By Beth Connors-Manke
Frantic note to self: Never, ever leave the north side again.
I’ll spare you some of the details of how this militant pedestrian ended up at Fayette Mall, but obviously this misbegotten Sunday afternoon was made possible by a C-A-R.
First off, it was a windy day. That can rattle a person. Second, driving in mall parking lots is like no other driving experience, and they certainly don’t train you to do it well in driver’s ed. Windy careening, SUV dodging, and then I was in the mall.
Before long, I’m huddled in the corner of the crystal section, whispering on my cell phone: “Husband, I’m at Macy’s. MAYDAY! I repeat: MAYDAY!”
“Beth, why are you at Macy’s?”
“Remember when so-and-so gave me that gift card, it was so nice, [words, words, words], and I can’t find anything to buy—it’s all so ugly old or ugly young, and [words, words, words], would you spend the gift card?”
“No, probably not. You shouldn’t have gone shopping without me. You know you meltdown when you’re by yourself at the mall.”
“Yes, honey. You’re right. I’ll just buy towels and get out as fast as I can.”
I did buy towels, yellow ones. Once Nicholasville turned into Limestone and I could breathe again, I vowed never ever to return to Fayette Mall. Who do I blame for the Sunday afternoon trauma? My car.
Here’s the way I see it: as a pedestrian, I’ve gotten accustomed to a certain pace and spatial awareness. My feet can only go so fast as I’m tromping to work or the bar or the park. There’s rarely a cluster-mash along my walking routes, and certainly never a traffic cluster-mash like at the mall. I’ve got space to move, and everyone (with the exception of some unruly, careening cyclists) stays in their predictable traffic pattern. Everything is logical; it makes sense.
The problem with my car is that it took me out of my habitat (a two-mile radius around downtown), which led to disorientation (and maybe some disassociative moments), which led to the desperate SOS from the crystal section. Because, you see, being a pedestrian makes you more habitat-invested and habitat-bound. You spend time looking at the same trees along your route, until you start to memorize their order and learn their species. You pass the same houses, the same porches, the same people until you’re so used to them that they make you feel secure, like you understand the lay of the land, even if you don’t really understand the ways of the world.
I first noticed how habitat-bound I had become when my husband and I recently traveled to Columbus, Ohio. Heading to Ohio State’s campus, we drove through the sketchy neighborhood he lived in during college and parked along a side street. Abstractly, the geography was just like my stomping ground here in LexVegas: UK, the trendy areas just north and south of downtown, and the lower-income neighborhoods farther north that many of us call home. Concretely, though, it felt much different: these weren’t my streets. I didn’t know that shaggy guy or that fancy girl. They were strangers, and I was in a strange place. I realized that the more I felt at home along the streets of Lexington’s north side, the more out-of-place I felt in other locales.
I wondered why this was a new feeling. In all my travels, surely I had felt like an outsider elsewhere. Eventually, I realized that it wasn’t so much a new experience, but one that I finally wasn’t ignoring — because it’s harder to deny your own foreignness when you’re on the street, in the midst of what a place really is. Most other times when I was moving through a different city, snaking through its downtown streets, with their run-down houses, music joints, mansions, and McDonald’s, I’d been nicely ensconced in my car. I zipped through and out before I could become too uncomfortable with the fact that I didn’t know how that place and its people worked. Do you smile and say “Hello”? (Yes in Lexington, no in Cleveland.) If someone pulls up next to you at a deserted streetlight at midnight, do you dare look at them? (No in East Cleveland, and probably no on Race Street here in Lexington.)
Cars, trains, airplanes, as grateful as I am for them, take you out of your habitat faster than you can really learn—or even observe—the rules of a new place. That simply is what it is. But it reminded me that we are creatures of place, even if we like to move from city to city or neighborhood to neighborhood. I also learned that, in the future, my love for my northside environment will keep me from that frenetic and consumeristic habitat called “the mall.”
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