Years ago, my three siblings and I discovered that we shared a recurring nightmare: We are running for our lives down our childhood street in Brooklyn, being chased by a subway train broken free of its tracks. We agreed not only on the plotline of the dream, but on specific details: the menacing appearance and size of the train, the exact point on the street where it would nearly catch us, jolting us awake.
When we realized this, we stared at each other in amazement – and then laughed. None of us had lived in New York at that point for at least 25 years, yet we were all still having this dream!
Our street was a cul-de-sac created by the crossing of subway tracks, which ran at ground level in that part of Brooklyn. It got very little traffic, so much of our outdoor activity – ball games, hopscotch, bike riding – happened in the middle of the street, with the subway rumbling by. Most of the time, we ignored the trains, but they could also be the main event: targets for snowballs or objects of dares.
We knew the trains’ sounds intimately and were able to tell, without looking, a local from an express; one headed for “The City” from one going to Brighton Beach; and which train our father was probably on, coming home from work.
We took the subway everywhere. Negotiating turnstiles, maintaining balance in a jostling, fast-moving train car, quick-timing through a crowd and out a train’s finicky sliding doors were the well-honed skills of my childhood.
I moved to Vermont in my mid-20s, eager to leave the city behind and live where my family had spent most of my childhood summers, a place whose lakes, mountains, and woods made me feel more at home than I did in Brooklyn. Yet, for decades after I moved, there would come a moment each winter, while skiing, when some dense stand of pine trees would morph into subway turnstiles – the kind with tall central poles and top-to-bottom whorls of iron bars; the kind that, as a child, I pushed my way through hundreds of times.
Although I have lived in Vermont for far longer than my childhood years in Brooklyn, only recently has that turnstile image faded. I suspect that the image hasn’t completely disappeared from my psyche, but has merely receded and is one of any number of long-buried urban images whose influences continue to shape the way I view the world. Despite my years in Vermont, somewhere inside me I know – in a way that has nothing to do with intellect – that snow turns black within minutes of falling; that plants and soil are to be found within discrete, concrete-bordered spaces; that streets, train tracks, and sidewalks are landforms; that the developed landscape is the norm.
I consider myself an outdoorsy person, someone who knows and cares deeply about the natural world and the ways we use land. Yet I seem to need an intermediary step between viewing a landscape and seeing it clearly, a set of corrective lenses to rectify the urban distortions, to dispel some of the reflexive (and embarrassing) reactions I can have to a place: unease at a lake without cottages along its shoreline; fear at a night sky whose stars haven’t been diminished by artificial light; gut-level knowledge that a cityscape has always been that way. I am capable of experiencing delight at an undeveloped shoreline, awe at the brilliance and breadth of the stars, curiosity at the landscape history of a city – but only after a disconcerting moment’s delay.
“Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time,” Wallace Stegner wrote in his memoir, Wolf Willow, “and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.”
That “particular environment” for Stegner was the prairie, its influential shapes were those of the natural world. I was exposed at a susceptible age to the shapes of the natural world, too, during those childhood summers in Vermont, and they certainly had a profound influence. But for 10 months of each of those years, I was a city girl, and you don’t get to choose which shapes of which environment will or will not take hold. Those subway turnstiles twisted their way, like corkscrews, deep into my subconscious, and the subway trains – like a force of nature – rumbled by again and again and again.
It turned out that our father had been eavesdropping on our dream conversation. “What about the dream,” he said, entering the room, “where you’re in the train when it breaks loose, only it’s up high, going wildly in and out of buildings, and there’s never a chance to get out?”
We looked at him, and we looked at each other, and then we each added details to that dream. This time, though, we didn’t laugh, for there was something about our father being a part of this – five of us now, and two generations – that gave us a sense of the magnitude of whatever this thing was that had so deeply left its mark.
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