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.
STEPS
On Thanksgiving, when I was a child, there was always that terrible moment at the table when we were invited—commanded might be a better word—to say what we were thankful for. The ritual was annual; I don’t know why I was never prepared. Beneath the eager stares of the adults, who seemed as hungry for my answer as I was for the cranberry sauce, every nice thing in the world flew out of my head. But this time around, I know what to say. This year, my year of walking in the Friendly City, I am thankful for the steps: the secluded pedestrian steps, half concealed by foliage and bridge rails, that offer safe passage to local walkers.
There are three sets of steps along Martin Luther King Junior Way, connecting the residential neighborhoods with the big university campus. I wonder if they were desire paths once—if students used to scramble up and down the incline, trying to get to class, before the steps were built. Now the cement stairs are worn, cracked in places, almost like part of the earth. Weeds border them. Ragged trees hang over them. These moldering flights feel clandestine, otherworldly, as if they don’t quite belong to everyday life (students apparently think so too: I once startled a pair of them smoking a quiet joint on the steps below Ott Street). For a walker, there is an air of magic to these steps, which materialize in the undergrowth as if in answer to a wish, as if the genie of the city has bowed to your command and, with an occult gesture, transported you to a different level of the street.
If these convenient passages have the aura of A Thousand and One Nights, how much more enchanting are the stairways that lead nowhere! The steps in the brick wall of the funeral home that plunge straight into a bush—what gnome uses them, on what enigmatical errands? The steps on Rock Street, flanked with ivy, giving on a deserted, grass-grown lot—who owns them? Who climbs up to stand among the forlorn trees, looking down on the railroad track? Do these steps serve any practical purpose, or are they placed here just to make us wonder?
GATES
The word pedestrian has, of course, two meanings. One is neutral, describing things involving walking, including people who go on foot. The other meaning has a negative connotation: commonplace or unimaginative. This implies a slur against walking, the oldest, cheapest, and most basic form of transportation. Viewed together on the page of a dictionary, the two definitions give off a faint air of disapproval: Don’t be so pedestrian! Upgrade to something smarter! Are you still using feet?
I can agree that walking is commonplace, but never that it is unimaginative. Only walk to the top of Hillside Avenue—not the one in the Park View neighborhood but the other Hillside Avenue, near Purcell Park (in the undulating Friendly City, it’s almost surprising that only two streets claim this name). Do not by alarmed by the Dead End sign. It’s not for you. Pass with confidence between the slumbrous, unassuming houses, their sloping lawns and disused wooden porches, and the trees, almost leafless at this season, that extend their branches against a chilly porcelain sky. You are approaching the top of the hill. A fence appears, a stout black mesh blocking the street. At this point, you may feel a shade of doubt. Is this a dead end after all? Will you have to turn and retrace your steps, glancing about to see if a face is watching you mockingly from a kitchen window, burying your chin in your collar and pretending to be in a hurry, in the sheepish manner of people who have gone the wrong way?
Fear not! Look to your right, and you’ll see a little open gate, charmingly overgrown like the entrance to a garden. It leads you onto the bike path, which traverses a huge, bare parking lot on its way down to the university. From the half-hidden, woodsy gate, so delicious to slip through, like something out of a fairy tale, you are tossed out onto a tarmac expanse with a science-fictional atmosphere, like a landing strip for spacecraft.
Walking stimulates the imagination. Passing through a covert gate tucked away in some corner of the city, moving from one type of terrain to another, I feel my thoughts turn unexpected corners. I recommend to you our cemetery gates: the gates of the Jewish cemetery, which you open by pulling out a fantastic old-fashioned iron spike, and the red-painted gates of Woodbine, especially the modest one on Bruce Street, scarcely noticeable behind the headstones, which seems to have been left ajar by a ghostly hand.
ROUTES
I have sung the alleys of our city, the intimate backstreets peppered with gravel or grassy like long green ribbons behind the houses, tunneling between the sheds and gardens, inconvenient for wheeled traffic but delightful for walkers, a special gift designed just for us. These routes form a precious network across the city. But I would like to mention another wonderful path, perhaps not as widely known—one that leads out of the city. I have often left my house on foot, carrying my backpack, and headed off to dine in the shadow of the Empire State Building.
Perhaps it’s not quite fair to include this route in my notes on walking, since it involves a bus and a train. But I can’t resist divulging this marvelous pedestrian secret. Yes, you can go to dinner in the Big Apple from the Friendly City on your own two feet! Or, if you prefer, you can enjoy a late lunch in the capital!
I step out onto my porch at around ten o’clock in the morning, pack on my back and tote bag over my shoulder, pulling a rolling suitcase if I’m planning a longish stay. I walk through town to the state university campus. There I walk up the steps of a bus that carries me out of the city, through a landscape of purplish, tumbled mountains, the clouds lying over them in clear layers, the words Endless Caverns picked out in white against the ridge. We arrive at the capital city. I walk down to the lower level of the station and board a train. Scenes flit by in the window: crumbling townhouses, factories, rivers. At six in the evening, I am walking through the wide, crowded streets of the metropolis to the Italian restaurant where I have planned to meet a friend.
I sit down to wait, perusing the menu, my bags stowed under the table, my legs tingling from the day’s exercise, my whole body filled with the elation of having accomplished this journey so smoothly, with so little stress, in this happy, pedestrian way. The dimming light of dusk falls through the window, mingled with the rays of the streetlamps. It gilds the silk rose on the table and touches the edge of my shoe—this sturdy, well-worn Friendly City shoe, which so recently crossed my porch. And I am amazed to think of the places I can go, and the distances I can travel, simply by walking out my front door.
