At an unlikely high elevation above a sleeping town made of wood and mostly surrounded by woods, there is a dreadful intersection known for its expensive parking spots and its doomed business slots: one small restaurant comes in, and after a year and much spent on the remodeling of its space, it is ordered to close and vanishes forever. Here, young people mill around screaming about drinks and pretend they are in New York City without knowing why. This is the rotten spot high above Ithaca, and it was a place to cross early-early in the morning, at 7 AM when the wooden interior of the halfway home-feeling coffee shop opened, and they let you in to buy. It was a cold place, that street, where nobody would live for more than four years, and the people who worked there did not even climb up the hill from the small town below, but drove in from miles away. The only answer was to take a walk that could be difficult for the ankles, down the steepest street nearby, named after the buffalo, and so it was called Buffalo. Buffalo inserted you into the low-low and better part of town, the flats where somehow contented people with cold weather marking their faces had managed to secure houses and households and had settled forever. How can you settle forever in this world? The highway thundering just a short walk away, west towards the lake, reminds you that it is always time to get going again, but this river of cars almost does not wash into some back streets, where we could take a Saturday night and calm it down totally. Maybe on a thousand-mile walk someday we will be able to rest there, and someone will build a memorial bench that won't be taken, and we can fall asleep there.
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Upper & lower, upper & lower...Does Ithaca have a particularly pure kind of cold?
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of the conversion of these wastelands into stopover points for wayfarers.