A man walks by your bench along the Capitol Crescent Trail in Bethesda,
Maryland, population 61,000, seven miles from Washington, D.C. You can’t tell if he has a limp or a
swagger. He clutches a tissue in
his right hand like a small storm he is trying to contain. A woman in a long purple scarf descends
the wooden steps to the path from her back yard; every other article of
clothing she wears is white: shirt, skirt, socks, shoes—each one jaundiced by
its neighbor, like a Great Pyrenees suddenly golden against winter’s first
snow. On your right, where the
trail edges a parking garage, locust trees live up to their Latin name—Robinia Pseudoacacia—or “False
Acacias.” They grow tall and
branchless in the shade, their spreading canopies of compound leaves not
appearing until twenty or thirty feet, looking savannah-like, as if they have
been browsed by giraffes.
Everything here seems a little “off,” including you: a much younger man on a bicycle says
“hi” and slows down until you look up and he sees you are not as pretty as he hoped,
your long hair having masked a rather mannish nose. You are embarrassed for him. He continues on.
“Alisa!
Alisa!”
“I
can go higher!”
The
sounds of a daycare playground several hundred yards back ring in your
memory. You passed it—a wood-chipped
square strewn with heavy-duty plastic outdoor play-sets from Wal-Mart or Kmart—on
your way in. There is little
dialogue here. Most people are involved in conversations with entities not
present: chatting on cell phones, listening
to iPods. A mother walks silently next
to the flesh that came out of her—her teenage son—a body now inconceivably separate,
and taller, as if it were trying to outdo its creator. Dense mats of Japanese honeysuckle
drape the trail-edge in odd shapes, like layers of nacre, concealing what’s beneath:
decaying logs, a single rock, some native shrub.
By
now you have a single mosquito bite on the back of each hand, your sacrifice
for being here: your blood—your
own cells—in the body of the female mosquito, low on the food chain again. A girl whose red hair clashes with her
yellow-green neon tank top jogs by.
Across her upper arm you see a single band-aid, as if she has recently
received a vaccine. Another biker
whizzes past, his light blinking brightly and rapidly enough to cause a
seizure. You look away, down at
your hands. Earlier in the day you
had a hangnail. It is so easy to
cut yourself with a knife (you
think about a morning last week, when the blade went right through the bagel
you were slicing in half and into your palm) but difficult to bite through your
own skin. So you just kept pulling
it back with your teeth—the hang-nail—farther and father, until it broke off on
its own and the dermis showed beneath.
It is what you would like to do to this land: peel back its layers until it reveals what’s essential. But suddenly mosquito bites populate
your hands—the knuckles, the heel.
You must cast yourself out of this place, this sweet-smelling, too-wet
urban woods, which you have borrowed temporarily, away for the weekend. As you leave you pass an
eight-and-a-half by eleven inch paper sign that someone has printed and affixed
to a wooden privacy fence: BEWARE,
it says. But rain has smudged the
large capital letters so they conceal anything more specific that might have
been written beneath.
