23 January 23, 2017
I chose a correct – or perhaps incorrect – time to initiate my walk today. Just past noon, some of Monday’s classes were ending, and students began populating the sprawling sidewalks of campus. On some days, this is an opportunity to walk with your head up and make polite eye contact with the passers-by and exchange fleeting smiles or verbal greetings. Maybe a casual “how are you” opens an opportunity to learn about somebody else’s day or past semester. Maybe I’ll even learn something. Every exchange substantiates a communal solidarity that otherwise feels in short supply.
On other days, which seem to be proliferating now, people on the sidewalks constitute just another obstacle to circumvent. I keep my vision fixated either downward or to the vague distance, headphones on my ears, maybe a cigarette to augment the potency of the sound. Often the music is captivating enough that it carries me to another plane of experience, to the point where I genuinely do not notice the passers-by. Other times, I’ll turn the headphones off to pursue musical permutations in my head or indulge the rabbit-holes of thought. Or simply despise the configurations of my thought patterns and go back to the music. Whatever might be going on inside, the nature of the withdrawn posture ought to be a universally-understood language that signals an unwillingness to be disturbed. But the world in all its diversity doesn’t permit such consistencies, and in the case of acquaintances or friends, one doesn’t have much of a choice but to stop and say hi. Everyone is familiar with the routines of superficial exchange, yet even those fall into selective patterns that mostly only reify the comforts of a hermetic worldview. I increasingly find resisting that pattern exhaustive and futile.
There’s a bench beside Otter Creek not far from Cross Street Bridge. One walks past a counseling and therapy office in order to get there, and there’s a lot of cigarette butts on the ground, taunting the girth of the property’s no-smoking sign. I’m surprised to find any butts at all that still have a significant remainder of tobacco attached to them, given how much cigarettes cost here, but there’s at least one. I mean it’s totally good if people are smoking less, but hell if you’ve purchased them, anything short of puffing and wheezing till the bitter, carcinogenic end is nothing but grievous. Either that or you’ve almost literally got money to burn. I wonder if it’s the patients or the staff who are the disproportionate contributors. Or maybe it’s just the staff from the restaurant next door.
The bench is astoundingly sturdy, given its rotten stature. Its surface has borne sturdy white-green moss, and the wood is cracked and dry. The bench is dedicated to somebody dead, according to the brass plate on the front. A white man-made cube of some sort lies half-submerged in the creek’s ice. I have seen a moving train in Vermont for the first time I can recall. First the engine, then the oil-tankers and boxcars brew their understated thunder underneath Cross Street and over the rusted truss bridge not far thereafter, all headed somewhere for something. From the perspective of someone in the discipline of international affairs, there’s a particular dissonance to this place – a settlement of dwellers pondering the evolution of the world and its peoples while nestled in this listless corner so far from them. Not that even good sir Washington is necessarily any better acquainted with those peoples, for whom he crafts meticulously haphazard destinies from his Foggy Bottom armchair. Here, we sit on the verge of New England’s natural environment, not quite integrated with its winter savageries or else we, at least I, might have learned to embrace them. Sitting in the insulation of pale and overheated buildings, I am uncertain that these intellectual pursuits will yield fruit in a world whose landscapes and exchanges are so utterly disparate from what we indulge here. Thankfully, most of us operate comfortably within that hermetic pocket, reaffirmed by similar peoples and similar settings. Most of us find the right fish tank in which to plop ourselves, perhaps with a view into fish tanks next door. Others flop around on the floor, gasping.
Tyler Belmont
The Walk of the Poem 