2005-01-18 - 12:52 p.m.
The space between, in addition to being an insufferable Dave Matthews Band song (although it did have a brief good moment in �Black Hawk Down�), is where I can no longer go. Geography has changed completely for me. The trip from one place to another used to be part of the experience, good or bad or pointless.
Now it�s all sort of the same. Call a taxi (and outside New York, you actually use a telephone for this), go outside, take a ride, hobble in wherever I�m going. Travel is now measured in cab fare, not distance or time. Everything is sort of equidistant in a way. Of course, I�m glad I still have the physical capacity to do this. And I know there are lots of people who just can�t afford a $5 cab ride downtown. But I sometimes miss the journey. Long ago a friend used to insist that we walk back the ten minutes to school from rock shows in Central Square because it would give us time to think about the show we�d just seen. I would walk from my home in the North End to the Haymarket T or sometimes to work in downtown Boston during the Big Dig. With all the construction, the topography changed constantly. Sometimes the path I�d walked under the highway in the morning would be gone by the time I came home. And public transit itself. I was always a big fan from the time of my 45+ minute subway ride across Brooklyn to school starting in seventh grade. Sometimes I�d take the train to places I�d never been, just to see what was there. I wish I�d gone more. My great unwritten book is �Alewife & Wonderland: A Guide to Every Stop on Boston�s T�. Best barbecue? At Wood Island. Tufts University? Kind of a hike from Davis, despite what the signs say. Braintree? Looks like car-world, but actually just a short walk to bucolic Thayer Academy. Of course, sometimes trips just sucked. Alithea�s dorm was quite a schlep, sometimes through the snow when the alleged shuttle never showed. Trying to cross highway-like Boylston St. in the West Fenway was a frightening example of the absence of planning. Traversing the wilds of Somerville, block after endless block of small, run-down two-families was just depressing. Sometimes it was pointless. My mind is littered with empty memories of meaningless hikes to some obscure academic building or of getting lost on the way to some random bar. What did it mean? Maybe nothing beyond travel. But I could viscerally feel the connection between one place and another. Perhaps it feels normal to Los Angelenos to drive from home to destination with nothing in between but annoying traffic. But I�ve always been an East Coast kid. I�ve never even had a car (in places like New York or Boston they always seemed more like something to deal with than actually desirable). I suppose I should get one now. Certainly absence of geography is better than staying home. But sometimes I miss the journey and experiencing the distance between here and there.� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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