On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (12 page)

The light turned, and we followed the instructions, feeling dutiful. Kalman spotted a church up ahead. At this point into walking with her I suspected what would happen next: we would be going in. Of course, this church, too, I had never visited, despite its open doors, shaded interior—so alluring from under the watch of the sun of summer—and occasional hallelujahing chorale. Once inside the church, we wandered down the middle aisle, as churches seem to allow anyone to do regardless of denomination, personality, or number of cameras around one’s neck. From inside, the street was visible, but seemed suddenly distant. As we walked, our cadence slowed, and we were no longer proceeding at New York pace. We were walking leisurely, at a tourist’s pace, because we had become visitors in our own city. The street signs were in a foreign language and the churches were all to be checked off on the map. After a tour down and back the aisles, we met again by the exit. Kalman spotted a wooden sign over a recessed area in the wall.
POOR BOX,
it read—a label at once no longer valid (there was
no box) and also apt:
Poor box! Gone missing from its alcove!
She snapped a photograph.

Back on the street, Kalman was church-prompted into talking about her own churchgoing. This was a definite fourth-dimensional fact for me to learn about this New Yorker born in Tel Aviv. But she loved the music of the congregation at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. And she marveled at their permissiveness in letting even a non-believer warm their benches: “You can do whatever you want—well, maybe not anything you want. But you can come and go. You can do
anything
and you don’t have to
do
anything.”

I was beginning to see what Kalman saw. She did not see a space as defined by an edge, but as an infinitely explorable openness. The church may seem to be about religion, but for her it was about music and company and freedom of allegiances. The senior center might seem to be for seniors, defined by its name to exclude us, two nonsenior non-social workers, but its doors were open and that was all it took for Kalman to wander in. Take a left turn where you ordinarily take a right; open the gate to the block garden you have never visited; view the passerby as a person who is waiting for you to speak to him.

Kalman’s movements and behavior also highlighted, however inadvertently, the multiple claims to space in a city. Cities are filled with a variety of private and public spaces, spaces one can enter and spaces one must be invited into. In the latter case, an open door may be the only sign that the public is invited in (but owners reserve the right to take a look at you and boot you back out). At times the dividing line is non-obvious, but most urban residents instinctively mind these boundaries and do not cross into private space. City sidewalks present a great confusion of private and public: they are generally public space, which means they are owned by the city—which in turn means that anyone who wants
to plant his stake on the sidewalk must pay the city and get a permit. With municipal permission, a restaurant, under private ownership, can take over a portion of the sidewalk for outdoor seating. The newspaper stands pay for the right to appear on the sidewalk, as do food carts and other vendors. Should you just want to walk and speak loudly, declaring your protest of this or that, or should you want to display art or be art on a public sidewalk, you need a permit. But sidewalks are also the responsibility of the abutting building’s owner. These owners must repair, clean, shovel, and generally maintain the sidewalks in front of their buildings—but they are not “theirs.”

Urban buildings, by contrast, are generally private spaces, often owned by one party (a landlord or corporation) and leased by another (a tenant). In buildings owned by cooperatives, the corporation owns all the space up to the rooms themselves, including the interior of the walls. In New York City, there are also “privately owned public spaces,” which developers create and maintain in exchange for the right to build taller buildings.

What struck me about Kalman was that she moved through all the spaces with ease. Had she opened a mailbox on the street (federal space) and lifted out a letter, I would not have been surprised. Sure, she didn’t climb any walls, but her ability to transcend the social and cultural knowledge of where one is allowed to go felt like a superpower.

 • • • 

Is there something about Kalman’s brain that leads her to see more
possibilities
on the street than I do? Simply put, yes. Neuroscientists are just beginning to put together a picture of what exactly it might be. The difference is not simple, nor is there a canonical “creative brain” that can be spotted from the outside, as if using a phrenologist’s chart to identify the bumps of a creative person’s skull.
One research team, though, reported a correspondence between the brains of those who seem to be especially creative thinkers. Certain people, they found, have fewer of one kind of dopamine receptor in the thalamus of the brain. These people also performed well on tests of “divergent thinking,” in which people are asked to concoct more and more elaborate uses for ordinary objects, for instance. The reduction in receptors might actually
increase
information flow to various parts of the brain, essentially allowing them to think up new and interesting solutions. “Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” the researchers wrote.

Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them. With that in mind, Kalman and I approached a streetlight. I cannot say I had ever approached a streetlight before with such anticipation. I had walked by streetlights, run into streetlights (then cursed streetlights), watched my dog spend precious minutes smelling the urine on their bases. You have seen these lights in your city. Indeed, in New York there are two or three on each side along every city block . . . wait, have you really seen them?
Yes, of course I have,
you say to me impatiently. And so you have. So you know that the most common streetlight typically extends from a pole that is round or octagonal—not rectangular—or is hooked like an inverted
J
; that the legs of these poles are thirty feet tall, more than three times as long as the arm holding the cobra-headed lamp; that there are white and yellow sodium lightbulbs (and that we feel calmer under the yellow), which are typically one of two streetlighting wattages; that there are a variety of possible pole bases, none of which is entirely impervious to dog urine. But you are getting restless, I see, since you have seen streetlights, and you know about them already.

This streetlight pole was festooned. Someone had decorated it
with a few half-hearted flyers, attached at eye height with serious packing tape. An advertisement for clarinet lessons stopped Kalman in her tracks. The bottom edge of the paper was cut into strips cut and bent hopefully for easy grabbing by clarinet-interested passersby. Kalman grabbed one. She had begun to learn the clarinet the previous year, she revealed, as part of a project for a class she teaches at the School of Visual Arts. For her curriculum, everyone was tasked with learning a new instrument, then taking a walk by themselves, writing down “what was going on in their minds,” Kalman mused, looking at the wee bit of paper in her hand. “Then one of the students took all of the texts that they wrote and made them lyrics for a song using all the musical instruments.” They were to perform the music on the street but kept being thwarted by the weather. She sighed. “So we never performed it out on the street where it was meant to be; it was meant to be walking music.”

We left the flyer otherwise intact, its strips fluttering in the breeze. I did briefly consider taking up the clarinet. I could hear someone practicing piano awfully through an open first-floor window. We walked down the street to this music. The street provided the accompaniment.

¹
Though she does have more ladders than one would ordinarily expect of an apartment dweller, and is drawn to rubber bands . . .

²
And so I try it!
horowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitzhorowitz
. . . and my last name becomes a pulsing, throbbing vowel-crushing machine.

³
It’s not you, alas: any egg shape with eye shapes within it that you show to an infant will elicit coos and smiles of delight.

“’Tis very pregnant,

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take’t

Because we see it; but what we do not see

We tread upon, and never think of it.”

(Shakespeare)

“A wooly caterpillar, his head crowned with four fearsome green horns, moved lazily on the first step, heading nowhere good for caterpillars.”

If you do not get excited about finding a blowfly paralyzed by a parasitic fungus on the bottom curl of a leaf tip, or upon spotting the globular, smooth-edged holes in a leaf that are the characteristic sign of a munching tortoise beetle, then perhaps a walk around your block with Charley Eiseman is not a good idea. But for anyone who as a child marveled at the metamorphosis of a homely caterpillar into an iridescent butterfly, or who has admired the tenacity of a slug or snail assiduously consuming their tomato plants, this sort of walk will open your eyes to the unnoticed population underfoot, overhead, and, alarmingly, onbody.

It is time to consider the bugs.

