I wander. I have never been lost….in the geographical sense. But I like to roam. Peregrination is my preferred word for this activity, not just because it is a big, important sounding word, but because it calls to mind a stealthy black figure with scimitar wings cutting the blue overhead , peering down with bionic vision, able to dive at its prey like a German Stuka plane.
My family encouraged hiking, biking and trips as far as our resources would take us (Utica, NY anyone?). My dad was a peregrinor in his own right and set a course on a map so he could deliberately divert and deke through back roads and avoid the highways. He managed to get us damn-near lost on what my younger brother and I dubbed “Magical Mystery Tours” which were either unmagical and full of knee jerk remarks from other motorists or led to interesting situations, such as a memorable roadside tour of “drinking shacks” in the “hollers” of rural West Virginia. Exasperated after one particularly long and nauseating spin around the outskirts of Newark New Jersey I pointed to a hooker on the corner and asked “Why don’t we ask this nice young citizen for directions into Manhattan?”.
By the time I was old enough to be a bored teenager, I was a rover. Indiscriminately mobile. There was nothing much to do in my crooked little industrial town that was fun and legal. I was too young to hit the bar(s) so I hit the pavement. Divided in half by a broad canal, my tonw had a white picketed WASPy side (with a surprising number of Catholic schools) and a Franco-Italian side, across an out of use shipping canal. The Other Side of the Canal was desireable because it had three things: ethnicity, poverty and danger . This was the oldest side of town. People talked differently. They drank differently. There was a main street that led across a sad but sturdy steel beam bridge, a library built with the aid of Carnegie money, and of course, the 24/7 factories. On humid nights I could just hear the steady heart beat of the drop forge 10 km away. All the old buildings were there, and a cannon as well, pointed toward the opposite canal bank.
By day I rode out into the country on old gritty roads flanked with farm houses, ditches, and rabies mad hunting dogs that snapped at my wheels. At night I roamed the Other Side, looking at buildings, eves-dropping on conversations and finding out that my emotions resonated to concrete and brick, steel and asphalt. Roaming became as much about the feelings and internal states that these sights produced, and associations to the required reading in my English classes vectored out like electron traces in a cloud chamber. This was no a deliberate make-work project for my bored, sex distracted teenage mind; it was an automatic reflex. I could be looking down at the river and the cinematic ghost of Huckleberry Finn on a rough hewn raft would float by. Any poured concrete building pulled the curtain up on a drama that mixed the characters from 1984, Brave New World and that magnificent dystopian movie from the 70s, Logan’s Run. My right palm would itch where the flashing red jewel would have been.
Trips to Toronto were a rover’s delight. While my mother shopped, I decamped with my dad and younger brother to Queen’s Park (which oddly, had only a statue of a prince), where my dad would be accosted for smokes (one fella prefaced his ask with “kind young sir”-an epithet that made my brother and I howl). My dad grew up in Toronto and regaled us with startling stories like how the yuppie fiefdom that is Yorkville (pre-1 million dollar “rock”) was once once a hippie haven where you could find Leonard Cohen sleeping it off in the back of a car while beautiful losers danced like charmed cobras in the middle of Yorkville avenue.
When I was 14 I took a not-so-bad photo of the George Washington Statue in Georgetown DC with my parent’s Vivitar 110 camera. At fifteen I used my summer job money to buy a 35mm Minolta. I started to photograph in the places where I wandered. As it evolved along with my wandering, and I made it into graduate school, I began to think a lot more about what it meant to wander, travel, and realized that I was trying, with every photography, to capture my feel for a place or an idiosyncratic urban detail. Finally, it coalesced, and now I am a compulsive photographer and observer of urban minutiae. Acquiring an iPhone has only made it easier.
Addicts hate fixing alone, so I plan to use this blog to reach out to other people who have the same strange need to explore and critique the urban landscape. Neighbourhood observations, critiques of urban trends, book review mash-ups: all are on the this map. And of course, photography.
Glad to meet you. Let’s get mobile.
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