Containing Multitudes...

...full disclosure: though technically a native of the big city, where I lived until just before my fourth birthday, when the family moved to the country...which can’t be blamed for being so quickly and easily swallowed by intractable forces of urban blight, white flight, and omni-ravenous sprawl...I am, in the end, one of that peculiarly modern tribe often held up as representative of just about everything wrong with American life today...a suburbanite...

...though, given the state of lonely misery in which my formative suburban years were largely spent, at least I can attest to never having been a very good one...


...for a long time, identified as a country mouse...and a rather militant one, at that...at one point, living amidst the screaming multitudes with their noise, anger, fear, and madness exploding it seemed on every corner of Boston or San Francisco, wrote a short story describing the tall buildings as tombstones for the forests, meadows, and multitudinous life they replaced...concluding with an ominous yet, to my mind, optimistic rumbling...

...and, in time, did my best to get away...backpacked all over the Rockies and southwestern deserts, lived in cabins, trailers and tents...hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine....and all that was certainly good...the fresh air, the trees, and the peaceful feeling I still can get tromping along a trail through the woods...but there was always some element of escape in it...of needing to run away from people...dreaming, at my worst, of a day when I’d never have to see anybody, except on periodic supply runs...

...so, the gradual emergence of the city mouse came as a surprise...as, kicking back in northern Arizona, I found myself longing for live music, bookstores, museums, and that strangely vibrant feeling of walking-down-the-sidewalk, life’s machinery rushing by at a sometimes frightening pace on one side, tall, deep, and unmoving on the other...the dance of diversity and discord, with its near-infinite commingling and conflicts...of which, it must be confessed, I am an inextricable part...