A Dose of Strangers

As dusk settles on a day I've spent indoors, I get restless, looking out the windows at the darkening forest, even if I've spent the day doing useful or creative things. I recall the convenience of living in my grubbiest apartment, nicknamed The Slum, in the Eastport section of Annapolis. It's the only time I feel the faintest twinge of dissatisfaction at living surrounded by nature.

There was a shopping center, my bank, and a post office within a block or two. My commute to work was a five-minute bike ride or a fifteen-minute walk to a poorly paid factory job in a sail loft. I could get home from work in minutes.

Knee trouble had knocked me out of bike racing in the spring that year, so I didn't have the distraction of thinking that I needed to train. That freed up a lot of time. Juggling a couple of unsuccessful love affairs chewed up a few weekends at either end of the summer, but once I got bounced from those I had my evenings and weekends to myself.

My roommate was a racing buddy who had lured me into splitting the rent after his own previous cohab had taken him for a few hundred dollars and departed. Then, during the winter, he moved in with a woman in another apartment complex, where they could actually afford to pay for heat, so my solitude deepened with winter's advancing chill. We had made a pact never to turn on the electric baseboards, and I held to it. I was getting into winter camping anyway.

The living room was furnished with a few shabby pieces and several bicycles. My roomie left his bikes because his new girlfriend didn't have room in her cozy dwelling. The place was poorly lit after dark, the off-white paint of the living room walls horizontally striped in dashes made by the Velox handlebar plugs of four bikes that rested against them. The floor was dark wood. The ceilings were fairly high, although the architecture of the buildings was boxlike and uninspired. It was a great place to go out from, in search of light, life, and possible companionship.

Companionship is a distant ship, a welcome sight when it first comes over the horizon, but menacing in its anonymity as it draws closer. What flag is that? Who looks over the rail as faces become more distinct? The idea seemed nice. Why spoil it with actual experience? I could easily walk to the center of town, to enjoy the bustle of other people's lives while they obligingly showed no interest in mine. I might go to the infant Ram's Head Tavern, when it was a basement dive offering a galaxy of unusual imported and domestic beers, or I might just walk and walk, sitting for a time on different benches, laying out the map of the city based on all that I could hear.

I'd started the practice of walking to town right after college, when I returned to Annapolis after graduation. Annapolis was both familiar and unfamiliar, because of the way my family had come and gone from it over and over during my father's Coast Guard career. I walked from West Annapolis at that point, a bit farther, but a pretty walk, between the Naval Academy and St. John's College campuses, or, often, across the St. John's campus. During firefly season, the walks were enchanted by millions of tiny lights. It was on those walks that I started laying out the sound map, realizing how much of the area I could place spatially from any point.

I would log miles on my evening walks, without thinking about it. Walking is a great way to stimulate creativity and relaxation. Driving facilitates sloth, which can be mistaken for relaxation, but walking provides rhythm, exercise, and flow through the scenery. So does biking, but walking is often a better choice. Especially during the times when I was spending most of my time on the latest draft of my bad novel, or other creative efforts that kept me in a chair for hours, the ability to redeem the day with an evening walk was not only a great amenity, the walk itself was an opportunity to observe other lives and fit these snippets into current or future works. I called it a dose of strangers.

I do have a few dear friends, some of whom I might actually hear from occasionally. I didn't have anything against meeting people, I'm just not very good at it. So, playing to my strengths, I was content to observe, tending to any close passage with a courteous nod and a smile. I did try to kindle something with the young woman who worked the evening shift in a cool bookstore on Main Street, but she deflected the advance. That was still something to file away for possible fictional use, as was everything in those days. I would go home and write for hours before nodding off. Then the alarm would pull me up to crawl from the deep seaweed of fatigue in search of coffee and whatever the day had in store.

In my childhood, my father would go for drives after supper. Like a favorite dog, I would be invited along a lot of the time. But after the gasoline shortages of the 1970s made it obvious to me that petroleum was not something to squander, I wasn't going to drive aimlessly even if I had a car. So here I am now, with a choice between groping in the forest among creatures adapted not only to function but to prey in the dark, or to walk along the road, where hotrodders like to manufacture rubber smoke, and drinkers fling their empties, their driving precision not to be trusted. I don't want to be a lone figure in the headlights even if the oncoming or overtaking motorist is totally sober and sedate. This is doubly true of biking. The advantage of the city was that I could see and be seen without being unusual. And at the time Annapolis had little street crime. There was little to fear.

Hiking is grand. I love to hike. But my night vision was never great, and now it's worse, so I'm reluctant to bumble into a bear or accidentally drop kick a skunk while I'm fumbling around in the dark. And even though I know that coyotes are an asset and don't habitually attack humans, when they sing out nearby it still makes my hair stand up. I'm not going for a walk in the dark. I'll have to come up with something else. Or, as usual, peck idly at this or that until I notice that it's almost midnight and I should have gone to bed hours before.