By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
“I have a question for you,” he said. “Why do you live here?”
He was young, and had lived in the Friendly City for about four years. He went to college here; this past spring, he graduated. He smiled as he asked the question, but his gaze was uncertain, even a little desperate. I imagined that as the city filled up with college students again, those migratory birds that land in huge flocks every autumn, he was wondering why he was still hanging around this undistinguished spot, why he hadn’t moved on.
And did he have to leave? Or was this a reasonable place to live—as good as any other?
I smiled back at him and went into my usual recitation: I applied for a job here because I have friends and family in the area, I grew up visiting the town, I like the four seasons, the mountains, the proximity to larger cities. I could tell from his polite nod and suppressed sigh that he wasn’t satisfied; what surprised me was that I wasn’t convinced myself. Everything I said was true, but it was so vague as to have little meaning. When I walk through town, when my step quickens with sudden delight, it’s not because I’m thinking about my job, my friends, the nearness of the capital city, or even the mountains.
What is it, then?
It’s the towering plaster rooster in a garden, overshadowing a statue of a small boy in gray stone.
It’s the house at the top of the hill completely surrounded by children’s playhouses, as if a miniature tribe has besieged and conquered the adults.
It’s the three plastic horses in a yard, each about two feet high, one of them colored a wonderful delicate shade of pink, who seem ready to gallop into the yellow scrub behind the house, their diminutive size transforming it into a great field of waving golden grass.
It’s the statue of a stag balanced on a ceramic turtle.
It’s the big rusty ogre, taller than a man, who guards a certain backyard, composed of some bubbly substance I can’t identify, similar to papier-mâché but impervious to rain. It’s his mighty, purplish head, which I saw lying on the front porch the other day, removed (temporarily, I hope) for some kind of surgical procedure. It’s the fact that this monster exists nowhere else. His DIY eccentricity. The ambition behind his construction, the humor, the verve.
It’s the row of modest houses painted in light, unobtrusive colors, each trimmed with a demure green patch of yard, and the fact that one of these yards contains an enormous skeleton, its skull almost level with the upstairs windows, grinning among the branches of a pear tree. Maybe this ghoul started out as a Halloween decoration, but it’s become part of the street, winter and summer. I love the weird silhouette of its long, creaky limbs, and, even more, the tolerance of its neighbors, the way nobody on this otherwise scrupulously normal block seems to be asking questions about the oversized cadaver. One feels that although the neighbors may not approve of the skeleton, may even grumble about it, clicking their tongues irritably as they peer through the curtains, they would all staunchly defend their neighbor’s right to self-expression, and if the skeleton were threatened by outsiders, they’d rise to its defense.
It’s the giant frog on a porch railing. The cow skull on a door. The sculpture of a surprised-looking boy riding on a pterodactyl. These rough-and-ready arts, these distinctive combinations of objects offered to the gaze of passersby, to the street.
It’s the porch with the silver mannequin torso, the green rabbit, the purple cat wearing a facemask, the blue chicken, the plaster head of a Roman centurion, the plum-colored alien clad in a hat and reclining on its elbow, the colorful plastic replica of a sugar skull, and the dented robot cobbled together from various spare parts. This porch is a little vision of utopia. If a rabbit can hang out with a robot, it suggests, and a soldier of the ancient world can rub shoulders with a creature from outer space, then there is room for everyone here.
It’s the carousel horse in a glassed-in porch, leaning against the wall, looking far too large for the space, exiled from the fairground of its youth, and the way the lamps in the garden shine up onto its red-and-blue trappings after dark, transforming it into a figure of romance.
It’s the place on Grace Street where the creek flows under a university building—yes, a building erected on top of the creek!—and underneath in the dark the tarry-looking water goes sliding along on its secret way, and in summer there’s a loud, echoing, chittering sound, as if birds are fighting or holding a parliament down below, and you can hear the water pouring over stones and bricks and rust-bitten pieces of pipe, and the bank is all overgrown, and there’s lots of graffiti on the wall, so it must be easy to climb down there, and someone has painted a little green dragon sticking out its long tongue, or possibly vomiting, and shouting “Blargh!”—or, again, perhaps this “Blargh!” is the sound of dragonish regurgitation—and turning up its eyes, and stiffening its ridiculous stubby arms, and the effect is comical and sly and a bit naughty in a high-spirited way, without malice, with the air of something done for a lark, from sheer exuberance, and I realize this might be an odd reason to love a place, but there’s something so charming about this quirkiness and greenness tucked away beneath the street, this conjunction of leaves and water and stone and a sense of the absurd that seems to ask, with merry philosophy, Why not here?
