Freshman English, Again
Today in class we’re reading Ian Frazier’s essay “Route 3″ which first appeared in the New Yorker. One of the most absorbing parts of the essay is Frazier’s description of the experience of walking on Route 3, on the stretch of the highway that extends from Montclair, New Jersey, to New York City.
The earth beside this kind of highway is like no earth that ever was. Neither cultivated nor natural, it’s beside-the point, completely unnoticed, and slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast. And yet plants still grow in it, luxuriantly–ailanthus, and sumac, and milkweed, and lots of others that know how to accomodate themselves to us. In the swampy parts, the common reed would take over the roadway in a blink if the traffic stopped.I’m still to recover from the permanent skid induced by those words describing only fixed soil–”slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast”–and the realization that, in this automobile nation, even the plain detailing of small life by the wayside is a triumph over an existence or a lifestyle that is legislated for you from on high. But in the paragraph that follows, the pleasure lies not in confronting the tenacity of lower life forms but the sense one has of a writer using his memory to recycle trash into material for celebration.
The tangled brush and the reeds collect an omnium-gatherum of trash. I saw broken CDs, hubcaps, coils of wire, patient-consent forms for various acupuncture procedures, pieces of aluminum siding, fragments of chrome, shards of safety glass, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, condom wrappers, knocked-over road signs, burned-out highway flares, a highlighter pen, a surgical glove, nameless pieces of discarded rusty machinery, a yellow rain slicker with MACY’S STUDIO on the back… Scattered through the grass and weeds for miles were large, bright-colored plastic sequins. Oddly, I knew where they had come from. Once, while on the bus, I saw a parade float–probably from the Puerto Rican Day Parade, held in the city–pull up alongside and then speed by. A car must have been towing it, though I don’t remember the car. The float was going at least seventy, shimmying and wobbling, banners flapping and these sequins were blowing off it in handfuls and billowing behind.
(A memory: Early in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, the following lines: “A figure, a walking man, trudging along the margin of a wide California highway… Anyone on foot in suburban California is one of four things: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging.”)
I just love the idea of w-a-l-k-i-n-g Route 3.
Comment by Maria — April 27, 2006 @ 1:11 pm
Hitchhiking, the lost art, might close this gap between pavement and field. No one under 45 has hitch-hiked, thus our mutual incomprehension. Hitch-hiking gave you long hours to study, as you waited, the patterns of Queen Anne’s Lace, upstate New York’s most prominent roadside weed. Eventually, the weeds of humankind stopped for you. They battened on you much as you parasited them. They stopped always out of some desire, and you got to know a range of human needs. This panoply of longings is unknown to the non-nitch-hiking generations. These new people are coccooned, idealistic, unknowing–milk-weed-pods of humanity.
Milk weed, also prominent along upstate New York roads, is enigmatic and comely. It solicits squeezing. The pod is filled with a creamy white ooze that remains on your hand for a long time. Unlike the cars that stopped for you, the milkweed was passive and had no agenda. It stood beside you, filled with promise.
Comment by Hap — April 28, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
the milkweed was passive and had no agenda. It stood beside you, filled with promise…
Hap, the end of your comment puts me in mind of a poem about lupins from Seamus Heaney’s last collection, “Electric Light,” which contains the lines:
They stood. And stood for something, Just by standing. In waiting.
and
Sifting lightness and small jittery promise.
Comment by St Antonym — April 29, 2006 @ 1:01 pm