I’m walking away from my middle school across a muddy playing field. A dear friend of my parents has already developed the tradition of relating how, at one Thanksgiving—celebrated in her home, no less—I walked past her chair and muttered, “Worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever had!” I was, she reports, three years old.
Now, at twelve, I say to myself: Worst middle school I’ve ever had. Rich—the friend with whom I build treehouses, hang out in the woods, or search for the smooshed remains of coins we’ve laid in the path of the freight trains that roll through Pittsfield—is moving to Connecticut. Rich’s dad, who has a sports car and likes me well enough to take me shooting occasionally, works for General Electric, the multinational corporation that provides most of Pittsfield’s best jobs, and he has been promoted to a role at the company’s headquarters.
I’ll be sad to lose Rich. Middle school is tough and he’s tough, too, and much better liked than I am. Unlike me, nobody calls Rich a nerd or a geek or accuses him of being gay. No one would dare make fun of his speech impediment if he had one, and no one makes fun of mine when Rich and I are together. No kids ever give Rich a day, time, and place on which they will beat him up, which is the appointment I’m facing today.
After my last class, I got my coat from my locker and started carefully north across this field. My stomach has been turning since yesterday. What will happen will happen, I say to myself. I’ve been in this situation before and once I told Mom about it. After I made her promise not to call the school she told me it was important to stand up and fight.
My brother has given me advice, too. On most days for several years, starting when he was seven or eight and I was five or six, we used to have the nonserious fight that Mom and Dad called our “Daily.” Sometimes the Daily took place indoors, sometimes in a pile of leaves or atop a snow fort we’d built in the yard. My brother always won, so as I walk I try to remember what he told me. I’ll do my best.
I continue to step carefully. One foot after the other. Now I’m in the middle of the field—the right place and time—but the kid who threatened me is not here. What I don’t yet realize is that he has almost certainly forgotten his words—if he ever meant them at all—even as they altered my week, my month.
I pass by a few other kids, but not the one I fear is waiting for me. I know not to look back and I know not to run. (One foot after the other.) I reach the north side of the athletic field and start up the steep street that begins across from it.
A few minutes later, I’m at the top of my own road and as I start down its gentle hill I start to breathe more easily. I reach and open our unlocked kitchen door, put down my book bag, make a hot chocolate in our just-installed first microwave, and fill a bowl with Doritos. I bring my snack upstairs to the desk in my room. Before I start my homework I take a blank piece of paper and write the name of my imaginary city in small capital letters at the top. Then I start to draw it, as if for the first time: the rails curving in from the countryside, the two runways, the straight lines of new streets.
Dave and I lie on our adjacent but not-quite-touching futons and let the smoke from our cigarettes swirl above our heads. They’re Seven Stars brand; seven’s my favorite number, but only because it features in the designations of many airplanes. A Walkman lies on the mat between our futons and we’re each using one of its earphones. We’re listening to Enigma, music of a sort that’s entirely new to me this summer and that inspires the slow figure eights we draw in the darkness above us, as each cigarette leaves a glowing contrail that doesn’t quite fade before the music guides our embers back around.
It’s August and we’re in the last days of a high school summer homestay program in Japan. It’s taken me two years to save for it and it’s been worth every hour I spent washing dishes at my restaurant job and trudging through snow on subzero winter mornings on my paper route.
There are about a dozen of us on the trip. Most of us are seventeen, like me, and about to start our senior year of high school. We spent a few days in Tokyo—the largest city that has ever existed, I was amazed to learn—and then a month in Kanazawa, on Japan’s west coast. Each of us lived with a Japanese family (mine named their new puppy Mark II; a few years from now, when I go to Japan in college and visit them, this dog—though I only knew him for a few of his earliest and most impressionable days—will shake and leap with joy when I reenter his house), and every weekday we met for language classes. Now, before flying home, we have this brief trip to Kyoto, only us and our chaperone, Meg, an American graduate student who recently wrote in large, underlined letters across one of my diary’s final pages what she says I must always remember: No matter where you go, there you are.
I like these words, even though I’m not sure I understand them. Does she mean that you should try to be fully present wherever you go? Or that—contradictorily, it seems to me—even the farthest journey won’t allow you to escape yourself ?
Today, though it is my first day in the city of Kyoto, more and more of my thoughts have been centered on faraway Pittsfield, where I have no choice but to return to a few days from now. Mom and Dad divorced last year. Mom left Pittsfield and then came back; she’s buying a little house a few streets away from the family home where Dad, my brother, and I still live. For now there are awkward dinners at the new, round glass table in her small apartment along the road that leaves Pittsfield to the south.
