Yeah — and Another Thing!

On Sunday we trudged along a forest path that leads from Marysville upward to the top of a local ridge. This area is part of the Appalachians. If you were more ambitious and had more than a couple of hours to spare, you could spend many days walking the famous Appalachian Trail that stretches from Georgia to Maine. We were content to get up the hill and back.

A few minutes into the walk, my thoughts too were wandering.

The essayist Jacques Attali has suggested that the nomadic state of mankind is our “natural” state. Of course, our nomadic history not only predates the era of settlement and land ownership, but is many hundreds of thousands of years longer. He suggests too that we’re all reverting to the nomadic condition as evidenced by our current rootlessness. I like the idea because it suggest to me why we all like to “take a walk” when what we really mean is that we want to let our minds get down to the business of thinking rather than simply managing our activities.

As I followed Karen along the trail, I thought about a similar walk I had more than a decade ago with my friend Neil Simpson. He was living on the edge of Georgian Bay, in Ontario. He loved to hike in the forest parks there and one weekend we tagged along with him. Why is it that, with everything I’ve seen and forgotten since then, I can still see Neil standing on a chunk of the Cambrian Shield, looking for a gap in the trees? I think it’s the meditative aspect of walking that allows those simple thoughts to be fixed in memory.

Neil eventually decided that walking is what he loves best and these days, he and his wife Vanessa live in Spain where they conduct walks through the rocky hills a few kilometers inland from the popular Costa Blanca Coast of Mediterranean, and in the Pyrenees north of Barcelona. The walks are very mild; just right for tourists. After gaining some altitute, the easy way ??? in a small bus ??? you have yourself a stong, sweet espresso, then spend the next few hours rambling around the hillsides in awe of what you see. This is scenery that you won’t find in a travel brochure.

Back in Pennsylvania, we reached the top of the ridge and turned to make our way down. By this point, I had had several good ideas, had settled some decisions and was probably working toward a valuable new invention. But we were back to the car. We had been gone only a couple of hours and it felt like a weekend away.

If you want to do some walking in Central Pennsylvania, look at the information provided by Slackpacker.com. Neil and Vanessa Simpson can be reached via their site, Walks+Plus. And you can learn more about Jacques Attali here.

Step out our front door and walk a few yards up North Street to the corner of Third. There you can see one of the most beautiful capitol buildings in the United States.

Only a few yards in the other direction, near the back door of our house in “downtown” Harrisburg stands a crumbling wreck. Not a colossal wreck that might inspire a poem; it yet remains. It’s been in this state for many years before we arrived.

This is an unfair introduction to Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, a town designed for The Capitol of the State of Pennsylvania, for legislators and their attendant lawyers, for a national railway link across the Susquehanna River, for carriages and feathered hats. Harrisburg helped win a fight with the Confederates in the summer of 1863; Lincoln’s address could have been the “Harrisburg” rather than the “Gettysburg”.

In about 1970, however, Harrisburg faced another foe and suffered heavy losses. This time it was hit by the automobile. Cars moved people and money out of town like cheap beer before the big game. Harrisburg today looks a lot like a real place but there is almost nothing here that would attract anyone back into town except a job with the government. And those aren’t very attractive. Government employees in their cars and pickups flow into the parking garages and then disappear into any of a dozen imposing state buildings and a couple of hospitals and banks. At five o’clock they flow out again, a daily tide that leaves a barren stretch of streets that you could safely cross with your eyes closed.

Harrisburg fails the “banana test”, meaning that you can’t buy fresh fruit within a 5-minute walk from city hall. But Municipal government tries real hard. Under an influential and visionary mayor, the city has built a pleasant and active park on the river-front and a local island. It draws a crowd for ball games and yearly events ??? craft shows and the like. The Burg also has its boastful “restaurant row”, a self-conscious and successful effort to draw in the after-work crowds that give a town its character. In this case, the characters are the noisy, young folks who like their burgers on expensive plates ??? and a monster TV overhead. Except for this weekend hubbub, as well as an active gay community and a handful of professionals with a taste for cramped, nineteenth century architecture, Harrisburg would be a no-man’s land between the safe suburbs and the vicious and lost neighborhoods where the town’s population really lives ??? and dies.

This is also a dangerous little place. Young people especially are routinely shot and often killed only a few blocks from that ugly shack in the photo. When we arrived here we were surprised to hear stories of middle-class folks living on “the white bank” of the Susquehanna River who were reluctant to cross the bridge, fearing violence in the city.

Yet the place is in much better shape than it was in the 70s and will likely get better. The cost of living in the suburbs is not going down, and a taste for small, close communities where people can walk to the corner store ??? and kids can walk to a library ??? seems to be growing. That kind of life is possible in this town and it wouldn’t take much imagination to see it. Maybe Harrisburg will recover from that nasty automobile accident it had 30 years ago.

If you’re interested in some strong opinions about how car culture had changed North America for the worse, try James Kunstler and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

All the email never written. All the stray thoughts that someone I know would have appreciated. Even a little wisdom from time to time. Will it all end up here in this strange captain’s log?

Years ago, working at SoftQuad in Toronto, we would overhear the tech-support people leading some new user through the complexity of HoTMetaL 1.0, our web page editing software. It was terribly important for this new user to create a web site about his cats. We scoffed and wondered whether SoftQuad’s brilliant contributions to the creation of the web might find its fullest expression in “mycats.com”.

I hope I’m not offending the owner of mycats.com, mycats.org, mycats.net, mycats.biz ??? yes, they’re all taken, but I suspect that he’s a corporation immune to offense and probably doing just fine, whatever he does.

And why should I care? What we didn’t appreciate at the time ??? the time being about 1996 ??? was that if the web really did take over the whole world of text and image communication then there would be room for everyone. “Everyone” is much harder to imagine than “take over the whole world …”

So here I am attempting an entry in the log that, if it’s ever read by the ship’s owners, will be not be too quick to flatter my navigating skills and not too quick to rationalize the errors, but will show the progress of the voyage accurately. If the ship’s owners are inclined to leave their stuffy offices, it might tempt them out for a day or a month.