Outside the supermarket the asparagus stand is erected. Beelitz is not far away. They sell white and green asparagus, offcuts for soup and punnets of strawberries. A plastic screen stands between us and the friendly woman who weighs our purchases and takes our money through a small gap at the bottom of the barrier. 

On a run out from the village I see what I think might be wolf droppings, but there’s no internet connection on my phone to check so I take a photograph for later. The results of the research are inconclusive. 

We hear the sirens first. Then see the first engines passing by quickly on our road. Over the fence we hear our neighbour say that he should go down to the station and see what’s what. There’s barely been any rain for months, and the forests are dry as a bone. Twenty minutes later the engines return, slower now, as does our neighbour, ringing his bicycle bell as he turns into the drive.

The latest coronavirus information is posted outside the town hall. The number of new infections, of those who have died, useful telephone numbers and relaxations to contact restrictions. Other notices include planning permission for an extension to the supermarket, and on which days the military will be conducting live fire exercises in the restricted zone. 

In the remnants of the old GDR factory on the edge of the village, the police find two thousand cannabis plants in an old warehouse. Three men are arrested. 

Most mornings a red kite hovers over our garden and most mornings I wonder if it is possible that there is a more beautiful bird. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Studying the Universe from Blackford Hill

Photo: Macumba, Wikimedia Commons Public Domain – Link

By Pippa Goldschmidt: 

Blackford Hill is one of the seven hills of Edinburgh, situated a couple of miles due south of the city centre. The hill seems to mark a boundary of the city, on its north side are the city’s suburbs, arrays of tenement buildings as evenly spaced as any mathematical grid. To the south, the artifice of a golf course soon gives way to fields and moorland. If you travel up the main road to the top of the hill you must first pass under an ornate sandstone arch with a florid inscription and medallion so typical of Edinburgh Victorian architecture. An arch that could be a portal in a Scottish science fiction novel, acting as a gateway to an earlier time or place. Perhaps it also does so in real life, because the hill is host to one of the largest astronomical observatories in the UK, internationally renowned for research on objects in the early Universe.

So far in my life, I must have walked up and down this hill around a thousand times. Very few of these individual journeys have created their own distinct memories, other than the first one. I had been invited to an interview for a PhD place at the Observatory, and even though I had already looked at the route in an A to Z, I was not prepared for the experience of walking up a hill that becomes steeper as you approach its summit. By the time I finally reached the entrance, I was sweating profusely in my smart interview suit and already regretting my journey, my application for the PhD and the whole endeavour. 

However, I was successful and spent the next four years studying at the Observatory. My project was concerned with quasars, incredibly luminous centres of galaxies. Because they emit so much light we can see them from billions of lightyears away, in fact they are the most distant objects known in the Universe. At the time I was studying them, they were comparatively rare; thousands of galaxies had been detected but only a few hundred quasars were known. My job was to find more of them, determine their distances, and try and understand how they were connected to their surroundings – both their underlying ‘host’ galaxy and the wider environment. 

My experience of quasars was formed almost entirely through measuring the numbers attached to them. First, I knew them by their coordinates on the sky. Then they became redshifts, luminosities at different wavelengths and distances. I found that this tendency in the Observatory to experience physical objects through quantitative information started to spill over into the surroundings; as my studies progressed I couldn’t help transforming the hill into data such as the numbers of the houses, and the length of time it took me to reach the summit. (Seven minutes on a good day.) Studying this part of Edinburgh on an old Ordnance Survey map told me that the hill was 1/3 of a mile long. Contour lines centre on the summit like a fingerprint, the bottom of the hill corresponding to 200 feet altitude above sea level, while the Observatory is at 475 feet. 

