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.
There is a forest near my house, but I’ve never walked there. I can see it from the bike path that branches off from Third Street, where I often stroll, but a fence separates me from the dense trees that beckon across the distance, raising their rusty branches against the ashen sky.
Today I’m taking a new route, hoping to reach the forest from a different direction. I start off toward Market Street from the Baptist church. The hill drops steeply behind the farm equipment store, and I scuttle down crabwise, then tramp through the deep weeds, threading my way between the sheds and ranks of tractors. One of the pleasures of walking is getting personal with space, encountering your surroundings at a granular level. The feedback from the ground underfoot, the textures of grass and concrete, and the unexpected conjunctions of objects that meet the eye—crates, slats, ladders, frames, white drums that say Used Oil in red paint, with the green hill behind them, topped with the triangular brick church—all of this adds up to a vivid image of a place, thick with sensory detail and deeply satisfying.
In his 1960 book The Image of the City, the urban planner Kevin Lynch studied the mental maps people make of the cities where they live. “This book is about the look of cities,” he writes in the preface, “and whether this look is of any importance, and whether it can be changed. The urban landscape, among its many roles, is also something to be seen, to be remembered, and to delight in.”
Lynch’s book, which would have a lasting influence in the field of behavioral geography, explores cities much bigger than ours—Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City. But his findings are relevant to any person moving through a space. Each of us, he explains, creates “an environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world.” This image is composed of sensations and memory. It’s more complex and flexible than a map, and varies from person to person. It helps us to interpret information and make decisions, and affects the way we feel about our environment. “The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual.”
Under a streaked, pewter-gray, semitransparent sky, I walk up Market Street, a fairly unlovely stretch of road, wondering what Kevin Lynch, with his quest for urban beauty, would make of this For Lease sign with a grinning face outside a dun-colored warehouse. I imagine he wouldn’t be very impressed. But I think he’d approve of the way Market Street sweeps along Westover Park, since clear trajectories, gentle slopes, and ample green space are all elements of his ideal city design. I remember, too, that he cautions against too much organization in the urban environment, which can feel “monotonous or restrictive.” A perfectly controlled and tidy city would also be perfectly boring. “It is important to maintain some great common forms,” he writes. “But within this large framework, there should be a certain plasticity, a richness of possible structures and clues,” so that each of us can construct an individual image of our urban space.
My own mental map of the city is a scratched and scribbled thing, with plenty of arrows, question marks, crossed-out bits, and corrections. With my poor sense of direction, I am hardly a natural cartographer. It takes me a long time to get to know a place, and I find it disorienting to speed through a landscape in a car. I need to get onto the street, even a dullish street like this one, and feel its contours with the soles of my boots. This method has its advantages. The leisurely pace of a walk allows surprising sights to crystallize from the landscape: a glimpse of mountains framed by the pergola of the Pioneer Bank, or an impromptu collage of white chicken feathers blown among red rosebushes. And when you walk, you can extend, adjust, and fill in your mental map at the speed for which your organism evolved, not snatching quick impressions from the driver’s seat but crunching over this gravel behind the bank, observing the sign for the quarry, its letters topped with the image of a tiny man wielding a hammer, and watching the forest rise into view, its edge snapping into your map, no longer fenced off but close by, within reach, with its piney smell, the desired forest.
I think this forest must belong to the quarry. Gazing into its fringes, I see signs prohibiting hunting and trespassing. Brownish veins in the shadows suggest the lines of a wire fence. But surely it’s possible to go a little closer? I watch for a break in the traffic and step briskly across Waterman Drive, where I come up against a trench lined with large, loose stones of the ankle-spraining variety, almost certainly meant to deter trespassers beguiled by the curtained gloom of the wood, its primal fragrance, and the aloof, unruffled presence of the trees.
I’ve met the owners of this quarry. A mutual friend introduced us years ago. Dear neighbors, I’m just taking the briefest peep into your forest! I scramble across the stones and through a gap between the trunks, where there’s no fence, and duck into the rugged glade. The sound of the traffic recedes with incredible swiftness, as if I’ve passed through the portal to another world. Buzzards circle among the treetops overhead. I hear the high, faint, saw-like creaking of insects. A leaf falls, crisp as an intake of breath. Peering through the branches for just a moment, before I slip back into the everyday hum of Waterman Drive, I see houses I know, the back of a street where our friends live, where I’ve walked completely cut off from this wood—the blowsy cedars, leaf-strewn trails, and strands of sylvan light I am only now grafting onto my environmental image.
Since a mental map is built of memory and sensation, walking maps must be more intricate and layered than driving ones, simply because they take more time. I think of my mother, who walks only for short stretches now, often with her walker, and how sharply attuned she is to changes in her environment, noticing every bump in the sidewalk, how grass grows between the cracks, and the tiniest seasonal shifts in the tree outside her back door.
