Protecting Place

As I'm drawn further into the life of a town where I don't officially live, I think about what I owe Reston. Though I can't swim in its pools or kayak on its lakes, I do walk its trails and enjoy its ambiance without paying its fees.

There's nothing illegal or immoral about this, but the film I just watched discusses those who enjoy Reston's amenities without buying into its program. We live less than a mile from Reston but aren't within its strict property boundaries. Still, I worship at a Reston church, donate staples to a Reston food pantry, and pay the higher, nonresident fee for a Reston yoga class. I'd like to do more. 

As I figure out how to do this, I think about what people owe place, the responsibilities that come with residency. It's a topic I ponder often, this idea of stewardship, of protecting what is priceless. What can be more precious than hearth, home and habitat? And what can be more natural than wanting to protect them?

Another Way of Living

Because of its strict property boundaries, I don't live in Reston, but I walk on its trails, buy strawberries at its farmers market, and take yoga at its community center.  

For many years, I haven't known where I live: My mailing address says Herndon, my kids attended high school in Oakton, and I commuted from Vienna.  You could say I live in the suburbs of northern Virginia, but for a person who cares about place, that's always rankled.

Since the pandemic, though, I've been gravitating to the place that suits me best, and that is Reston, a community founded and developed by Robert E. Simon (hence Reston) 60 years ago. Last night I watched a film made to celebrate the town's 50th anniversary: "Another Way of Living: The Story of Reston, VA." 

To say it makes me proud is an understatement. It roots me, inspires me, makes me want to move a mile away just to live in Reston officially. I probably won't do that. But I'll walk its trails with more awe than usual. 

(The Van Gogh Bridge in Reston's Lake Anne. More on the film in future posts.)

Blooming Where Planted

For so long this has been a loaded phrase for me — "blooming where planted." It carries with it more than a hint of compromise. Or maybe it's wistfulness, that I didn't stay where I was planted but moved several times as a young adult before settling where I did. 

And then there's the fact that I've ended up in the suburbs. Heaven knows I carp enough about that.

But today, the angle of the light striking the grass on the lawns I passed, the scent of the air, rich with loam and honeysuckle, made me think that there could not be a much better place to be planted. And that whatever the mixed emotions with which I've traditionally viewed the saying, there is a nobility in trying to flourish wherever you are, in contenting yourself with the situation at hand. 

(Pebble people frolic along one of my favorite routes.)

Beauty and Bane

December dawns gray and cold. A new month. I began the last one in an old house by the sea. I begin this one in the two-story suburban home I've lived in for decades. A garbage truck trundles by as I write. It's the third garbage truck I've heard this morning.

Ah, the suburbs! The beauty and the bane of them. I love the trees and solitude. I deplore the sameness and isolation.

But that's an old story. The new story is this: Here I am. 

The Wild Side

Yesterday I found the trail I was looking for. It was tucked away in a corner of the county that adjoins the Fairfax County Parkway and its monolithic soundproof walls. 

The path featured several fair-weather stream crossings, but nothing that could scoot below or hang above all that parkway asphalt, as impassable as a raging river. 

There was a tunnel under a lesser road, though, a dark enclosure that paralleled a stream. I took that — despite the warning.

Sometimes you have to walk on the wild side.  Even in the suburbs. 

Worth the Wait

I'm going to stay with The Power Broker for this post, too. I realize that most of my comments about the book have been about its weight. But 923 pages into it I can say at least a few words about its content. 

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is an in-depth portrayal of New York City's traffic and building czar, Robert Moses, who held sway over the Big Apple for more than three decades, crucial years during which much of the city's modern infrastructure was shaped. 

Moses built parks and dams, bridges and highways. He moved rivers and shorelines, condemned homes and destroyed neighborhoods. He shaped not just New York but all the cities of this country, because New York was held up as a model. And in it, public transportation took a back seat to the automobile. That there was a connection between this deficit and the highways that were clogged with traffic almost immediately after opening was just beginning to be understood in the 1940s and 50s. 

The book is also a study of power, how it seduces and changes a person and, by extension, the places over which that person has control. In this meticulously researched account of Moses, author Robert Caro shows young reporters and writers how to tell a big story, one so big that for years it wasn't understood, let alone written. 

It's for that reason that the book was assigned as summer reading before I entered a graduate journalism program years ago. I bought it then, a used copy for $7.50, but am only now getting around to reading it. The book has been worth the wait — as well as the weight. 

(Entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, which Moses tried to block. He disliked tunnels.)

Weed Me!

Here in the suburbs, lawns matter. They're to be green and weed-free, though many of them are not, ours included. 

Driveways, on the other hand, should be as smooth and polished as ebony, well poured and thoroughly sealed. They should not require weeding at all, as this one (full disclosure, mine) so plainly does. 