With time, the hill’s intangible aspects started to become both smaller and more precious: the coconut-almond smell of the flowering gorse bushes in summer, the jagged-tooth view of the castle and the Royal Mile to the north, and the sparkle of the sea to the north-east. The few days each spring when all the frogs in that part of Scotland travelled to the hill to mate and I couldn’t walk more than a few metres in any direction without encountering a gravity-defying tower of them. The oddity that I couldn’t actually see my destination as I walked up the hill, the road rises to meet an open area of scrub land and the Observatory is situated off to one side. The abrupt transition between that scrub land of gorse bushes and thin birch trees, and the estate of the Observatory which is boundaried by a handsome stone wall. The  dichotomy between standing outside on a clear winter evening and gazing up at the anonymous stars, and studying quasars which are all invisible to the naked eye. 

The distinction between the hill and its representation on the map seems straightforward; the hill itself is real rocks, soil, trees and buildings whereas the map is a symbol of the hill on paper or screen. This relationship between the two must be one-sided, the map can’t exist without the reality and many things are present on the hill that are not (yet) mapped. Yet I realised from my work at the Observatory that maps and their corresponding realities are not so easily divided into two separate categories. All we can know of the Universe beyond the solar system is derived from maps. We have constructed maps of the stars in Milky Way, of surrounding galaxies in the Local Group, and of more distant galaxies. Furthermore, these maps don’t have to be of specific objects, like charting the seas on Earth we can plot diffuse gas. We can even map an entity we have not yet directly detected, such as dark matter. We can never hope to know or experience anything other than the maps, so they must always stand in for the reality. In the absence of any other knowledge, perhaps eventually they become that reality. 

*

The Observatory is not the only structure on the hill, about a hundred metres from it is a radio transmission tower used by the police. In the same way that the two poles of a bar magnet oppose each other, these two structures are apparent opposites; the tower is responsible for sending out invisible waves while the Observatory’s purpose is to receive waves from the sky above. Although it does this more indirectly than it used to, its two copper-topped domes (aligned along an East-West axis) each used to house a large telescope but these have long since been mothballed; two mechanical eyes blinded by obsolescence. Many astronomers who work there either travel to telescopes in other locations with better weather and less light pollution, such as Chile or Hawaii, or – increasingly – observe remotely. Telescopes in these places are sent instructions, carry out the observations in an automated fashion and transmit the data back to the Observatory.

I was always aware of a special irony in analysing images taken of the night sky during a Scottish winter day so full of cloud and mist that the Universe seemed like nothing more than a fantastical story written in numbers and graphs.

*

The map of the hill also has an iron age fort marked on it, although I’ve never managed to find it. On the other side of the hill is an eighteenth century house called the Hermitage which stands in a grass clearing, and now functions as the headquarters of a nature reserve. The Observatory, the radio transmission tower, the Hermitage and the fort all can be seen as emblems of specific eras, reminding us that each instance of time must carry along with it earlier times. 

Similarly, we tend to think of places as static and fixed, but one of the first things I learned was that the map of the Universe itself is expanding outwards with almost every galaxy moving away from each other, continuously adjusting their relationships with each other.

The walk at the beginning and end of each working day separated me not just physically, but also psychologically, from the rest of my life in Edinburgh. Its role as a ritual and a boundary was reinforced by the substantial wall surrounding the Observatory. All observatories are inherently not quite of their surroundings, constructed from metal and stone and grounded in the earth, their purpose is to study distant light. Walking up the hill towards the sky was a symbol of my efforts to understand what was far above me. 

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books). Her work has been broadcast and published in a variety of places, most recently in Litro, Mslexia, the Times Literary Supplement and on Radio 4. Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

Memories of Elsewhere: Tre Cime di Lavaredo, by Steve Himmer

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Steve Himmer:

There are better hikes. Hikes where you don't wait in a long line of cars and coaches to pay admission. Hikes that don't begin at a trailhead with three terraced levels of parking and tour buses spilling groggy riders by the hundreds. I've spilled from those buses myself in each of the past three years, bringing successive groups of college students to Italy's Dolomites as part of a course.

