New Haven to Boston, Part 8 of 8

POST ROAD HISTORY

The original Post Road went through Hartford, Springfield and Worcester MA, and into Boston.

The “Post Road” originally went from New Haven to Hartford. [Long list I wrote down of the order of towns on the three separate Post Road paths- the ‘Lower’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Upper’.]

[Sketch of 1775 map of Boston environs: the “Shawmut Peninsula”, significance of the landmass. “Boston Neck” –Orange St—is the connection to the mainland.] Puritans settled on the peninsula for the excellent spring water. (Springs where the Old State House and King’s Chapel stand today.)

The main library. Busts with the irises dug out. Beautiful reading room with hunching green lamps all down its length, vaulted ceiling. At the old reading tables, a vinegar smell in the skin-oils trapped in the wood. A graceful place to be, high in the air above the city streets, looking out onto a courtyard, the smell of books.

1620- The Mayflower lands at Plymouth. Governor John Carver.

The Royal Governor of New York during the time of the first mail carrier was Francis Lovelace, and he designated that the mail delivery operation be carried out. (John Winthrop was the governor in Connecticut at this time.) The idea of a royal mail-carrying route actually belonged to King Charles II.

The first mail in America was dispatched from NYC on Jan 22, 1673, and appeared in Boston on or about February 5^th. (I find the spot where the mail arrives, the old newspaper building). The mail would have been dispatched on Jan 1, but the unknown rider was held up waiting for dispatches from Albany, New York. Lovelace stipulated that the rider should be “a stout fellow, active and indefatigable, and sworn as to his fidelity.” (He went by way of Hartford.) Pequot Indians made travel dangerous through these forested reaches. Shortly after the rider’s journey, the mail was forced to stop for 2 years on account of King Philip’s War. Nov. 5, 1639: Order of the General Court of Mass.

“Richard Fairbanks his House in  Boston” Site of the old Globe office.

--I think of Iraq. Who is excited for Iraq’s threshold of ‘Liberty’? Last night, Bush announced the “surge”: 21,500 more troops in Iraq, for starters.

--What’s “the news”? What’s truly new? What transpires. Qui transtulit. Qui sustinet. (‘Novels give us the news.’ About how we live.)

January 6, 1868: despite great protest by Roxbury residents, Roxbury is annexed to Boston. (Like Brooklyn to NYC: date??)

Capt. Nathaniel Urig, visiting Boston in 1710: “The Neck of Land betwixt the city and country is about forty yards broad, and so low that the spring tides sometimes wash the road, which might, with little charge, be made so strong as not to be forced, there being no way of coming at [Boston] by land but over the Neck.” (Travel can be a bitch.)

**

I walk around Boston past nightfall, eventually I go wait in a diner for the first Amtrak train of the morning, back to New Haven.

Nice to be in a big city, a wintery one. Boston seal: ‘SICUT PATRIBUS SIT DEUS NOBIS’. I’m wearing the Ace bandage as tight as it will go and taking pain relievers, but it seems like a good night’s sleep took all the little points of ache out of my back.

The map kiosks around downtown are printed with the motto: “BOSTON: America’s Walking City”.

Across the Charles: the obelisk commemorating the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775. The patriot army of irregulars ran out of ammo defending the hill, but it was a courageous stand and very costly for the British.

(At 12:30pm I start the walk from the outskirts back into Boston.) Forest Hills: ‘You are at the transportation center of the streetcar suburbs.’

In the 1630s Puritan settlers arrived in this area, and they constructed the toll road from Roxbury to Dedham.

-The SMELLS when you move to different terrain.

-The cool earthiness of Rhode Island.

-The particular chemical cocktail as you approach Boston.

-The gentle complexity of downtown: smells of human grease and street grit.

Jamaica Plain: graffitti-style ads for real products, like Axe Deodorant. New, quaint, small-scale housing projects.

John F. Eliot Square: (b. 1604, d. 1690)

“On this hill the Puritans in Roxbury built their first meetinghouse, in 1632.” Eliot was known as ‘Apostle to the Indians’: in 1663 he translated the entire Bible into Massachussetts Algonquin (the language of the people of Neponset).He was the second minister of the First Church in Roxbury. (Seems like a fascinating story, converting Indians. How did he approach the philosophical problems of holy writ translation?)

April 18, 1775: William Dawes sets out from the Meeting House Hill Common, riding to Lexington and Concord, at the same time Paul Revere was riding from Charlestown. This Town Common was occupied by patriots as part of the defense of Boston. The grand 1804 church now standing on this common is the fifth one to occupy this spot. It had been one of only three churches in Puritan Massachussetts to admit Indians as members. Speaking of converts: Near the Common, Washington Square intersects El-Hajj Malike El-Shabazz Boulevard. As a teenager, Malcolm X lived in the Dudley neighborhood of Roxbury. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964. There are beautiful, decayed 19^th century buildings boarded up here. It’s a distinctively black shopping thoroughfare. I’ve been seeing the spines of churches and other large buildings on the horizon way out to the east.

A big ‘T’ distaster happened the day before I arrived. Human error. Several crewmen were killed. –In the ‘Chinatown’ area the streets have New York City streetnames. (There was some reason for this.) The information kiosks all have big graphics that say “BOSTON: America’s Walking City”.

