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.
On that day, when you weren’t sure where to go, you remembered the words of a neighbor. “Take a walk on Hawkins Street,” he suggested. “It’s best when the school buses are letting out. It really illustrates what’s special about the city.”
So you walked toward Hawkins Street through the hot, bright air, among the skeletal trees, the dry leaves stirring and crunching underfoot. How quickly they seemed to have fallen. A few branches still held up the shreds of their gorgeous colors, smoldering lonely among the rooftops; in Liberty Park, the gingko trees, which had turned later than the others, raised their shimmering golden standards. A prison crew was working in the park, dressed in zebra-striped pants and orange t-shirts, the drone of their mowers and leaf-blowers erasing the sound of the traffic. The sky was an opaline blue, streaked with white. It seemed to have grown larger as the trees dropped their foliage, revealing more of its pallor through the bare branches, and this, along with the dryness of the air, the powdery fragrance of fallen leaves, and the subtle change in the angle of the light, convinced you that it really was autumn, despite the heat which you persisted in describing as unseasonable. How long, you wondered, would you go on saying this, as if warm weather this late in the year was something extraordinary? You remembered the children who had recently come trick-or-treating at your door, their faces under the porch light pouring with sweat in their furry or thick polyester costumes.
In Old Town, political signboards stood in the yards, rattling in the feverish wind. Some had fallen over in the grass. You walked up Bruce Street past the cemetery, thinking that soon, once the temperature dropped, it would be the time of murmuration. You’d heard that it was possible in the city, in the autumn and winter months, to see the murmuration of starlings at dawn and dusk: the birds flocking together in a wavelike motion, making dazzling patterns in the sky to the rhythmic murmur of wings. You’d only seen it in videos online, and hoped to catch it live one day. In a book about bird behavior, you’d read that starlings sleep communally, and that there are several theories about why they form murmurations above their roosting sites, “flying,” the scientist wrote, “in great weaving clouds.” They might be warding off predators by banding together to make big, dramatic motions. They might be conserving the heat of the flock. They might be broadcasting information about feeding sites. The scientist placed his analysis of murmuration in a chapter on “Avian Play.”
You arrived at Hawkins Street, a small branch off Reservoir Street that slopes down toward a blue veil of mountains, thinking of murmuration, of how things gather in response to pressure, thousands of starlings, long lines of people at polling places, leaves blown out of the street to form rustling banks along the curb, piled together in jostling layers, driven by force.
Who will read the patterns of these things?
On Hawkins Street, there were small houses and a few mid-sized apartment buildings. You passed a tiny porch decorated with rows of hanging plants, then a slender yard packed with living and artificial flowers. A rocking chair. A complicated fountain festooned with mosses and animal statues. A strip of earth where a plaster Virgin Mary, her blue sleeves outspread, shared space with a chipped black laughing Buddha and a second, calmer Buddha head, its face painted white with ruby lips. A man talking on a cell phone waved at you from between a pair of parked trucks. A woman holding a baby waved at you from a doorway. A teenager in a wheelchair, shepherded by three women, made his way across the street to a car, where the women helped him in, and all of them waved at you. And when the school bus arrived, you understood why your friend had recommended this neighborhood, why he had found it so special, so illustrative of the essence of the city, for this was a place where the Friendly City expressed its character as a nesting town. Kids clambered down from the bus, chatting in the city’s second tongue. Yard signs proclaimed both Slower Is Safer and Más Lento, Más Seguro. Circling the block, you heard the automated voice at the crosswalk on Reservoir Street, where some teens were waiting to cross with younger children, announcing in two languages that the yellow pedestrian lights were flashing (the cars, ignorant of all human speech, kept streaming by). A sign posted at a construction site bore the name of an electrical company called Neza, whose logo was a stylized coyote with an ornate collar: the emblem of Nezahualcoyotl, the renowned Aztec poet-king, who died in 1472.
Though his name is translated as Hungry Coyote or Fasting Coyote, Nezahualcoyotl often identified himself with a bird in his poems. “Nezahualcoyotl has become a bird,” he declared. “I, a quetzal feather, a bird of the flowering water, I flow in celebration. I am a song.”
Walking home, you thought of the flowing birds, the patterns of movement all over the earth, the pressing desires for warmth, for play, for communal sleep. The leaves blown willy-nilly against the walls. You remembered arriving in this city, which you hoped never to leave, and you also thought of your father, who left his country to nest elsewhere, something that was unusual at the time, and how ordinary it became later, during the war, the ongoing violence, a force still pushing desperate people all over the globe. You remembered how your father and uncles talked about the war, their horror and astonishment, their helpless gestures as they spoke of this overwhelming catastrophe that seemed, and still seems, to have no end, and which they could never have imagined when they were young, when they walked together in a lovely, undestroyed city by the sea—a city they still remember for its white walls, its courteous, slow-paced life, its happiness, its innocence, and its friendliness.
