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THE LORD GOD BIRD (The Singer Tract, Louisiana) What would you do? Say you found something rare and close to your heart - and I'm talking rare here, dinosaur rare, Bigfoot rare, something so rare it can't be real - what would you do?... EULOGY FOR THE HAZARD STREET BRIDGE (Houston, Texas) I miss my bridge. Okay, so it wasn't "my" bridge, technically, but I felt like we were friends, at least. I've lived on or near Highway 59 the entire time I've lived in Houston... MUSKET PORN (Brooklyn, NY) The signs went up a few days in advance, appearing overnight in the front windows of Snooky's Bar and the New Purity Diner, all the shops along the avenue long enough in the tooth to be considered "neighborhood." "Battle of Brooklyn Reenactment: Saturday, 1 pm," they proclaimed... HITCHHIKER HEARS... (Vancouver Island, Canada) In British Columbia I'm suddenly aware of all the ways in which it is physically not Ontario: the mountains that tower over the sea, the deep green woods of the West Coast. Instead of the flat, pristine lakes of Southern Ontario, everything here looms over us - but it is comforting, as though we're being watched over... NEWS (Iowa and Michigan) The Iowa River flood of the late 1980s took us all by surprise. It shouldnžt have. During a pleasantly hot summer weekend in Iowa City, my wife Susan and I stepped out of the Comfort Inn, where our friends from Illinois were staying, into one of the most intense gully-washers we had ever seen... THE FRONTIERSMEN (New York, NY) PETE: Gentrification is the story of my life. As soon as I was an adult, I was cast out of the neighborhood I grew up in. This was the Upper West Side in the 1980s, which during the Reagan boom became the co-op and condo bedroom community to the first wave of Wall Street types who bum-rushed the city... EVEN MY DREAMS ARE POLITICAL (Dreamland) 9/3/97: I was hanging out in a department store with a friend, who suggested to me that even though the Pentagon seemed like an impenetrable fortress, it could be disrupted in a small way. I went there and, after walking through the front doors, placed an obstacle in the floor to block the passage and escaped through the bathroom window... 
GRAY WATER RAFTING (Paluxy River, TX) Our camp on the Paluxy river is amid the live oaks on a bluff about fifty feet high, looking over the brink of the muddy and enervating. We called ahead to reserve the site... THE EARTH BENEATH YOUR FEET (Blacksburg, VA) Compost makes me homesick. Not just any compost. Alan's compost. He sent me a picture of it over the Internet: two rich piles of Virginia dirt mixed with garbage, neatly contained in a pallet fence he built himself. "If you come home," said the attached e-mail, "I'll build you one just like it."... I LIVE AT HOME (Philadelphia, PA) When I graduated from college I was determined not to move back in with my parents. Born in 1976, Ižm a baby Gen Xer. I watched from the safety of high school as those leading the generational pack were deposited into a jobless marketplace and went back to mom and dadžs in droves. The culture of ironic slack ensued... HIGH WATER MARK (The Minisink) Where Sussex County Route 580 tumbles down off the New Jersey ridgeline, it encounters a sudden band of forest. Here the trees are packed tight, taller and dense and foresty in a way unlike anything along the roadsides on the two-hour drive from the city. This, on the long, fast decline, is a good place to keep an eye peeled for white-tailed deer.... DOWNSTREAM: AN INTERVIEW WITH SANDRA STEINGRABER (New York, NY) When you look at a farm field with untrained eyes, you might see some cows, a barn, perhaps a few drab brown Ho-Hos of hay. Itžs the dull, pastoral scene that fills the broad expanse of Middle America, conveying flatness and hominess as you zip past on the endless interstate... EGRET HASH (Grand Forks, North Dakota) SUNDAY: Deep green and blue sparkles in the house where itžs always okay to sleep late. Sky huge and blue, land stretched endlessly sun baked fields and fields of green. My hips ã rose hips, skin perfumed by sweetgrass air, nipples harden in the soft fresh breeze, bliss alone in wide spaces. Prairie enters me, brings itself home... ROOTS AND WINGS (San Juan Capistrano, CA) The housing tract where we live could almost be described as socialist. Not because of politics, but because in some ways it defies the American Dream of the single-family home with white picket fence and private swimming pool in the backyard, around which the homeowner mows, edges and occasionally rototills... BLUE STREAK (Meadville, PA) "Hold it! Just one moment, if you please." Three seconds into my first impressions of the Conneaut Lake Blue Streak and I'm prevented from boarding the train by a grizzled old ride operator in mechanics' overalls... NEW YORK STORIES (New York, NY) The morning after the World Trade Center bombing, I do what I have done most mornings for the last couple of years: I walk to the deli around the corner from my house and get a cup of coffee... 