In the late 1700s, Revolutionary War patriots began to settle along Washington Street south of what is now East Berkeley Street. (Recall: in July 1824 the single avenue of Washington was consitituted out of all the main boulevards.)

1801: Charles Bulfinch lays out the streetplan for the South End. (George Washington had recently made a tour through the area.) This region was built-up in the mid-19^th century. In the 1830s-1850s, the city filled in the tidal flats on either side of the peninsular neck. These flats were full of oysters, and the oysters were used for paving. In the 1870s, with the rise of the streetcar, most of the well-to-do left this area and moved to the Back Bay. An immigrant population moved in here. By 1855, there were 55,000 Irish in Boston, because of the famine. In the 60s, yuppies took over the old Victorian houses.

ULTRA DIAMONDS

-Thriving 2-story Borders  across the street from the old Ticknor and Fields. The Borders has just ousted a Barnes and Noble, as if to provide here a perfect concrete example of the banality of ‘alternatives’ and ‘choice’ offered by modern chain retailers.

Spring Lane. [Sketch of The Old South Meeting House; Old State House.]

“Rich’d Fairbanks, his house in Boston is the place appointed for all the letters and hee is to take care that they bee delivered or sent according to their directions.” Order of the General Court, November 5, 1639. This plaque, by the original site of the Globe office, was placed in 1924.

The Old State House: the Declaration of Independence was read from the east balcony on July 18^th. 

I watch junior high hockey pregame warm-up at Sterrit Rink (Suffolk University). It’s Winthrop vs. Revere, very Boston school names. The hockey action is pretty cool to see this close up, the swerves on the ice.

Community roundtable meeting (tenant association?) visible from the ground-floor window of a building in the Concord Housing Projects; there’s Dunkin Donuts pastries and coffee in the middle of the table.

“The largest solar system model east of Peoria, Illinois” is distributed through the malls and public buildings of Boston and its suburbs, Newton, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain. The Sun is located in the Hayden Planetarium. Here in the food court at South Street Station, on a pedestal, is the model of Jupiter, in textured bronze showing its bands of cloud in relief. It’s about one and a half feet in diameter. “Visit all 9 planets and experience the awesome vastness of space!” I like this. Note: the giant planets orbiting the sun farther out from Earth protected the fragile blossoming of life, because they attracted away the giant intergalactic debris that could have smothered, knocked around, disrupted Earth.

12 am, 40 degrees, I’m wandering the south half of the Freedom Trail. The first skyscraper in Boston is the 1911 tower addition on top of the 1847 Greek Revival Customs House on State Street. Today, the clock up there is lit colorfully.

Winthrop’s daughter Ann (Pollard) was ten years old when she came over with him. They landed near Prince Street. She later described the landing site as having been “very uneven, abounding in small hollows and swamps, covered with blueberries and other bushes.”

The old South Street Diner: the only place downtown to eat late at night, it seems. A young waitress with a black and white tattoo up the inside of her pale left arm. “It’s an octopus strangling a swan. …It’s…I have this whole thing,” she tells me. I play ‘Going Back to Cali’ by B.I.G. on the jukebox at my right, as I eat my eggs, toast and coffee.

I take the 6:05 (Amtrak #95) back to New Haven, but I’m asleep for the ride and the sunrise, even with the cup of coffee on the floor by my feet. Shooting pain in my knee makes it hard to get into a good position to rest in.

MIGRATING: I get a thrill whenever I see a backpacker wandering in the city, in the subway, or crouching in a train station or on the train next to their gear, opening a book, face sharpened and eyes slightly fuzzy with the effort of the day’s forward motion. I’m ready to plunge right back into a book again, a book about walking forward where I can walk forward vicariously. (There’s always somebody somewhere stomping toward the horizon.) Over the landbridge from Siberia into the New World, following game herds and heartsickness or religious mystery.

**End

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.

New Haven to Boston, Part 6

EAST GREENWICH. Established 1677. Exhausted, I conjure: If this was an indie movie, a silver deer would lead me somewhere, and I would wake up there, with police around me, and the deer scene would turn out to have been a dream sequence dramatizing my exhaustion. This is the sort of dreamlike fugue I often pass into after twenty-four hours on foot.

LIFE, it seems, has to be sustained by idle chit-chat and BUOYING narratives of success, struggle, valor, deserving, repentance and condemnation, disgrace and triumph. An ADVERSE world (men like “sports” gossip for this purpose; women prefer “relationship” gossip).

A middle-aged woman in black jogging gear picks up a flattened plastic bottle from the roadside and jogs away with it.

High up: I see to the ocean, below and to the east.

1791: Construction of the Methodist Meeting Hall on Main Street where the Rhode Island Constitution was adopted in 1852.

(Days—Views—Unforgiven Apotheosis) We go through our history and in each epoch everyone prospers and obeys and no one ever has any CLEARER idea of what the LAST MAN should look like. What is the termination point of human history. Why are we doing this. We make all this fuss over the lives of kids we haven’t conceived yet. Aren’t we forgetting to answer one simple question before we crank out more human beings? What is the endgame of this supposed to look like? Are we closer?

2pm, 43 degrees. Planes climbing steeply westward from the airport, through clear skies. A blue plane with a red tail jogs my memory back to the fond stirring colors of my Octopus Battlebeast, that first Christmas I can really remember.

