PrintAs we pulled off the highway, I yanked the pearly buds from my ears and the Dire Straits gave way to the stuffy silence of the bus. The quiet would explain the glares from the frumpy woman to my right—my music must have been loud. The move to local roads meant we were a mere half hour away, and my overwhelming excitement for my first trip home from college took over, usurping the place of any embarrassment I might have felt at the fact that everyone around me now knew I had the music taste of a 60-year-old man.
We huffed along past the park, past the decrepit exterior of the high school and of the bank and of my favorite little burrito place. It was familiar territory, but something had changed. Not as though I were seeing it for the first time, but as though I were wearing my grandfather’s bifocals—the scale was off. The past couple of months had conditioned me to a landscape of towering apartments and dizzying extravagance, and my hometown now felt quainter than I ever could have imagined it would.
Nearing downtown, we passed the colorful houses in rows and the bakery with rickety metal tables outside even though it was much too cold; we drove by couples walking their dogs by the river and parents taking their kids to the White House.
And it was not until I saw the Secret Service milling around the gates and the snipers on the roof that I reminded myself that I do not actually live in a rural, farming town tucked away in the depths of middle America and removed from the hustle of the urbane.
In fact, I live in Washington, DC, about five minutes from the president. And the high school is only decrepit in comparison to the Gothic cathedral looming over it. And the bank is one of five PNCs on the same block.
The fact that a mere three months in New York City have made the nation’s capital feel like a farm makes you wonder about either, 1) the overpowering influence of the Big Apple or, 2) my sanity. One of my most distinct memories from Columbia so far is that of reading Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in the first week of an urban sociology course. I remember vividly the dread that crept through my veins as this man told me, with irritating objectivity, the deteriorating effect that the next four years of city life would have on my psyche. “From these two dangers of metropolitan life,” writes Simmel, “we are saved by antipathy which is the latent adumbration of actual antagonism.” A little extreme, I thought, but I could buy it—a few trips on the 1-line have made me well aware of the value New Yorkers place on silence, stony glances, and pretending no one else exists.
As I read on, though, my scoffs turned to worry and my worry to horror. Simmel actually argues that this coldness is central to the functioning of city life, that it forms the “distantiation and deflection without which this type of life could not be carried on at all.” Alright first of all, distantiation is not a real word. And second of all, get me the hell out of here.
I dropped that class shortly thereafter, mostly because I had overscheduled myself like every other frantic first-year, but partially because I didn’t want to be disillusioned any further. I had already signed up for this college thing, and I wanted to continue operating in blissful ignorance. Those few weeks of reading and self-reflection, however, stayed with me, and I found myself stopping to think about my developing urbanism as I established roots in my new home. I performed mental checks every now and then—as I poured over books in Butler, as I relaxed on the steps in the quad, as I went running in Riverside—and determined that I did not feel any more of a city girl than I had before. Were the projections about the high-strung life of a New Yorker exaggerated? Or had I always been adjusted to city life, with years of living in another metropolitan area under my belt?
My return to “the farm” of DC put things into perspective and helped answer that question. Though the skyline is not as tall, the city I call home feels no smaller than New York City; the people are just as frosty on public transport, tourists seem to be as pulled to the National Mall as to Times Square. Emphasizing the fierce independence and antipathy necessary for the survival of urbanites, sociologists evidently assume a complete lack of community within cities. While, of course, it is impossible to claim that the entirety of New York City or the District of Columbia constitutes a community, both of these cities are composed of a patchwork of thriving bodies of people whose foci are largely inward. It is this patchwork that gives me a certain immunity from the purported feeling of isolation in city life; in DC, I am part of a smaller residential community not unlike Morningside Heights. After all, I was only struck by the landscape of my hometown after I took a step back, after I removed myself from the narrow world of my childhood, and approached the city—literally—as an outsider looking in.
Oh, and the burrito place is a Chipotle.