BENEATH THE SKYLINE

LOOKING SWEATY AND A LITTLE MUDDLED (AND WHY)

Deborah Good

When most people think of the urban, single woman, they probably think fashionable and polished. Funky heels, a few hair products, and a purse chosen carefully to match her outfit. She’s flagging down a cab after an evening with friends and martinis in a climate-controlled restaurant with unctuous temper-controlled waiters. She is Carrie Bradshaw on any given episode of "Sex and the City."

Somehow I have lived 20 out of my 26 years in large East Coast cities and managed always and still to fall short of fashionable and polished.

I’m more likely the young woman you see sprinting down the sidewalk for a train, a heavy shoulder bag flopping against my back and a plastic bag ripping at its handles because of the soccer cleats and shin guards inside. Sometimes I’m the one stepping into the library wiping moisture from my forehead where a subtle bike-helmet imprint lingers, my hair slightly matted from the commute.

I have spent a lot of my summer looking sweaty and little muddled. This is not because I am an utter disaster when it comes to yuppiehood, though that is probably true. It is because of how I live my life: waiting on public transportation, navigating the city on my bicycle, and for blocks and sometimes miles at a time, getting by on foot.

On a recent trek from one part of Philadelphia to another, I caught the R8 train to the blue line, also called the "El." It was on the El that a man once sat next to me and launched immediately into conversation.

"So I went to the University of Pennsylvania to have caps put on my teeth."

I smiled (How could you not?) and turned to look at him.

"But later that day," he continued, "they fell off, and I swallowed them."

"Oh, really?" I managed to spit out.

"So I went to my doctor, who said they would pass. But they didn’t pass and they didn’t pass." I think by this point, my smile was taking up quite a bit of my face. "And so I had an endoscopy done. They eventually had to cut them out of me."

"Wow—"

"And the crazy part about it is that my insurance covered the endoscopy and surgery—but they won’t cover my dental, which is why I went to the school in the first place instead of paying for a regular dentist."

See. This is why I opt for public transportation over the comfort of my own air-conditioned car.

Once it leaves downtown, the El emerges from its underground tunnel and becomes an elevated train. I rode to a stop in North Philadelphia and then walked maybe a mile to an urban farm, carrying a shoulder bag and a small cooler which I would soon fill with my house’s biweekly share of local food (see www.greensgrow.org).

Sweat dripped down my legs as I walked through one of the summer’s worst heat waves.

For a recent issue of the Philadelphia City Paper, Duane Swierczynski had his staff exploring the city on their own two feet and then writing about it. He himself walked a street he had seen rushing by his window probably hundreds of times before. "In exchange for an hour of my time—that’s how long it took to walk home—everything in an overly familiar stretch of the city looked like I’d just been sprung from jail after ten years," he writes. "Up close, everything was new" (Jul. 27-Aug. 2, 2006).

This is, of course, the romanticized view.

But he is right. Walking brings me the world a little slower, less insulated, and in greater detail. On foot, I have plenty of time to internalize the smells, sounds, and conversations I encounter on my way.

After filling my cooler with carrots, tomatoes, blackberries, eggs, and cream, I set off on a slightly different walk through the neighborhood, back to the El. It was a quiet walk past rowhouses, small businesses, a few abandoned lots.

I would like to say that my stroll was pleasant, and that I was bolstered by my choice to reduce my CO2 emissions into our ever-warming atmosphere (Al Gore, are you reading this?) and curtail my gas consumption, in its tangle with global politics and war (How about you, Michael Moore?). But it was not pleasant, and I was not bolstered. I was hot, my cooler was heavy, and I could not wait to get home.

Most places in the world are full of complexities from which trained social scientists and political analysts are continually mining explanations. I too am trying to make sense of it all. Why the bloodbath in the Middle East, or the ever-rising real estate values in my neighborhood?

I read the paper (not often enough) and listen to my fair share of National Public Radio. I read books by people smarter than I. Mostly, though, I prefer to leave the academics to their good research and their banter, while I leave my house to walk, ride, or bus the streets they analyze.

When I return, I won’t be able to tell you the percentage increase in homelessness since the year 2000, but I will tell you that the woman who asked me for money had short, graying hair and a steady gaze. I can’t write a thorough report on the gentrification of the neighborhood where I grew up, but I can tell you that it still smells like urine on Irving Street, half a block from the construction site where six-figure condos are going up.

I like to tread the landscapes of places I cannot explain and do not understand. Philly’s local news programs teach us to fear parts of the city. But when possible, I prefer to breathe in the air of these streets—mostly in the daylight, mind you—and come home telling my own stories.

There is a man who seems to take this idea very seriously. His name is Rory Stewart, a Scottish author who took a long, cold walk across war-torn northern Afghanistan in 2002—then wrote a book about it, The Places in Between.

I have not read the book (so can’t recommend it), but in the Washington Post article I did read, Teresa Wilitz writes about Stewart’s perspective on colonialism. While early colonialism was obviously a horrific and exploitative system, Stewart notes that many colonialists did spend years living in and walking through the lands they stole, even trying to understand the people who lived there.

In contrast, "today’s ‘neocolonialists,’ foreign-aid workers and diplomats, parachute into a country, trying to impose Western culture on a people they don’t understand. It is, he argues, a ‘morally dubious’ proposition" (Wilitz, "Equal Parts Blisters and Enlightenment," Aug. 9, 2006).

Too often, we watch our world go by through glass windows and on television. I wonder if walking a little more, we might engage our streets, neighbors, and foreign lands with a little more personality and openness to the idea that we might not, in fact, have the whole picture.

I have a basket on the back of my bicycle which an old boyfriend called "the kitchen sink." Lugging my produce through North Philadelphia reminded me of an endeavor I undertook just one day earlier, when you would have found me biking home with green hostas in my kitchen sink, sticking up behind my head like silly rabbit ears.

And picture this: My housemate once biked to her community garden plot with one tomato cage wrapped around her body and a second balanced precariously behind her seat.

Here’s to all of us who have looked slightly ridiculous loading all variety of paraphernalia onto the backs of our bikes, or walking for blocks, sweating like the dickens. I write this column in our defense.

Look out, Carrie Bradshaw. We just might be the next authentic image of the urban, single woman. And I bet we can walk farther than you can in your heels.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a writer, editor, and middle school classroom assistant. She spends a lot of time walking, biking, and waiting for buses and trains—and firmly believes that changes in our transportation habits, and in the way we design our cities and suburbs are part of the answer. She is also occasionally found driving a car, and can always be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.