Stuck in a puddle fully reflecting the sky, a shard from the rim of a plastic garbage can gives the appearance of a whole can submerged, out of view. (Sort of a haiku sentiment)

The ONLY NOTE… I can stop now, I think, this is the note I was looking for:

Damn it, Grab what you can get. Take what there is of life’s feeble schematics. Grab tight, claw, uproot; the blood-scream of greed to get it. –I imagine myself petting the blonde lady’s boxer and then weeping. “My dog died,” I tell the blonde lady, and perhaps she weeps as well. What’s as kind as the heart of a dog, and as useless?

Apponaug Village, founded 1696. The sun just blazing an outline around the top line of a great massy cloud in the west. Cemeteries: How can they put SOMEBODY in to the earth, you wonder: a human being, how can they put them down in the dirt like that!

[Illo: HOPE anchor]

I see the big red WARWICK water tower in the distance down the hills. Hideous new condo units facing the cemetery, in hideous green-grass flattened clearing.

The first European to set foot on Rhode Island: Giovanni Verrazano, 1524. He was exploring for the French crown. In the library I’m reading stories about how the English colonists would loose their mastiffs on the Naragansett Indians.

1636- Roger Williams founds Providence on land bought from Naragansetts. 1644, Williams is granted a charter to the colony by the English crown.

It is the 100^th anniversary of the “LEVITON” Company, housed in a long stately brick building. In the same district, the “RHODE ISLAND MALLEABLE IRON WORKS”, founded 1912. A sign on this shuttered building reads “Ironworks Tavern Coming Soon”.

A Hebrew cemetery: Chased Schel Amess Association, organized 1908. A hair salon across the street has opened a mini-business on its premises: “Bonnie’s Tatoos”. From the radio in a deli I learn that oil costs $55.64 a barrel today.

Route 1A: Across the Pawtuxet River. I follow Main Street across the river into the heart of Providence. (The first indoor mall in the US, built 1828 in the Greek Revival style, known simply as “The Arcades”. 3 stories, covers an entire block on Weybosset Street.

8:39, 36 degrees. The State Capitol is majestic, situated on an inspiring overlook, but it happens to look directly across at a gigantic ugly shopping mall. I try to sleep in the bus station for a while, but it’s not designed for sleep, and there are people checking for tickets. When I’m among the last ones on the benches, I go out into the night again, walking along the quiet highway toward the Massachusetts border. North Attleboro, to Plainville, to Foxborough—suburbs of Boston.

Across the state line stop for a coffee and donut and the guy from Kings of Convenience is on tv, performing on one of the late night interview shows following a professional athlete. The music is soft and melancholy and beautiful, it gets me. There are only a few night patrons here, reading the newspapers and chuckling with the woman behind the counter who might be Middle Eastern.

After another two hours or so, the police flag me down.

“What did you, lose a bet?” the cop asks in a thick Massachussetts accent. (Whoever pukes first has to walk Route 1 from New York to Boston.) The talkative younger cop confers with the older, silent cop, who was pulled up in a separate cruiser. These are iconic cops. Every day is another wacky civilian to sort out.

“Stay off the road!” says the other. They point out the white sign that marks the end of their jurisdiction as town officers, and they tell me to get out beyond it and continue to do whatever crazy thing I want. They think I’m the guy who was vandalizing storefronts around here, but I suspect it was probably a local job. They read my passport into their radio: “Sierra, Alpha…”

Why are so many roadside motels in this region owned by Hindus? I can see the lit prayerwheels and devotional posters from the road. I’m half-heartedly looking for a place to stay, I’ve been up for basically two days.

5:41 am, 29 degrees. Past the “7 MILE” marker on Route 1.

Got to get up over the black hill that stretches across the horizon. (This will turn out to be a long journey, up and down the wooded hills leading into the port of Boston.) I think of the swamps and wild little mountains in northwestern Massachussetts; this land is not so different.

Near the bottom of the hill now. Sitting in Dunkin Donuts. Hoping the old guy with the leather jacket and blue track pants will get up and leave me his Times. I realize I’m staring at it too hungrily. I’m just sitting here with my coffee, a little shell-shocked. “Do you want the paper?” the guy finally says. It turns out to be the Boston Herald, of course, not the Times.

Why have I been on this peak of horniness? Especially considering I’ve been exhausted enough to get diarrhea. Why is my libido so cranked up?

Up and down hills along side mirrored lakes, a Scrap Fortress of car junkyard, with huge sheet-metal doors that slide on chains. It seems like in my exhuastion, all sorts of weird left-over emotions are popping up, from various dimly-remembered narratives: different places I was, different things I was waiting for or was about to accomplish; any kind of thing, happy, sad, indifferent but full of strong emotional detail. Emotional memories out of the blue.

[Sketch of hill in Norfolk]

New Haven to Boston, Part 5

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Back before, in the beginning, the ‘New World’—they didn’t have even a culture, only the CONGREGATIONAL Church and its earnest prescriptions for civil society. In time, these people acquired neighbors. They were eventually able to move freely in a whole network of Connecticut towns, seeking jobs, spouses, trade, education.