Meanwhile Dad is dating someone I expect he’ll marry. She is kind to me but it will be years before I’m half as kind in return. For now she and I at least have airplanes in common: her first husband, who is no longer alive, was a private pilot. He learned to fly at Pittsfield Municipal Airport, where I’ve taken my first flying lessons. She tells me about her own love of flying, and shares stories such as the one about the time her husband flew her from Pittsfield down to New York and got permission to land their single-engine Cessna 172 at two minutes past 8 p.m. on the longest runway at JFK.
I’m happy to talk about any airplane or about Kennedy’s schedule of landing charges (twenty-five dollars before eight o’clock but only five dollars after, she relates), but this doesn’t change the fact that my parents’ divorce is as hard for me as its causes are mysterious. Going away—as I have this summer—makes it easier, so much so that there have even been times when I briefly forgot that it ever happened.
Japan’s distance also allows me to see my hometown more clearly. For the first time I understand that on the one hand there are countless cities like Pittsfield. On the other, the name of where you are born—a detail so significant that in other ages it might form part of the name you passed to your descendants—is fixed forever.
And it’s occurred to me, also for the first time, that for my parents Pittsfield must once have seemed an unlikely place to have come to call home. Especially to Dad, who was born in a small town in the Belgian province of West Flanders and trained in the city of Bruges to become a Catholic priest. He left Belgium to work in what was then the Belgian Congo, before moving across the ocean to spend a decade working in three large Brazilian cities.
Mom’s journey to Pittsfield was more direct but still, to me, implausible. She was born in a small town in the anthracite coal country of Pennsylvania. All four of her grandparents were born in Lithuania and while Mom grew up speaking mostly English, throughout her life she could easily summon many Lithuanian words. As a young adult she became a member of a Catholic lay missionary group outside Cincinnati, Ohio. This organization dispatched her to Paris and planned to send her on to Indonesia. Instead, she decided to leave the organization and move to Boston.
In the spring of 1968, Dad, who had been struggling with his faith for years, stopped in Boston on his way from Brazil to Belgium; an interracial ecumenical organization had invited him to speak in Roxbury about the social and economic justice projects that he and fellow priests had initiated in the Brazilian city of Salvador. Mom attended and invited Dad to dinner the next evening. They exchanged addresses, but Dad understood (incorrectly, and perhaps due to his difficulties with conversational American English) that Mom already had a boyfriend, one more reason he assumed they would never meet again after he resumed his journey to his homeland.
In Belgium, Dad sought out the Bishop of Bruges in order to tell him that he had decided to leave the priesthood (there was no excuse, he later wrote, for “leading a life that was no longer mine”). His superior, Dad recorded in his notes, insisted on three further meetings over several months, and turned to the arguments that “St. Thomas Aquinas had molded in the thirteenth century” to reassure him of God’s existence, but these failed to alter Dad’s decision.
America, Dad felt, promised a new start, and with friends already in Boston, including Mom—they’d been writing back and forth—he crossed the Atlantic once more. Mom met him at Logan Airport. The next year they married. They remained in Boston for several years, and then moved to Burlington, Vermont, where they adopted my brother, who was born in João Pessoa, one of the metropolises in which Dad lived during his decade in Brazil (“the easternmost city of the Americas,” as he titled his notes on it). Soon after, Dad got a job in Pittsfield, a city neither of my parents had ever seen, though they had honeymooned elsewhere in the Berkshires. I was born in the late spring after their first winter in Pittsfield.
Here in Japan, the other students are from cities such as Atlanta, Tampa, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Only one of these new friends had heard of Pittsfield before, and I experience this—as much as I do the fact that they didn’t know me before, either—as freedom. I needn’t tell them about the speech impediment I only recently put behind me. I believe that several of them suspect I’m gay, but none of them express this in the form I’ve most often heard it, as an intended insult. I needn’t tell them about my parents’ divorce, nor about the short history of most of my friendships back home, the ones I describe to them in terms that suggest they’re all but lifelong.
I’ve dreamed of gaining this distance from Pittsfield for much of my life. So one aspect of this dream’s fulfillment is entirely unexpected: when I look back at my life from the far side of the Pacific Ocean, I discover that while I’m worried about returning—to high school, to my divorced parents, to the city that part of me can’t wait to leave again—it’s also true that I love my hometown.
