by Tim Gilmore, 7/17/2012
(Canal Street to Broadway Avenue to Westbrook Park, Slit by the Ribbon of Three Mile Branch Creek, Just South of Jacksonville Masjid of Alislam)
Walking’s the way to understand the city. Walking is how he lives, how he lives in a place, and how he knows he lives. He’s a present-day archaeologist of what in the far future will be the deep and mysterious past. He understands the present as that far-future deep-past and he chooses to live in it with that much wonder. He walks down Broadway past crumbled brick-walled factories and comes to where the road itself is broken up into large impassable slabs just at the point of the park. Beneath these big slabs slips Three Mile Branch Creek in the same topography it’s occupied for a few thousand years, but now full of factory chemicals and fecal coliform bacteria. Down at the level of its contours on the earth, the walker wears the city like a skin.