**

Yellow spartina, in the little Lieutenant River. By the road, one half of a metal scissors. “LAX” bumper sticker on a white Chevy Tahoe.

A brook in a backyard. The people in these homes can live with nature in harmony no more than with a good white wine: they must lay it up in order to quaff it at their leisure, cycling through it expensively as they go about life’s business.

KAFKA’S ECSTASY: The ecstasy of the desk. Exhilaration of continuing at your desk-work.

The road follows the riverbank north. The gassy smell of leaves rotting, trees in shallow swampwater. Griswold Preserve in Old Lyme. IN THE FOREST IN JANUARY. It’s unusually sunny. I walk through whole hillside developments around Jericho Drive. There are excavators parked in cleared plots of mud.

Wood fence in front of a beautiful private lake.

“Do you enjoy annoying all the neighbors or just us” –A handwritten sign affixed with masking tape to the fence, facing the road.

It’s going to rain overnight tonight. So: ?

So quiet in the highland hills. Obvious suddenly: Why am I so ANGRY? At everyone who has judged me, on the general criteria, without reservation, without questioning the criteria; as a transparent failure. A misguided half-person. –Without even considering, What is the origin or societal function of the judgment. Remember to think of EVERYONE, the very best.

[Did people really judge me, or was I just depressed and imbalanced enough to believe this.]

The colonists would be very afraid of the hilly terrain away from the shore and riverbank. People didn’t move up here to these forest homes until the late twentieth century. Thinking of the real thing, kids like my old friend B, one’s scorn and pity and shame. Everyone who wants to get up an argument, between our different respective choices. Makes my own work so much harder—(the belief in an undivided world of intentions!) the enemy—the opponent—the demarcation—the blood-drinking ego.

Just past the East Lyme border, a shuttered roadside bar for sale by owner. [Sketch: lichenous brownstone milepost, 10 MILES to New London]

A glorious day for all the multicolored spandex bikeriders to be out. Two men, one woman resting at an intersection, one man says, “You know, I don’t mind that we did this instead of mountain biking today.”

(Indian grocery: ‘Please don’t go behind there, that’s Indian groceries’. Warning me off.)

Orange sweater guy at credit union reaching out car window to use the drive-through ATM, puffing on the curved stem of a pipe.

3:15pm: I FIND THE PLASTIC ALLIGATOR, “Taber”.  The highway sweeps above 95. I remember losing a toy in the Sound, and my mother telling me it would be swept out to China. Because I stop to pick up the tiny plastic alligator, I notice the six-person cemetery next to the highway here.

A single length of cold rebar rings the overgrown grounds. I step through the pricker bushes and clear away the grass and dirt from one of the horizontal tablets. I read the weathered inscription: In memory of Samuel Taber, who died January 6^th, 1813, in his 39^th year. (That was yesterday!) [See sketch] In Memory of Mr. Samuel Taber Junr, who died Septr 6^th, 1798.

One would wish to know why there is no Nobel Prize for needlepoint. [This sounds like a quotation but I don’t remember from whom or why I was moved to record it.]

Stout young guy with red-outline tattoo of the Raymond Pettibon Black Flag logo on his right tricep. He tells me there’s no bathroom at this gas station, but I can pee out back. In the gas station: much heated debate over Tony Romo’s critical fumble.

Lacrosse is big in this region. The sign for youth lacrosse in East Lyme: the decayed netting of a stick, affixed to a post at an intersection. It looks like a Joseph Beuys sculpture.

“CONGAHAVATH CHESED” Jewish Cemetery. I spot graves from 1926. I place a rock on the memorial of an Army private; there’s already a bucket of rocks and an American flag there. Some of the headstones give the Jewish date:

“LUBCHANSKY: Sep 2 1950/ Elul 20, 5710”

Route 1 at night: neon signs. (But by day it’s picturesque.) In Waterford, I can still pick up a New York City tabloid newspaper, but I can also eat at a Tim Horton’s, which is right down the street from a Starbucks.

NEW LONDON: Established 1646. A car parked behind a multi-family home is bumping reggaeton; migrants part of the economy here. A pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses walking their bicycles up the hill of Beckwith Street. Here in New England, liquor stores are called “packies”, and I pass a business actually called “The Packy”. I make my way down the hill, toward the lights of downtown New London.

5:53pm, 39 degrees.

The US Customs House/Maritime Museum: There’s an inscribed cement placque out front about the first US trial where a slave got his legal freedom. During the proceedings: “’Do you want to be slave or free?’ The slave replied, ‘Free!’”—Note: Enslaved by my own cynical depression, I interpret this dialogue as Beckettian tragedy.

Little whales everywhere here, like picaninnies in the Deep South. A bar with $1 PBR. The home of CT’s first newspaper press: a gorgeous space being refurbished to house a bar. I-95 over the Thames River. A shredded diaper on the shoulder. Nothing to do about it now: I’ve committed myself to walking across this dangerous bridge. (I-95 melds briefly here into Route 1.) Groton obelisk?

A state cop on the Groton line on the bridge flashes his lights behind me. A very thorough frisking (my crotch), he gives me a ride across the river. He drives surreally fast. We whip off the exit. I brace myself for carnage and death.

“Do you think your laptop could take a bullet?” I ask.

