Baltimore Blue
This is a monthly installment from Walking the East Coast, a serialized memoir. PREVIOUS CHAPTER. If you wanna, start from THE BEGINNING.
I’m sure I envisioned a table, brown paper piled high with steaming Chesapeake Bay blue crab. New friends, eyes and lips glistening with candlelight, melted butter, and story. A cocoon of laughter and jazz rifts. I’m almost as certain I passed the four days I spent in a Baltimore hostel in July 2007, according to the log I kept, largely alone and silent.
Maybe I was too busy with editing work. Maybe that’s why the log is absent tiny script filling pages to their corners with the details of peoples lives and our interactions as on other legs of this trek. Maybe the bunk beds in my shared room were empty. Maybe there lay weary heads, uninterested in passing friendships and merrymaking or engaging with a young woman moving like a tumbleweed, backpack stuffed with gear and unprocessed grief. Maybe I was shy. Maybe I was disembodied by longing, different parts of me flowing like waterways to the bay of my someday.
No matter how I grope the caverns of memory, I find no chain to yank and spill light into the crevices of those days. To revive my stay near the Patapsco River and Camden Yards, we’ll have to rely on a triptych—(1) cirrus cloud memories of a street and a pair of eyes, (2) correspondence records, and (3) a poem scrawled in a hospital cafeteria, the log’s single entry from the Baltimore days.
Let’s start with a cement stairway leading up to a heavy wooden door. Close your eyes and you’ll see them—one set of stairs among a handful along stately row houses. Recheck scribbled notes to be sure of the the address. Glide up them; let’s say there are seven. A buzzer, a speaker box, and—intake of breath—steel bars. Glance back. The street below, oyster gray ’neath sun-beamed sky, is mostly empty, its sidewalks tipped upward at a jaunty angle as it climbs, the scene mellow if not exuberant. How different will it look dressed in night’s cloak? Inhale slowly. (Later experience will confirm bars on hostel doors aren’t indicative of much more than precaution. And don’t forget the wispiness of these glimpses; we can’t even be sure there were bars.) Exhale. Press the buzzer.
Belongings deposited inside, I’d have wanted to explore. What did I want most? To window-shop Charles Street? To stand in Federal Hill at dusk and see Inner Harbor in duplicate, one skyline reaching toward the stars, the other soft and blurred in the mirror where ships rest? To breathe in the salty pheromones of the sea? To get lost in the artsy district of Hampden, find among its eclectic nightlife a companion for the evening with kind eyes and a bedroom gait? Emails show I had three ongoing editing projects, deadlines looming. So, it’s most like I headed vaguely in the direction of the nearest attraction, pumpkin orange laptop case slung over my shoulder, in search of a café that will welcome a digital nomad typing away for hours more than a decade before the term will be in use. Is a table with a window to the street too much to hope for?
I wanted so much from this trek. I wanted to overtake the belief kneaded into me that a woman alone was lost and vulnerable, all softness and unfulfillable purpose. I wanted to not to want a partner in order to travel the world. I wanted to turn a corner and—what’s this?—partner. Come then. We’ll take in the world, define together. I wanted to outpace the losses trailing me—a familial home, a daughter, a career, a promise till death, a dear friend’s unexpected graveside. I wanted waking again and again in new places to remake me so, if (when, hope whispered) I was found by the daughter I’d laid as a newborn with eyes like mirrors in the arms of another woman, she would not think, Good riddance. I would raise myself to her gaze and find my mistakes softened in the reflection of their chestnut pools. I wanted to feel strong and intrepid, capable of escorting myself safely along any street. I wanted to capture all I saw in words that would transform me and reader alike. Was that too much to want?
I think there along the Baltimore shoreline (and for much of what would become a six-month East Coast meander), I barely acknowledged any of this longing, shoving it to the bottom of my pack after a quick glance every now and again. During my four days in a place dubbed both Charm City and Mobtown, I emailed my former Seattle roomie, an amateur photographer, for help with “some great shots of downtown Baltimore.” If images were attached, they no longer exist. I’d have sworn I was still using 35mm film, shunning the newfangled digital cameras. But I’m just as sure I purchased a Canon 30D for the trip, which Google says was digital. At any rate, the camera would be stolen a couple of stops down the road. No photos would survive the journey. A friend, who grew up in nearby Bel Air, emailed to recommend Attman’s Delicatessen for “corned beef better even than anything you can get in NY!” I don’t recall if I went. Let’s say I did. Let’s say it was mouthwatering.
I think I thought I could simply let go and, thus, be master of my own destiny. While I’d thrown off the yokes of a path I’d been born into, I hadn’t exactly grabbed hold of the reins. Or maybe I couldn’t yet. Maybe I knew that, to be a well-read writer sent to far-flung places to record and report, I’d need more than a log I shared with no one, a backpack, and a willingness to wander. Maybe that was all I could muster then.