The trail, reached after a long walk on pavement, remains crowded as it departs the Refugio Auronzo, your last chance for snacks and souvenirs until the next thirty minutes away. It's entirely flat though there are numerous spots at which enthusiasts might veer off to inspect pale rock formations above or green meadows below. There's as much shuffling between oncoming walkers and getting ahead of slow moving clusters as on any Venetian sidewalk (which my students encounter soon after), with the same risk of selfie sticks swung at eye height. Last summer a drone buzzed overhead the whole route and I found myself uncharitably wishing for the invisible pilot to twist an ankle or crash the contraption or both.

There is no reason, in other words, no reason at all, for any person who enjoys hiking or mountains or being able to hear their own thoughts to visit Tre Cime di Lavaredo in summer. I bring my students up other trails in the region, like the exposed, narrow spine designed to cause vertigo at Cinque Torri. But of all the more meditative, more challenging, wilder places I've walked it's Tre Cime I'm thinking of lately, with its trio of spires in pale lunar stone.

That flat, gravel trail hangs on the rim of a valley, offering sustained views toward a far away lake so blue it can't be described without risking cliché. Overhead, set into the faces of the three peaks themselves, are the shadowed mouths of caves left by soldiers who endured the fierce fighting and vertical living of World War I along that contested border between Austria and Italy. The meadows call out for singing — my students reliably belt selections from The Sound of Music — then stretching out among flowers to bathe in high altitude sun and forget, for a while, that the trail a few meters above remains packed with people watching their phones as much as their feet or their world. The longest downward digression reaches a memorial statue to honor the marksmen of the 8th Bersaglieri regiment: a tall angel standing wings folded with one hand pressed to the pommel of his sword and the other holding a wreath as he keeps watch over the towns of the valley below.

After all that, beyond the memorial or at least where its steep path departs from the trail if you choose not to take it, past the rugged Cappella degli Alpini with its steeple low enough to stay out of the wind, you'll arrive at the trail's second chance for food and trinkets, Refugio Lavaredo. The outdoor patio will be crowded and you'll jockey for space at a table — a large group will most likely be scattered — but the polenta and sauerkraut and venison and boar, not to mention the beer, will achieve depths of flavor and satisfaction they never would at sea level with better prices but without the view. All those other day hikers, marvelling in languages from all over the world, are there for the same reasons you are and so what if it's at the same time.

The trail carries on past that second refuge. All told it's a six mile loop that climbs more aggressively after Refugio Lavaredo to reach a plateau with views across the Austrian border. It swings around the far side of the peaks to reclaim the parking lot from the opposite end. But most of those having lunch won't go up, or if they do it will be a short scramble to take in the view and to see what remains of some World War I bunkers before coming back down to return to their coaches the way they arrived.

The way we arrived, I should say, because with my students it's always like that, not enough time to complete the full loop.

What I miss, what I long for right now, are the things that annoy me on that trail: the people, the jostling, the cacophony of human voices and dogs greeting each other, the elbows-in space of the refugio's terrace, and more than anything else the fresh awe of my students each summer through whose eyes that crowded, unwelcoming, less than wild trail and valley and ancient rock face could never grow old. I've watched one of them spring hircine up a steep slope only a day after facing down her fierce fear of heights on another peak. I've seen a sprained ankle risk ruining the day for the group but result instead in a ride back to the coach clinging to the waist of a refugio host straight off the bodice-ripped cover of a romance novel. I've had the privilege and pleasure of introducing that mob scene to new students each year, along with annual guilty grappling with my own conflicted emotions about our contribution to its overcrowding, and I've read what they've written about it.

This year's course is in jeopardy while that region of Italy suffers as badly as any place does, but I daydream of summers and students to come when the world has found its new normal. The Tre Cime di Lavaredo have seen centuries of avalanches and harsh winters and soldiers lost where they can't be recovered, and every hike there, however constrained, is undertaken in the shadow of those many deaths. So the more legs out on the trail walking, the more voices raised and the more elbows bumped while hoisting a beer, the greater the celebration of being there against odds.

***

Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram and Scratch, and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College in the US and the Netherlands.