“Ha. It’s a tough book,” he replies. The thing looks like it could burn you a DVD out of recycled plastic bottles. “Don’t walk across bridges no more,” the state trooper says. He must have discovered my incident with the state trooper in Old Saybrook!

The night still holding clear.

10pm. MYSTIC 5 MILES (regular road sign).

Shopping cart on the rocks at Trout Hole Brook.

Highways wend past ancient, incidental cemetery plots. Scattered soft rain begins, lightly tapping the fallen leaves.

11pm: Mystic Historic Downtown. Settled 1645. (The year before New London) The huge white Baptist church lit up. Glow from within the high arched columns. The name of the town is supposedly derived from a Mohegan phrase--“great tidal river”.

AVALONIA: A beautiful paradise of spartina reaching way out along the road. Nature preserve.

1649: First settlement of Stonington. (Again, Seye-Brook was 1635.) Lichenous green trees in a watery area: a river or brook. It’s raining. I have to stay at a motel. I can’t sleep under this rain, even in the shelter of a tree with the moisture running all over my coat. The rain is in my eyelashes and I’m chilled to the bone. (I stay the night and watch ESPN in my cold bed. Blow out the hairdryer trying to get my socks and shirt dry. There’s a story on about the footballer who played right through with the bleeding broken leg, and that gives me courage. Stupid courage, perhaps.)

PAWCATUCK. The next day. I get a bite to eat and coffee at Tim Horton’s, down the road from the motel. “Mechanic Street Historic District has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the US Department of the Interior.” There’s a sign up in the window of the chiropractor’s office: “We accept Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Insurance”. Route 1 goes through a pretty, vintage old downtown here. There’s a new sunset. A sign on the other end of a road bridge across the high, flush river, within the same downtown:

“WELCOME TO WESTBURY”, incorporated 1669. Half of this downtown lies in Westbury, Rhode Island. “Pawcatuck River: Mentioned as the western Boundary of Rhode Island in the Charter of 1663”. Big old red brick buildings wall off the north bank of the river. I look in on some newspaper employees, they’re leaning over their desks and trying to wrap up an edition of the WESTERLY SUN. (The office is a historical site.)

4:53pm. 48 degrees. “Victorian Strolling Park” behind the grand romanesque terra-cotta library. (There’s a phone number for a room to rent, I write it down.)

To travel to Block Island, you can take a ferry from here, or you can fly from Westerly Airport.

I get onto Route 1A (scenic diversion) in the town of Cross Mills. There’s a little cemetery. 1A is quieter, although not far from the main highway.

1:38 am, Kingson, RI: “I can’t stop ya.” RI State Trooper lets me go, gives me a cynical lecture about how I’ll be run down in the dark by an automobile. I show her my passport. Against the chill night wind, I  attempt to project composure and gravamen. The highway comes out of the woods. Marina. Galilee State Beaches. Still dark. There’s a lighter blue in the sky ahead. The stars that way are fainter. I’m hungry.

“Wow. It’s actually only 1am. No wonder I’m not sleepy.” To 1A, scenic route further east toward coast. I see a fox dart across the highway.

1:36 am. 37 degrees. Some wind.

Around 2am a tall local cop, South Kingston PD?, stops me, and he wants to know where I live. “You come to Rhode Island to walk around at night?” I’m pissy and I get a little standoffish with the cop, I chew my gum. I’m in a bad mood now, and it lasts until I get to the beach. The breakers rolling in from the bay, tide in from the Atlantic. The state’s archipelagic web shines from darkness as an array of more or less distant lights on the horizon. North up the coast, I can see the twinkling span of the Newport-Verrazano Bridge. Far off on the dark horizon the points of lighthouses appear and disappear.

Cops: My race (white), as well as certain class cues I’m aware of deploying (“Yes, officer, this gentleman spoke to me”). The road wends up a stately hillside, the black bay spreads out below to my right.

At Casey Farm, I rest and take in the view of the Newport-Verrazano Bridge. I listen to some tunes by Amadou and Miriam on my iPod (music from Cassie). I am exhausted, cold, in pain. The bridge is beautiful and far enough to appear radiant in its nearness. A whole swath of the world, the ocean, the rough coast of Earth here. The music helps me, as I prop my back against the stone wall demarcating this farmland. Later on I will listen to some B.I.G., and that will help me push forward when all else has failed. Cars blip across over the bridge slow and steady.The cars are like soundless sprites on an LED display screen.

North Kingston: Incorporated 1674. The roadside puddles haven’t frozen all the way through, but they have a thin layer that looks like when you tap your finger on the scum of your hot chocolate. The town sits on a pretty bay. The graceful, weathered concrete bridge, built 1920s by McLaughlin in New London, CT. [see sketch]

A local paper has a headline: “What’s In the Lost and Found?”

An editorial, written by a liquor store proprietor, in The North East Independent (I’m reading it over breakfast at a quiet diner):

“If you want to see businesses that are totally quaint and unique to Wickford village

added to the already vacant spaces in Wickford, [i.e. if you want to get rid of these quaint businesses] and if you want to see several businesses located on Post Road [sic] go down the tubes and if you want to see the former Mancini’s Hardware remain vacant and so on, then by all means approve and allow the prepared big box development at Quonset, but don’t ask the few of us who remain to help you wash the blood off your hands!” (He’s talking about a Home Depot.)