I recall a man with a manuscript to share—“you gotta read it to believe it”—walking alongside me on that blue-gray street farther than I wanted. Was it that same day I wound up in the hospital cafeteria?
I must have walked past the hospital and thought, Why not? Two short years earlier, I’d stood vigil by a hospital bed for weeks awaiting the flickering of eyes that would never again open. So, there must have been some familiarity, a knowledge I’d find tables dotted with quiet people, coffee, and Wi-Fi. The single entry in my log from the Baltimore leg is a prose poem (I marked it so), “UMMS” scrawled in the place header:
Beneath Paul Bunyan-sized windows and potted ficuses gleaming in the atrium, I type. Suddenly, “Code blue, shock trauma unit, code blue.”
I can’t look up. My heart flails in my chest: You toad. Is someone choking on butter-drenched beans, sliding back a chair, cursing the nurse, his mom, her brother, and whoever else thought they knew best telling him he should step away and eat, that nothing would happen while he was gone?
I recall feeling cold and brutal, unaware it was my only my own heart I was cavalier with in that moment. How dare I choose this place to mark up a manuscript about an LA detective I called in a letter to the author “classy and stylish, brutish in just the right amount, capable and intelligent—the kind of guy you’d want on your side in a pinch”? How dare it be here I suggest he give the character a memory or two that haunts him to render him sympathetic? Here, in a place where loss and relief eyeball each other from either side of a perpetual teeter-totter?
I must have collected my things, choked back a sob, and spilled onto the street. Perhaps that’s where I saw her, the woman whose eyes were looking not into this dimension. She seemed either my age or ancient or both. She wasn’t the first person I’d seen nodding out. I’d covered the beginning of the opioid epidemic as a reporter in rural West Virginia, had sold jelly in Seattle’s Pike’s Place, setting up the stand and closing it down when the market was still empty and souls who clouded their lives on the streets as best they could were made visible by the absence of tourists. But I felt a bond of kinship with this woman as we passed. It was as if the mycelial-like structure that connects us all got tangled, and for a nanosecond, her pain shot through me.
Perhaps I hurried back to the hostel to log onto the wifi. Maybe it was then and there I decided on the solitude of the Appalachian range as my next stop. Maybe that’s where I typed an email to a lover I called even then the Mountain Man, sent an image no longer attached. I wrote about Charleston, where I’d boarded the Greyhound that had delivered me to Baltimore and my friend’s Doberman:
I woke up at 5, and while Max ensured that the perimeter was safe (there’s two acres back there, and I think he crashed through all of it), I listened to the birds talk.
The light was blue, and the air was wet and cool, and I breathed very deeply. I felt privy to a meeting that was secret only because nobody pays attention.
I was not, however, with it enough to grab the camera. So imagine this a little gentler, a little darker with wetness dripping from the trees.
The Mountain Man’s reply was clipped. He was not a man of many words in person and even less by email.
It was the same with partnership then. I hadn’t yet learned to shepherd my own heart. I knew what I didn’t want but only thought I knew what I wanted. I was, though I didn’t exactly know it, still guided by cultural norms that didn’t suit me. I wanted my Mountain Man (or someone) to pursue me fervently. I wanted to be (be seen as?) independent. I wanted to swig from the cup of desire without censor. I wanted to choose again and again. I thought I would also have to (seem to?) demure eventually. Mostly, I wasn’t sure how to tease out what was true to my distinctive belly of yearning from what I’d rejected.
Maybe by the time I got to Baltimore, I had been a ghost of myself for a long time. Maybe if you’re hoping to marry and divorce and party and fuck and adventure your way out of a loss of faith in yourself, in the world, you become less visible. Maybe I was only just learning how to embody the paradox of my yens and complications.
And listen. There would, on this trip, be tables with shared bottles and eyes gleaming with new friendship. There would be dancing and vistas over rivers that hummed like gems. There would be words murmured beneath bedsheets, long gazes, and strolls arm in arm. So maybe my blue-gray Baltimore triptych was exactly where I needed to start in order to learn what it would take to move freely and also find rich soil in which to grow the visions I longed to create. Maybe all I could muster was exactly enough. Maybe it still is.
This is the second installment of a loosely serialized memoir on a six-month trek along the US East Coast by backpack in 2007. I stayed in hostels and campgrounds and traveled by bus, train, and foot. I say loosely serialized, as I intend each essay to stand on its own. But should you want to follow the journey as it unfolded, here are some links:
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"But I felt a bond of kinship with this woman as we passed. It was as if the mycelial-like structure that connects us all got tangled, and for a nanosecond, her pain shot through me." Oh I've felt that so often over the years, especially in San Francisco, a casual glance so brutal you can never forget it.
We're all studying how to shepherd our own heart.