Earlier today, I had occasion to take an intercity bus through parts of Connecticut. The final stage in an odyssey that began on the other side of the country. Normally, this last leg of travel would take place on a train, but work on the rail lines meant that some trips had to be taken by bus, so, pulling out of Hartford and rolling through downtown, I had myself a sudden bite of the madeleine.
Throughout the last decade, I’d ridden that bus or others like it at various points between New York City and either New Haven or Hartford—a weekend home from law school or maybe some holiday travel or the simple need for dislocation, for jostling and wheels rolling. And often during that period, hanging over the trip and blotting out the sun was the fog of being a broke student in a city that punishes broke-ness like few others I’ve occupied. This was before CTRail and the Hartford Line, a time when Greyhound and Peter Pan were cheaper than Amtrak and could spirit me more directly where I needed to go. The thing about points of transit is that there is so much people happening. Having Port Authority as my point of departure for five or so years turned me into a bit of an expert on arrivals and leavetakings. Every holiday season, I would watch the amateurs, the first-timers, et cetera, scramble through the ordeal of overbookings and too-long queues, missing connecting trains or funerals or Christmases or Thanksgivings with loved ones, opportunities at reconciliation or perhaps a few final days with a beloved, traditions with family and friends, and almost every time, there’s the same odyssey through rage and grief to dispiritedness, then they evanesce to be replaced by yet another beleaguered traveler having run the gauntlet of Port Authority only to find their path home blocked off by yet another instance of Aeschylean tragedy. Port Authority during the holidays is a cauldron of Teachable Moments.
Anyway, the bus would pull out of the tunnels and, eventually, like a shipwrecked sailor coming up for air, we would hit highway. After enough practice, I got the hang of when to get my ride so that we would meet minimal traffic and I’d watch the sites of my fiscal struggle whizz by until there was little more than mountain and treeline flanking us.
Then something would happen after about an hour or so. These trips tended to bunch around fall and winter so there was that blessèd bite to the air. On the warmer end, you would still need a hoodie. But, generally, you could rest comfortable in a varsity jacket and know you would not have sweated through the damned thing by the time you got to where you were going. On my mind would be all types of things: cover letters for summer fellowships, the Sandy Hook shooting, whatever novel I was working on at a particular time. But we’d cross into Connecticut, and I would feel it signaled in my bones more vividly than any Welcome sign could have communicated. Crossing the state boundary line, the fog lifted. The colors of the world—its edges—grew sharper. The air was easier to breathe. My heart had lifted. My troubles hadn’t evaporated: I was still broke, I still had those Contracts readings to catch up on, those novels were still unfinished. But there was something about leaving New York behind that cleansed the lungs. Not just leaving but seeing it left behind. It’s slower on a bus than on a train, the moment enlarged.
Prior to law school, I spent much of film school commuting between New Haven and NYC, a precursor to the daily commute that would consume so much of my life 6 or so years into the future. The reason for the commute was money. I couldn’t actually afford to live in the city where I was studying so I had to count my coins and hope workstudy payments hit in time for me to afford my Metro-North tickets. And that was where I first felt whispers of that fog-lift feeling that would become a mainstay of my law school days. At the time, I was in a bit of a bad way, and one of my professors—a coruscating bundle of enthusiasm and love for the theater—would often take time to speak with me before or after her class. Hers was the course that got me to appreciate, if not love, playwriting. And it seemed, more often than not, that she had singled me out for evangelizing. She had Edward Albee come speak at her class, and I don’t know if she knew that he and I had attended the same high school, but it seemed too organized an episode of serendipity to be mere chance. I will always believe she had her fingers on the scale in my life. Anyway, we were reading a lot of Chekhov at one point, and when she got wind of my commutes, rather than pity me or exclaim a worry, she told me with trademark enthusiasm of Chekhov’s periodic excursions from Moscow to the countryside, a peregrination I vibed with because I recognized the desire to cleanse the lungs of urban carcinogenic. I’m convinced we’re always fleeing to the countryside for our health because it’s much more difficult to treat spiritual tuberculosis in air breathed by so many other souls. There’s something to be said about the palliative effect of birdsong. Maybe she didn’t know the extent of my condition when she told me of Chekhov. Maybe she did. Again, her fingers on the scale.
One of my recurring preoccupations during those bus rides was a growing appreciation for the state I’ve called home for just about my entire life (minus a year or two of infancy in Massachusetts). My uniform for much of that time was hoodie-jacket-boots. The off-duty kit of people I knew who were contractors by day or mechanics or tattooists or massage therapists. Salt of the earth types, in my eyes. It was a sort of vicious leaning-in to the idea of working class identity and I think a part of me even then figured it as a sort of antibiotic reaction to having spent so much of my life in the Ivory Tower, listening to bloodless conversations about quintessentially sanguine topics like love and civil wars in Africa. I wasn’t like Them, I was like This. And part of that leaning-in had me fashioning the skylines of Bridgeport and whathaveyou as a kingdom in a sense or some place of supreme importance inversely related to its lack of splendor, the stereotypes of attractiveness. New York was noise where the parts of Connecticut I occupied contained life quietly, stumblingly, nobly lived. Of course, there’s a fetishizing at work, Levin and the peasants and all that, but the uniform fit, so why not claim that skin if I can wear it so comfortably?
I didn’t have all of this at the forefront of my mind during this afternoon’s bus ride, but it was there lurking in the lizard part of the brain. What I was consciously considering, however, was the idea of “sense of place” in literature. Or when people say [CITY/LOCATION] is like a character itself. It seems to mean more than a character or characters moving through the place’s architecture (manufactured or natural) or hearing the music or seeing the grime or gleam. In a crime novel, it can come across as a sort of unnameable malaise or ambient worry that one’s end is lurking somewhere in the shadowed alley you’re walking past. Or maybe it’s the way sunlight hits the face while you stand barefoot on a sandbar. I don’t quite know how it happens or how it’s done, and if I’ve done it in, say, Goliath, then it was probably by accident. Getting the reader to feel the chill or the burn of a place. Getting them to hear and feel the crunch of snow under their boots. Convey the ever-present sweat-stink of tropical climes, the claustrophobia of a jail cell, the crushing expanse of desert or the sea you’re stranded in. It’s a kind of magic-knot I can’t quite untangle. I’m just writing down what’s happening to my people.
Maybe it’s simpler than I’m making it out to be. Worldbuilding is only really the character moving through the world and if that empathetic transference that puts the reader in the character’s shoes is successful, then it’s the reader moving through that world, both paying witness to the effects of that world on the character and vicariously experiencing those same effects. The chill, the burn, the crunch, the sweat, the claustrophobia, the crushing expanse, all of that. But there’s also the way a place works on the soul. And that seems to be where the really difficult part of the writing happens. Getting the reader to understand just how liberating it felt to leave New York every time I had the chance to, that seems like a gift. Even if their “New York” is some place else, that feeling persisting means mission accomplished. It felt so good every time my lungs were cleansed. And there’s little more I want right now than for you to understand with your whole body what that can mean.
Currently reading: Private Empire by Steve Coll
Currently listening: Leedle Leedle Lee - TrippyThaKid