Last night I passed the Krystal Penguin Inn, outside Westerly. The name is worth writing down. The inn was to my left. A sign in Wickford: “JAIME’S CAFÉ-DELI: NEW YORK SYSTEM”. I discover that ‘New York system’ means a hotdog with ‘the works’.

According to a tourist brochure, the state of Rhode Island is 37 miles across and 48 miles from north to south. Not so bad, I can make it.

I reflect on things which have become abstracted somehow into total hilarity as I have walked. At present these subjects are sublimely comic to me--paragons of the Platonic ideal of the comic.

--Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc

--the comic strip Shoe (they’re songbirds, they have these hard-bitten reportorial lives, they’re fantastically cynical about songbird politicians, etc) --(Part of walking is, you can look back and criticize the zany abstractions of your walk-addled mind. You can have delusions from walking. “Shoe”?? I don’t even see it anymore, at all.)

New Haven to Boston, Part 4

[All this info from plaques near the Route 1--Baldwin Bridge.]

These northerly hills sloping down to marshland—Essex and the tranquil towns of Middlesex County, the tidal estuary ebbing around and between Nott Island, Lord’s Cove, Goose Island, Calves Island—250 million years ago, this land lay encompassed in the spine of a mountain range thrust up by violent tectonic collisions.

It was around 25,000 years ago that the last of the Ice Age glaciers swept down over New England and scored the land so deeply, furnishing the soft outlines of future river valleys. Paleo-Indians arrived here 10,000 years ago, over the Siberian land bridge from Asia. North America was then a vast tundra, and the humans were most likely following herds of caribou.

 During the course of our most recent glacial epoch, a much greater portion of the world’s oceans were locked up in Earth’s ice caps, and world-wide sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are today. The Connecticut land mass once extended out about 100 miles south of present-day Long Island, out to where the Atlantic Ocean now washes the continental shelf. Ancient forests stretched to this southern coast, their petrified remains today reposing off the Atlantic beaches, and here also roamed the shaggy mastodon herds memorialized in Neolithic cave paintings. For hunter-gatherers, it was a gold coast.

The course of the Connecticut River was established 13,500 years ago., During one of Earth’s periodic climate shake-ups, with global temperatures climbing, the packed ice of taiga and tundra retreated northward all across the crust of the earth, and this once-compressed layer of crust began to rise. To the north, where the heaviest layers of ice had pressed down, the crust now rose to the most dramatic elevations, forcing the glacial lakebeds of North America to drain southward. Over time this continental drainage managed to effect the north-south cut of America’s main riverways, and the river channel of the Connecticut was laid during this thaw.

By 5,500 years ago, the North American climate had grown mild and hospitable, and the human societies which had immigrated so recently now began to settle into permanent villages. Some time in the last four thousand years, a rich alluvial soil was deposited along the banks of the Connecticut, establishing the bounteous marsh environment of the present day.

By 3,500 years ago, the Connecticut River had become an important commercial waterway. Copper from Michigan, chalcedony spear-points from Labrador—these were traded between established cultures up and down the coast. Disputes over land claims along the riverbank began to simmer as early as a thousand years ago, after corn, beans, and squash had become well-established in vital croplands attached to agrarian communities.

            Today, most vessels on the Connecticut carry gasoline and home heating oil, hauling these necessaries upriver as far as Hartford.          

NEW LONDON: 14 MILES

New Haven to Boston, Part 3

CONNECTICUT BEGINS WITH THE SOUTHERN, NORTHERN TRAFFIC OF THIS RIVER.

YOU GOT I.D. ON YOU?

8am, sitting on the bridge, Connecticut state police pulls up. Among the drivers passing, “a couple people” have made worried calls about me. He’s either a jumper or a terrorist. The cop takes in the view and says “I can see why you’re doin’ this, though.” The spare, straightforward beauty against the slow action of the sunrise. My whole mind is transformed and brought to a good state. (The first automobile bridge was built here in 1911, the toll was five cents. This eight-line bridge was put up in 1993.) [See sketch.] The cop sets me back on my way, gets me walking again.

[The last great impression I had was the solace from that sunrise? I felt like a poet. I’m a little depressed now, late at night, poring over these weather-beaten old pocket notebooks in order to type them up. But I should strive to be faithful to the original, hard-won impressions of the world.]

“Having lived, one has done more becoming [I wrote, flinching and striving], one must have become more of something.” And—“ART: you have to collude with a big lie, but it’s the GREAT LIE that humans can truthfully depict ORDER and PROCESS (to a goal).”

New Haven to Boston, Part 2

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On my night train to New Haven, a little girl with pointy teeth and a punk-rock mommy is singing “Die, Monster, Die” by the Misfits.

11:35: Stopped by the Branford Police near Branhaven Plaza. There’s been some sort of incident here earlier. The cop has a blonde marine cut. He wants to know if I’m coming from the big bar, called SBC (a chain). “That a grenade in your pocket?” he demands. Nah, I just get a hard-on from hilarious cop humor! I give over my passport so he can write my name, birthdate and residence. I notice the year, looks like 1671, on his green town-seal shoulder patch.

Branford keeps attractive fire trucks: banana-yellow, almost green.

