tonic. Nearly every day I was in them or on them or looking at them,
often alone. Unlike a lot of people in Boulder, I was neither a seeker
nor a fitness freak, so I didn’t approach my walks with a quest for
spiritual or material utility. And as a born and bred New Yorker, I
don’t use words like “tonic” lightly. I’ve never worn a heart monitor
and clocked sprints or downloaded playlists from Olympic coaches. I
would just head outside, usually walking, and if I couldn’t get out, I’d
get surly. When my feet were moving, I would think about whatever I
needed to think about and the farther I went, the more I would space
out. Sometimes I could by accident compose some writerly sentences
in my head, or some insight might waft up, unbidden.
I’m not a wannabe mountain sprite. There’s a lot I love about
cities, like great cheap tacos and smart people in fantastic eyewear.
It’s just that I noticed some dramatic things about my mood,
creativity, imagination and productivity in different environments,
and I started to ponder it.
THE MOVING TRUCK pointed itself toward that anti-Arcadia that is the
nation’s capital, and we reluctantly followed. It was 104 degrees when
we arrived, and my hair shriveled up into a pile of Brillo. This surely
wasn’t the East Coast; this was Manaus with suits. I ventured out to
explore a nearby park early in the morning, and found that to get
there, I needed to sprint across a highway and bushwhack along some
bridge pilons to find the words “Pussy Fudge” waiting for me in spray
paint. Our house was near a river but also near a major airport. Jets
passed low overhead every sixty seconds. There was the noise, the
smog, the gray, the heat. (To be fair, nature as well as civilization
could wreck you here: the nonnative tiger mosquitoes as big as my
thumbnail, the nymph deer ticks smaller than freckles. Both are
capable of giving you diseases that can damage you neurologically
and for life. Washington had names for weather events I’d never
heard of or had to think about: derechos, polar vortices, level