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.
In the 1930s, the German Jewish writer Siegfried Kracauer fled the Nazis to Paris. He fell in love with the city’s neighborhoods, especially the disorganized and shabby ones, where, he wrote, he would walk for hours, captivated by “the intoxication of the streets.” These labyrinthine streets felt organic to him, “like the limbs of living things.” Deep in their crevices, he felt as if he were searching for some lost destination or memory. “Filled with the longing to finally reach the place where what I’d forgotten would come back to me, I could not pass the smallest side street without entering it and turning the corner at its end.”
Today I’m walking through the lanes behind Liberty Street, not as a shortcut to anywhere, not because there’s anything in particular to see back here, but simply because, like Kracauer in Paris, I cannot pass the smallest side street without entering it and turning the corner at its end. Behind the big old pillared homes that have been converted into student housing, smaller brick structures stand pressed together in lines. I assume they’re inhabited by students too, until I pass a very old man standing by a mailbox, apparently lost in thought. I weave among these apartments, crossing their parking lots, their strips of grass, the shadows of their rickety wooden balconies, entering an alley where a fake deer gazes soulfully at me from a yard as if mourning the plastic forest of its youth. Here’s a boat swathed in a dusty tarp, a firepit made of loose bricks, a kayak on a porch, a railing crowded with bicycles. I’ve passed these houses before, but now I’m seeing them from the back, from the other side of the tapestry, where knots and stray threads show.
When you walk in a limited space, there are two ways to experience newness. You can observe how the landscape changes—seasons shift, people move in and out, the creek runs high or low—or you can take matters into your own hands, wriggling onto the other side, discovering fresh routes and novel angles on familiar things. My walks are constrained by ability and time, as I always start from the same place—my front porch—and go as far as my legs and schedule allow, usually not more than a few miles, an hour and a half at most. So I often try to get onto the other side, preferring the crooked road to the straight, the cluttered alley to the open sidewalk, and even the dead-end street to the more promising thoroughfare.
In the Friendly City, it’s worth noting, a dead end is not always dead to a pedestrian. I cut through a stretch of weeds beside the creek, climb up to the bridge with its fantastic rotted old railing hanging like shredded cloth, and pick my way over the railroad track, careful not to turn an ankle on the stones, to enter the back of the lumber yard. I have the feeling of good cheer that always fills me when I’ve managed to walk somewhere I couldn’t drive or even bike. Here on the flip side of the tapestry, the city feels rough and ragged: motionless train cars, dark as mahogany with age and exposure, stand as if rusted to the tracks; planks lie piled in the parking lot; and scrawls of graffiti cover the white-painted brick of the outbuildings like colorful tangles of yarn. It is not, perhaps, everyone’s cup of tea to walk through a lumber yard, but I love to see how the city is put together, to explore the knots. And if I never strayed from the most obvious paths, I wouldn’t be facing, right now, the gorgeous stained glass in the house that suddenly looms up at the end of the street, catching the sun with its circlets of molten gold, pale pink diamonds, and squares of purple iridescent as mother-of-pearl.
I remember once, searching for a place to lock up my bicycle at the Family Dollar on Chicago Avenue, I found myself overlooking a patch of countryside bordered by a small vegetable garden and ending in a field of tall corn. A forest darkened the background of this rural scene. How strange to realize I was looking at the back of the bike path—a route I’ve walked and biked hundreds of times! The forest was the thicket of trees along the path, the corn was growing in someone’s backyard, and the vegetable garden belonged to the autobody shop whose roof, scattered with tires, lay below my vantage point. In all my roaming through this neighborhood, I had never before discovered that these enterprising mechanics were growing tomatoes on the side! Often, I’ve found, the reverse of the Friendly City’s urban tapestry yields a maze of country threads, as if the woods and farms, imperfectly covered with asphalt, are always waiting for a chance to reclaim their territory.
“I would have liked best to explore all the courtyards,” Kracauer wrote, “and search through one room after another.” I recognize this feeling. There is a lack of fulfillment in my walks that makes them endlessly tantalizing. I circle the streets and alleys, cross the creek over and over again, but what I really want is to enter all the doors, to inhabit every building, to live in that white octagonal house with the curious little balcony, that brick cottage almost engulfed by the twin pear trees. I want to be on the other side of the windows, looking out at myself on the street. On these marvelous bright days, with clear light falling through my eyelashes, I am so intoxicated by the streets I want to climb on a random pickup truck, scale an anonymous wall, try my teeth on a fence, taste the cobwebs, eat the grass.
What have I forgotten, what am I searching for on these rambles? Some everchanging, always unforeseen prize: a glint of stained glass or the ruddiness of unexpected tomato plants that throws a new light on the city, altering the whole landscape for a moment, like the pure bands of the rainbow that arced over my in-laws’ apartment the other day, transforming the back of the row, with its plain windows and wooden staircases, into a place I’d never seen before.