I have passed the same ancient steam shovel three times. Its arm is strung with cords and pulleys, instead of pistons. A light drizzle.

2:30 am, near Orchard Market, Guilford: “Stand in front of the car.” This is a Connecticut state trooper, and he attempts to ‘run’ my passport. “Stay dry,” he says finally. I am clean. He’s a nice cop.

From a late-night incident when the whole Fairfield P.D. tried to interrogate me, I’ve learned not to excite cops by telling them the entire truth of my journey. I don’t know why but this revelation turns me into an attractive police catch. “Congratulations, boys, you found Osama Bin Walkin’!” You could say it sends up a red flag.

4:30am: Back in historic downtown Madison. For some curious reason, the only vehicles on Route 1 at this time of night are red pick-up trucks. I’ve noticed this before.  Outside the travel agent’s office is a gag milepost with hands pointing in all directions: “Quebec: 408 Miles”. Feasible, I think. Seductive.

The outdoor amphitheatre in Hammanassett State Park. (Did I see a performance of Romeo and Juliet here as a boy with my family? It rained lightly for the last scenes, the audience swooned a little. I think I remember this store called “The Book Room”. Friend from childhood overdose, I flash on this, what’s the story?)

January 6^th. A very early diner breakfast, lots of coffee, beneath a TV showing ESPN. Today is NBA player Gilbert Arenas’s 25^th birthday, he’s younger than I am. I read a local newspaper. Story of a man honored for forty years of work at the New London water facility. A profile of an English professor at the Naval Academy, also in New London. One of his students, now a fleet lieutenant, told the professor how impressed the enlisted Latinos were with the lieutenant’s knowledge of Garcia Marquez. The Wall Street Journal picks the Giants to lose.

Clinton Historical District. A replica milestone says 25 MILES TO NEW HAVEN. The landscape out here reminds me of way out on Long Island, where I went for a wedding once: wide open marshes, ancient telephone poles, the occasional old man on a bicycle. Salt hay is a high-nutrient feed crop, it provided well for settlers. I take a detour down Grove Beach Street to the shoreline, look at the Long Island Sound for a while, and return to Route 1 via Menunketesuck. Private beaches, dead ends, low stone fences between charming houses sitting in sand. Breeze over the water, pulling clouds along to the East.

Steel-deck bridge over the meandering Patchoge River. Amtrak lines against a low hill to the north, across the marsh. 10 am.

THE BODY.

Bad pain in my left kneecap, and blisters. My body already feels wrung out, hot ears, dry eyes. Maybe pop some multi-vitamins. When I lie down there’s a tingling rush all over. Aw, what a pansy! The lesson of the other day (when I walked from Stratford to Hartford, CT) is, Don’t give up. But what a miserable condition to be in. [So nice to be comfortable and typing this up in my warm dining room.] I just want to focus on this landscape: when I crossed the Westbrook, everything turned beautiful, boat dealerships and wooded coastland under the warming white sky. Bad diarrhea.

Tough nap against a stone field fence out behind some historic house, closed for the season.

Interesting animals that live here: shad, alewife, eastern cottontail, mockingbird, box turtle.

Ah, the waste land segment of this Route 1 stretch, where all the motor vehicle sales lots are. Prices. Brand names.

Saybrook. A nice Slavic man, his wife at his side, stands before the vending machine in the Days Inn motel hallway. He holds up a coin in earnest and utters, slowly and fluently, a scintillating English sentence: “Can you break a dime?” The Days Inn is $64, it’s Saturday night.

 The motel clerk is from Bronxville, New York. He asks me what I do, seeing as I’m alone. I am unintentionally cagey. To another room go two big girls, one a Filipina taller than me. In the bathroom of my motel room I use a Days Inn ballpoint pen to pop a blister on my big toe. I have to really force it through, and a sudden jet of serum blasts me in the right eye. In my room I study an Old Saybrook tourism brochure. “The Fire Department owns such equipment as ‘Jaws of Life’ and a heavy-rescue unit.”

7am, I have an English muffin at the continental breakfast and leave the motel. Birds are singing. On the Baldwin Bridge, a vast arcing span, I stop to watch the morning light on the  Connecticut River. The sun has just cleared the hills. To the north, a vast span of power cables with the red and white marker-things strung on them, they look like volleyballs. They hang suspended in the pale dawn like planets. The river is pale blue without detail or depth. North upriver the land runs to hills, the town of Essex. (The Tylenol took away most of the pain in my ankle, but I wonder how far I will end up traveling.)

The river is flawless. –I have believed that I will go to Hell to suffer, for the sin of not allowing divine light through: not being fully hospitable to God’s grace and not living charitably. Moreover, not being aligned correctly in faith, not having PURE INTENTIONS. But, the admirable ones are those who continue on their path of righteousness and set aside the knowledge of their own mixed motivations and their baseness. The ones who push ahead anyway. (The walker- or else the steadfast one, who doesn’t leave but only moves forward in time, accepts the passage of time.)

Sun more full now. The flat winter hills repose toward the water, meeting it at a border of tawny marsh. South: the x-girdered truss bridge for the Amtrak and the Shoreline East trains. The marshes and the dark copses at the sunlit mouth, where the Algonquins made their base, and then the Seye-Brook Puritans built their forts, looked out with their guns—like the watch house that stood then on Academy Hill in Stratford (that frozen coppery grass).