To which I can only say, as I have for so many other suburban transgressions ... oops!

Night and Day

Last night, after the kiddos were rounded up and their weary parents pulled away from the house, heading home, I noted the miracle that's so easy to ignore this time of year, the great gift of evening daylight. 

Family activities postponed my morning walk, but there was still (barely) enough light to take a late stroll. It had been awhile since I took this walk on the downwind side of the day, and I couldn't help but notice how different it was. 

Yellow lamplight glowed through windows. Late birds rustled in the trees. Sprinklers made that tst, tst, tst sound. I was the only walker on the road. Houses and lawns that look ordinary at 8:30 a.m. look positively fetching 12 hours later. 

With walking, as with so much else, timing is key.

Hybrid Walks

Here in the suburbs we have few bears, and no lions or tigers.  But we do have automobiles.

This morning, lured on by the buoyancy of the air and the radiance of the light, I turned right on a narrow road and (staying off it for the most part) made a dash on foot to the safety of a path. I was happy when I tucked into my usual route, because the road is hilly and cars travel fast along it.

On the way home, I thought about the walkability quotient of my neighborhood and how greatly it has improved since I've come to know the shortcuts and the cut-throughs, many of them woodland trails. 

The best routes around here are the hybrid walks, part paved, part pounded. They are the safest ways, and in some cases the only ways, to get where you're going. 

 

An Encounter

An early walk this morning, sun smoldering orange on the horizon, first birds clearing their throats, air soft on my skin. Back home, I bounce and stretch on the trampoline. When the fox spots me, I'm doing the bird dog exercise, so I'm on all fours just as she is. We are maybe 20 feet apart. 

A fox's face is doglike, though the eyes are more wary than soulful. The animal takes my measure just as I take hers. 

I wish we could hold the gaze longer than we do, but she's smart. She knows better than to linger long with someone 10 times her size. So she scampers off to try an alternative route to her prey. And I go back to my exercise. Just another morning in the suburbs. 

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

To the untrained eye this is nothing but an ordinary parking lot. But to me — and the other people who parked their cars here — it's a suburban trailhead. 

Yesterday I took two short walks, both of which began in parking lots. In each case, I had to find the paths, which took online research (which happened years ago) and on-foot exploration. Then I traipsed the paths themselves, an ongoing process of discovery. 

Who would guess that less than a quarter-mile from the lot above there are fox dens and creek bends and greening briars glittering with raindrops? 

The photo above was snapped quickly with no attention to angle or light. But I'm glad it looks as ordinary as it does. It's proof that around here, the ordinary can lead to extraordinary. 

Suspect

Most of my walks are in the suburbs these days, which makes sense given the title of this blog, but when I commuted downtown, a fair number of my forays were in the city. This allowed for more constant comparisons between the urban and suburban stroll.

One of the major differences is that in the city we walk to get somewhere, but in the suburbs we walk to walk — because there are few errands we can run on shank's mare. For that reason, the long-distance suburban walker, the one who dares hoof it along a major road, can be suspect. This is true for people of all races. 

In his book The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson tells the story of a well-dressed man stopped by a sheriff's patrol car on the one-mile walk to his office in Los Angeles County.  It was on "a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday," the man explained, and he was dressed in a coat and tie when he was ordered to identify himself and explain where he was going. "As a pedestrian," the man said, "I was suspect."

According to his definition (minus the coat and tie), I'm suspect, too.  

Driving Day

It's been a driving day — not a Sunday-drive kind of driving day but a rush-to-the-dentist-then-run-errands kind of driving day.

It's been the kind of driving day when I look longingly out the window as I zoom past side trails I've strolled, imagining what it would be like to be on them rather than behind the wheel of a car. 

I've smelled the pine needles, pushed a low-hanging branch out of my way, even felt the fine feathery tendrils of a spider web. 

But all the while I was really cruising down Main Street, Chain Bridge Road, the Beltway. I was in Fairfax and Vienna and Tysons Corner. Everywhere and nowhere, which is how it is when you're driving. All the while racing to get home ... so I can walk.

Think Zebras!

Doctors are taught that when you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. It's a saying I've always appreciated, worrier that I am, a reminder to see the molehill instead of the mountain. But even doctors know that in some situations, it's better to think mountains — or zebras.

This is especially true in Maryland, where five zebras escaped from a farm and 30 days later have yet to be caught. Zebras have been spotted grazing in suburban yards and dashing across suburban lanes. 

Officials tell folks to be careful around the wild animals, that they cannot be caught, they must be corralled. Funny, I was just reading about zebras in the book Guns, Germs and Steel (more on this classic in a later post), how, unlike the forerunners of the horse, zebras are impossible to tame. They cannot be lassoed, and they have a tendency to bite. 

