New Haven to Boston, Part 7

DESERT FLOWER: vast clean lines of Gillette Stadium. In the thin morning light, perched in its fata-morgana depth-trick, it looks exactly like the architectural model it once was. All the forest around it has been cleared. There is a sprawling holocaust of parking lot. A guy drives around one of the lots in a suction-hose truck, sucking up junk from Sunday’s game. What a terrible job. (I think of Sim City, when you place the giant Stadium down on your cleared land: CHUNK!)

From the north you can see inside the gap in the stadium wall. Beautiful, it’s so empty and clean and finely detailed against the forest on all horizons.

A light snow. I panic. I’m out on an overpass, which is under heavy construction. The workers scold me as I weave my way through. I turn right after the construction.

[Sketch of Boston skyline view, shadow of cloud on treetops]

Suffused cloud cover. In an instant the sun breaks. BAM: too bright for the pupils, I can’t look at the beercans and the median marks gleaming on the highway!

(July 6, 1824: the various streets of Orange, Newbury, Marlborough and Cornhill are all given the name of WASHINGTON, to form a single long avenue into the Shawmut Peninsula.)

This is where I leave Route 1, I think, which continues north from Dedham and skirts Boston to the west. I am following Washingston Street in Dedham all the way up into through Stony Brook, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, into downtown Boston. By nightfall I am in Dedham and I’ve moved inside the circle of 128, the highway that rings metropolitan Boston.  On a hilltop I can see the lights and skyline profile of downtown. Leading down the hill, a gold chain of streetlights, which is my clear path. It is a clear shot. The lights taper off and blur together into the far dark, bumping up rises and falling down into obscurity again. I’m here for real.

A great-looking used bookshop near Roslindale Center. I get a library card and use the internet in the library to find a hostel. I buy a last energy drink and catch the T here and crash out into sleep in the hostel in Back Bay, near the music school. I come back out here the next day to officially finish the walk.

Before leaving the hostel: I get up at 9:30 and have coffee and a raisin bagel in the hostel canteen. Back in my room, the guys who arrived the previous night are getting their stuff together. I tell a guy about my walk. He’s a happy, excited guy having a good trip around the US with his buddies. He wears a small steel hoop earring. U. of Louis*, Lafayette. He studies quantum computing. What do you think of string theory? We had to learn the basics, he says, but you can’t do experiments on it, which is what science is, he says seriously. He is amazed to meet a character like me on this walk and remarks on the interesting things one sees, one can tell others about. So, he probably told people about me. He and his friends are headed to New York next, and then back home to the university.