Even when you see no bugs before you, even when the ground looks still and the air looks clear, they are there. Millions upon millions of bugs. And there are even more signs of bugs past: on vegetation; in leaves and bark; in characteristic leavings; in egg sacs, cocoons, spent exoskeletons, and built structures; on brick, dirt, clay, and on your own skin. Their ubiquity does not make them inherently interesting, of course. In fact, as a culture we tend to value the rare over the common, in our sensibilities and in our policies. We mourn the passenger pigeon, hunted out of existence a century ago, but vilify the pigeon on every city street; we keep bunnies and mice as pets yet kill rabbits and mice not born in pet stores. Of course, there are hundreds of rare—federally named as endangered—insects: the “superb” grasshopper; eleven pomace fly species; assorted weevils, ants, beetles, and midges. But the prevalence of bugs (or, better,
Arthropoda
—true insects, arachnids, and otherwise) only highlights our obliviousness to them . . . most of the time: we certainly notice when a cockroach darts across our dinner table or when a male mosquito, covering for his bloodthirsty mate, buzzes in our ear.

The insects’ advocate is Charley Eiseman, a young man with a calm manner and a trim beard befitting the naturalist that he is. Though I had not met him before, he proved easy to spot: wearing a plainly genuine expression and a flannel shirt on a sixty-degree day, he stood out among city folk. Eiseman has the quiet footfalls and unassuming presence often found in native New Englanders. He smiled broadly in greeting, but he also looked at me a bit like he was trying to determine what kind of insect I was.

A field naturalist by training, Eiseman confessed to having an overweening sensitivity to all living things. While working out of doors teaching tracking classes and conducting salamander surveys, he began noticing “little mystery objects”—the spoor and leavings of insects and other invertebrates. Wanting to have a field
guide to these tracks, and finding none, he and his friend Noah Charney set off on a fifteen-thousand-mile, forty-day journey to document evidence of invertebrates—what is called sign—in all the major ecotypes in North America. The result of their travels and research was
Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species
. The book is a marvel: a rollicking, seemingly plumbless guide to the innumerable indicators that insects leave of their presence.

Eiseman met me on an early-September afternoon in a parking lot in Springfield, Massachusetts, an industrial city that never had an urban reincarnation and is very unpromising for walking, as far as I was concerned. But it was near Eiseman’s hometown, which is not urban at all, so this was where we converged. I asked that we meet in a parking lot on the strength of a mention in his book. In the introduction, Eiseman writes that he and Noah stopped on their invertebrate tour to visit Noah’s mother in Tennessee. Five hours after they said their good-byes, Noah’s mother left her house to find the fellows still in the driveway. Turning over sugar maple leaves and flipping logs, they had found enough insect sign to postpone, for the time being, their trip to the “wilderness” where real nature was to be found.

I was secretly hoping that we would not make it out of the parking lot ourselves. If a driveway holds an ecosystem, what of a parking lot? Perchance a universe. Sure enough, we were barely ten seconds into our walk before he spotted a few beautiful orb weaver webs, followed by a handful of funnel webs along a hedgerow at the lot’s edge. He did not know the name of the orb weaver (“An arachnologist might be able to tell you,” he said unhelpfully for those of us having no arachnologist readily available), but here, as throughout our walk, it was clear that the specific naming was not the point. Instead, the fun is the discovery of the thing at all.

The funnel webs turned out to be a repeating motif of our walk.
Once we saw one, it was as though they were imprinted on us, and we were unable not to notice another. The characteristic dense white web shows up again and again—at the top of a row of hedges in front yards, along intersecting brick walls. If you look more closely, you will see the titular funnel: a smoothly rendered spout in which, if you are lucky, the spider is hiding, waiting for some walking insect to happen upon her lair and submit to her jaws.

To look at insects up close is to see the hasty cycle of birth, violent killing, and death. Few insects are humanitarians, and even herbivorous insects work great damage to the leaves, buds, grasses, and stems they eat. But Eiseman and I were looking less for insects, and more for the traces of insects past. In following their tiny footsteps, we were forensic insect hunters, looking at the evidence of their criminality they have left in their wake. Insects are messy eaters, like to storm a place and live it up, and rarely clean up after themselves (except those polite larvae that eat their own egg cases). They shed their skin, excrete willy-nilly, plunder and pillage, and move on: the insect equivalent of a mad party with only hastily removed clothing, broken bottles, and other detritus left behind. Positively uncivilized.