The Maryland zebras are living proof of these biological and historical facts. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Sprawl

Jason Diamond is a child of the suburbs, and in The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, he writes about them with mixed but ultimately fond feelings, realizing the idea of comfort and security they have given him.

Which doesn't mean he didn't escape them as soon as he could. But he does come to terms with them, something I've been trying to do for years in my own, still-living-in-the-suburbs way. 

Diamond seeks to understand suburbs by visiting them — Levittown, New York; Roland Park, Maryland; Lake Forest, Illinois; and Fort Lee, New Jersey — and by analyzing movies and songs and books about them — William Gibson's Neuromancer, Rakesh Satyal's No One Can Pronounce My Name and one of my favorite films, "Ladybird." 

The Sprawl is another book I picked up at the library, so serendipity was involved, and though it's not the most lyrically written book on place, I like the no-holds-barred way Diamond describes its effect on those creative souls who grow up in places like, well, Oak Hill, Virginia: 

"Suburbs in the postwar era were built with homogeneity in mind, and nothing develops a sense of not belonging like telling somebody they have to fit into a mold. While it's impossible to figure out the roots of each and every case of suburban alienation, stepping back and seeing that there's something downright strange about the actual concept of the modern suburb — how it's built and the psychological impact it can have on people — isn't nearly as hard."

Viva La Cite!

Into my inbox this morning comes news from Jeff Speck, whose occasional newsletter I signed up for after reading one of his books on urban planning. Speck's headline "No, Cites Aren't Over," was a welcome counterbalance to my own recent post "Solace of the Suburbs."

When the question of urban density was raised at a public hearing about transit-oriented development, Speck says he reminded people that some of the countries that have best controlled for the virus are exceptionally urban ones — Japan, Korea, Hong Kong.

Also, he says, denser cities have the most patents. "Cities exist because they solve problems," he writes. The Black Death didn't do much to slow urbanization and was followed in short order by the Renaissance.  "So even though much of the ruling class has slipped off to their country houses a la Boccaccio, the future still lies in walkable urban places."

I want to believe that, too.

(From the Boston Globe via Jeff Speck's newsletter.) 

Solace of the Suburbs

The title of my blog has always carried with it a faint whiff of irony. The suburbs aren't made for walking, as anyone who's lived in them will attest. And I've never hidden my mixed feelings about living in the suburbs.

However ... the pandemic has reminded me of urban density, suburban space — and why we ended up with the suburbs in the first place.

People moved out of urban cores for green grass and family harmony, to stretch their legs and put some distance between themselves and their in-laws. But they also moved for their health and safety, for clean air and open space.

The suburbs have no urban buzz, no throngs surging up the avenue. But if you're looking for social distancing, the suburbs are the right place to be.

Newly Mown

An unusual Thursday working at home, but other than that, fairly typical. On my walk this morning I was hit with a wave of gratitude for the relative normalcy of my life. Not that everything is perfect, only that it's for the most part blessedly normal.

I often feel this way when I trudge through my leafy neighborhood and see the newly mown lawns, the neatly coiled hoses, the freshly mulched trees. With one or two exceptions, the people who live here care about their property; they paint their shutters and put their trash out: Mondays for garbage, Tuesdays for recycling, Wednesdays for sticks and lawn clippings.

When we first moved here I thought the tidiness was a sign of suburban OCD.  But now it seems proof of increased property values. Something — or someone — has changed. I think it's me!

Fortunate Day

I was waking up slowly when the sound of a falling branch catapulted me into full consciousness. It's a hazard of living in the midst of a waning suburban forest, a place where the old oaks have outlived their three score and ten.

This time we seem to have been spared. It was either a branch from the common land, or a smaller limb off the tree in our yard that's already slated for demolition next time the tree guy comes around.

But the swoosh and thud did serve as a rousing alarm. It got me up and into the morning, where I took a delicious amble through humid air and young birds doing that little looping fly that is so endearing.

A day that begins with an early walk, no matter how one comes by it, is a fortunate day indeed.

Good Fortune

Though I call this blog A Walker in the Suburbs, my feelings about suburbs are decidedly mixed. I appreciate the greenswards, the sound of spring peepers in the night air, downy woodpeckers at the bird feeder. I chafe at the driving culture, the isolation, the lack of community.

Alice Outwater's Wild at Heart (mentioned last week, too) is reminding me why the suburbs once seemed like Shangri-La. In the late 19th-century, human waste was stored in cesspits and removed by horse-drawn wagons. The horses that pulled those wagons produced millions of pounds of manure, which collected in the streets.

"In 1900 there were well over 3 million urban horses in the U.S., and those city horses deposited enough manure to breed billions of flies, each one a potential vector for disease," Outwater writes.

No wonder people moved out of the cities into what must have seemed like heaven. Grass, trees, manure that was manageable. Walking Copper this morning, I reflected on my good fortune.