New Haven to Boston, Part 1

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The wonderful mosaic of historical scenes at Acton Library, Old Saybrook, was funded by a summer resident from New York City. Reading the mosaic, I learn:

Connecticut became the fifth state in 1788.

The coat of arms on the state flag, adopted in 1897, is an adaptation from the original seal of the Saybrook Colony. The image is supposed to have come from a signet ring worn by the plantation governor Fenwick. The seal’s grapevines represent the fifteen patentees who settled the original Saybrook plantation under English colonial law. It was in 1620 that Lord “Seye, and Sele” of Brougton Castle in Banbury, Oxfordshire, decided to establish a Puritan plantation settlement. He received in 1631 a patent from the Earl of Warwick, a patent shared with Lord Robert Brooke.

The two lordly names were combined in “Seye-Brook”, the name of the plantation. Its settlers arrived in 1635 on the ship Blessing, out of the Massachussetts Bay Colony. Seye-Brook was established on the mouth of the Connecticut River, a good harbor that had been explored recently by the Dutch. In 1614, Adriaen Block (of Block Island, RI), became the first European to explore the Connecticut River. He named it “Fresh River”. He was hired to scout for natives to trade with.

The land had been inhabited perhaps since the beginning of terrestrial life.

‘Noah’s Raven’- The three-toed dinosaur footprints in the Connecticut River Valley, discovered 1802. This was the first fossil evidence of dinosaurs in the New World. Dilophosaurus, a medium-sized carnivore with an odd double crest on its skull.

‘Connecticut’ in Pequot means “LAND ALONG THE LONG TIDAL RIVER”.

1636-7 was the first Indian war in New England, fought against the Pequots at Saybrook.

At the mouth of the river (which flows from Canada), there’s a shallow estuary about a mile wide full of shifting sandbars. Because deep-draft ships can’t navigate here, the Connecticut is one of the longest US rivers without an urban center at its mouth.

December, 1718: “The Battle of the Books”

In 1701, the Connecticut Colony founded a ‘Collegiate School’,  with forty folio volumes donated by ministers. In 1714 the school got its big endowment, a donation of seven hundred books, including an autographed edition of Newton’s Principia. In 1716, the school was moved from Saybrook to the bustling commercial center of New Haven, some thirty-five miles west, where it would become Yale University. Residents of Saybrook rebelled against the move and attacked the carts transporting the library’s collection, destroying some 250 volumes. 

New Haven had been founded as a Puritan colony in 1638. In 1665 Charles II forced the town to unify with the Connecticut Colony.

Like a Beckett play

"Chinese authorities blanketed Tibetan neighborhoods with armed police in riot gear bearing fire extinguishers"

--
"In China, Self-Immolations Continue as Party Congress Opens", Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2012

"Use the Internet in a Legal Manner"

The 18th Party Congress convened yesterday in Beijing to anoint a new supreme leader. In the city center, construction projects are being halted and taxi drivers are being instructed to remove the window-rolling levers in their cabs. The shifts of giggling youths in charge of x-raying commuter baggage have put on grim faces. The censorship guys are going crazy. A notice translated at CDT:

 

Use the Internet in a Legal Manner
Strive to be an honest Internet user. Encourage the Internet’s civilized development. Strengthen civilized Internet awareness. Establish self-respecting, self-disciplinary and self-empowering awareness. Strengthen the ability to tell right from wrong. Strengthen one’s ability to protect oneself from negativity. Do not propagate illegal, criminal or false information. Do not use QQ, Weibo, forums, email or other Internet platforms to hurt others. Do not violate the privacy of others. Do not disrupt the order of the Internet. Do not casually meet Internet friends.
Self-respect and self discipline start with you. Let us join hands and work together to promote a civilized, safe and positive Internet environment. Let us provide a civilized, safe and green Internet for the 18th Party Congress.

Beijing City, Chaoyang District Internet Monitoring Team
Beijing Kangjing Property Management Company
Guangdong Yingxin Information Investment Company, Ltd. Beijing Branch
Guangdong Yingxin Information Investment Company, Ltd. Beijing Branch
October 23, 2012

... Fuck the 18th Party Congress.

Large Disparities

A press release from the Ministry of Environmental Protection:

"In Chinese cities, the evaluation of air quality is usually based on the concentration of 10-micrometer particulate matter (PM10). In Beijing, the American Embassy has been releasing its evaluation of the city's air quality based on PM2.5 for an extended period of time. This data and Beijing government's data usually showed large disparities, causing outcry and prompting the city authority to adopt the new standard."

A look at this contentious "disparity":

•  According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, today's air quality in Beijing was "slight [sic] polluted".
• According to the US Embassy's Beijing Air Quality Monitor webpage, it was "Very Unhealthy", verging on "Hazardous (Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors)".
• Today's been one of the days when you can stare directly into the mid-afternoon sun. (You probably shouldn't; you probably shouldn't live in Beijing.) It appears flat and featureless, like a full moon behind thick cloud. Opaque pale pink. I went jogging today, which was basically taking bong rips off a muffler. Still can't bring myself to buy one of the insect-like filtration masks you sometimes see rich foreigners wearing in the streets.