BUTCHER BIRD (Portland, OR) Larder. It has two meanings in my life. The first is the small dirt-floored room off my grandparents' basement where my grandmother hid beer from my granfather who'd quit drinking, decades before, during a card game... PRESIDENT STREET (Brooklyn, NY) On President Street, we could tell it was spring when Miles Riley came out of 913 with a broomstick and a cut-in-half Spaldeen for a stickball... FORGOTTEN (Brooklyn, NY) "See that alley?" says Kevin Walsh. "That's called Sea Place. But as you can see, it's just about gone."... DO HISTORICAL EVENTS LAST FOREVER? (Livermore, CA) Although its population has reached over 70,000 people, Livermore is still considered a small town by Bay Area standards. We're just a stop along the road to San Francisco or out to the Central Valley... THE WALL IS DOWN (Berlin, Germany) When on November 9, 1989, the Wall came down, I was fast asleep. My radio alarm started at 6 a.m. Some said that early in the morning, the borders had been opened; people were dancing in the streets, et cetera. Well, I thought, good for them... DARK HOLLER BLUES (Logan County, West Virginia) August 1999: It's 6 a.m., and the sun is beginning to peer out through the dark pines that line the high jutting mountaintops, a beautiful August day just beginning. I am at a fast-food restaurant just off an interstate, eating an egg-and-cheese biscuit... Plus: A HISTORY OF BILLBOARD REGULATIONS IN TIMES SQUARE by Annia Ciezadlo 
WTO (Seattle, WA) The first major protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle happened on my street, Broadway, the major shopping artery of the yuppie-gay-boho-student enclave known as Capitol Hill... NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS (New York, NY) Washington Square Park is one of those diminished neighborhood places I try not to think about. A curfew and police surveillance have not fulfilled their original purpose of discouraging pot dealers... SACRIFICE (Black Hills of South Dakota) It was one of the hardest decisions I had ever made in my life, and I didn't even know I was making it. I was forced to choose between a person and a place, and the person won... THE BATTLE OF BROOKLYN (Brooklyn, NY) In Brooklyn's Prospect Park, down in the basement of the building called the Picnic House, under a desk in a nondescript office at the end of a nondescript corridor, there's a box of fake turf... READING THE SIDEWALKS (Matsue, Japan) Even during those first disorienting jet-lag days in Matsue, I noticed that the sidewalks of main streets were unusual. Maybe my curiosity was triggered by the absence of sidewalks in my auto-conscious but pedestrian-negligent suburb in Texas... AN AUSTRALIAN IN NEW YORK (New York, NY) Melbourne, Australia. March 1999, some time after 1 a.m. This is a lounge room, much like any other. A well-worn leather sofa plays host to me and my calico cat, Holly... A REPORT FROM THE FIELD (Seattle, WA) It started with a southbound bus ride. All the significant communal events that I've participated in since moving up here have begun exactly that way... Plus: SUBWAY BLUES by David Dyte 
GETTING THE MAIL (Arlington, TX) "There was no possibility of going for a walk that day," begins Jane Eyre. She would really have hated living in Arlington, Texas... WHOSE STREETS? (New York, NY) Springtime is just around the corner, and despite the bitter cold that has descended on New York City, the first buds are starting to poke through on the sycamore trees in City Hall Park... FREEWAY (Route 91 West, CA) I'm pretty sure that Los Angeles is to blame. I try to avoid Los Angeles County at all costs. I mean, I don't have any reason to go there: they don't have anything up there that we don't have here in Orange County, except for thicker smog... SHOPPING IN EASTLEIGH (Nairobi, Kenya) You know those places some people tell you not to go when you visit a new city? Well, Eastleigh -- Nairobi's "Little Somalia" -- is one of those places... NORTH OF NORTH DAKOTA (Grand Forks, ND) The drive from Fargo to Grand Forks is much like the drive from Minneapolis to Fargo, especially in winter. Except on the northern ride there are no hills. The total trip takes six to seven hours, less if you drive at L.A. speed, like my sister does... SIDEWALKS (North Bennington, VT) This morning, as I do nearly every day, I walked to the post office pushing my year-old daughter in her stroller. I love this ritual any time of year, but in summertime when the air is sweet, the trees full green and the sky blue, I feel as if I live in paradise... Plus: TIGER STADIUM, 1912-1999 by Kim Stroud / THE LITTLE HIGHWAY THAT COULDN'T by Neil deMause / OUT WITH THE OLD EYESORE, IN WITH THE NEW by Stacy Cowley / PHONE BOOTH by David Dyte / MONSTERS OF ROCK by Neil deMause / DOWN ON THE CORNER by Neil deMause 
ZIPPO-TOWN (Bradford, PA) "It ain't been the same around here since the oil companies pulled out." I was sitting in a Ford Econoline full of video equipment, smoking cigarettes with... OUR HOUSE (Brooklyn, NY) The windows over the doorways in our apartment -- little wood-framed panes of glass, some now painted over -- are called "transoms." They tell a story... WEB OF GOLD (Chicago, IL) In Chicago I had a room in a sooty brick building that leaned forward toward the street as if preparing to collapse. Winter came and stayed... ON THE MOVE (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) Optus Oval sits quietly in the middle of leafy Princes Park in inner suburban Melbourne. A tranquil, pleasant place. From Monday to Friday, anyway... MENDHI: JUST FOR FUN (Queens, NY) The pot sat in the little sink, half full of water. It was brown-rimmed with the remains of either chai or henna, it was hard to tell which... TROUBLE IN RIVERHEAD (Riverhead, NY) I still remember vividly one of the first times I met Terri Scofield. It was a chilly November weekend in 1995, before "welfare reform" became a household word, and... Plus: WOODWARD AVENUE, DETROIT by Neil deMause / GREENWOOD, BROOKLYN by Neil deMause / SOUTH BANK OF THE MONONGAHELA RIVER, PITTSBURGH by Neil deMause |
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