This contradiction takes the form of affectionate jokes with the other students about Pittsfield. In fact, this Pittsfield banter has become my “thing” over the course of the summer, and I’ve never had a thing before: There’s a password you need to travel over the mountains into Pittsfield, I say, and a special visa, too. A new friend from the Bronx laughs and asks if there’s even a special handshake. Yes, I tell her, and there’s a dialect I could switch to if I wanted, but then you wouldn’t catch a word I say. (Already I’m able to joke about not being understood.)
Among the friends I’ve made this summer I’m particularly close to Dave. Dave likes airplanes almost as much as I do. He’s funny and we laugh a lot, and whenever our group is required to break into pairs—to complete language exercises, to take seats on a bus, or to be roommates, like in this inn—we choose each other. He tells me about California, where he’s from, and I tell him about Pittsfield, not only with wisecracks but through my ham-fisted efforts to explain what it’s actually like there: how the hills look, when the first snow might fall, what kind of trouble my brother gets up to, who my small gang of friends are: you wouldn’t believe the crazy things we’ve done, one time this, one time that.
In the nearly dark room in this quiet inn the next song starts and Dave and I each light another cigarette. As I do so I recall a classmate in Pittsfield, and the time his sister told their mother, as we all stood eating Ritz crackers in their kitchen, that she thought I was gay. Their mother put one hand on my shoulder to reassure me: Oh, don’t pay any attention to her. Do you think I’d let you sleep over if I thought that were true?
Suddenly, in this Kyoto inn, I sense the approach of a feeling that I realize I did not leave in Pittsfield. (No matter where you go, there you are.) I don’t yet know to call it shame, but I do know that I want to think about something else.
If not my imaginary city—I’m seventeen; it’s a childish thing that I should leave behind, I should leave it behind—then Kyoto. Before we arrived, I studied a map of this mountain-ringed city and tried to make sense of the waterways, temples, and shrines so densely marked on it. Meg has explained that Kyoto’s name might sound unfamiliar to us, but the meaning of the two characters that compose it in Japanese could hardly be more straightforward: “capital” and “city.” I’m fascinated, as well, by the city’s age and, simultaneously, by the fact that for practically all of the earth’s existence, there was no city here. Did Kyoto have a first day?
I lean back on my futon and when I look up it’s as if a simple sketch of my guidebook’s fold-out map repeats in my vision. Our cigarettes burn and turn. Sometimes I start to forget where I am and then Dave speaks and I picture the map of Kyoto above me, and it’s as if the city itself is waiting for me to answer.
Now there’s silence, except for the crackling as one of us inhales, and I try to imagine that there’s no ceiling to the room, no roof to this inn, and that our cigarettes are swirling against the stars of Japan’s sky; or that I’m up there, too, looking down on the lights, and on ourselves, as we lie on these futons, these beds that are all but on the floor, a height at which, at home, only shoes sleep. Then Dave says something about a buddy of his, a story about that friend’s girlfriend, and in this near-darkness we could be anyone, anyplace.
London, the North Atlantic, Greenland, and around 2,000 miles of Canada are behind us. We’ll arrive in Los Angeles in a few hours, in darkness.
For now we’re roughly keeping pace with the near-dusk, and the continent-dividing Rockies practically fill the width of my forward window. Wyoming is below; a few minutes ago, from the right side of the cockpit, I saw Yellowstone and then the Grand Tetons, a range of mountains so cartoonishly jagged that, even from a perspective as clear as that which a 747’s cockpit offers, it’s hard to believe they’re real.
Colorado is in sight, as well, and when I realize how badly I’m humming John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” I stop to check that my headset intercom, which would transmit this directly to the captain’s ears—both captains and first officers are pilots and do roughly the same amount of flying, but the captain has additional managerial responsibilities, and ultimate legal authority, as commander of both the aircraft and its crew—is definitely turned off.
When I was growing up, Dad worked in the Pittsfield offices of the state government, whose headquarters are in Boston, on the opposite side of Massachusetts. I understood that Boston, therefore, was where Dad’s most stressful phone calls originated, and that our state capital was the seat of a power unattenuated by a distance that within Massachusetts could hardly be greater. Because Boston told us to, Dad might respond with a sigh, as he tried to prepare dinner while I asked question after question to unpeel the layers of his workday.
The idea that Boston might have desires of its own, and the ability to direct even those who were far from it, overlapped with the most arresting fact I learned about it in high school: that both the city, and the nation whose independence it helped secure, might be identified with the City upon a Hill, the image that the Pilgrim father John Winthrop found in the Sermon on the Mount:
“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill, cannot be hid.”
As a teenager I couldn’t believe that a city as familiar as Boston—in the sense that Dad went to meetings and eye doctor appointments there, and my own visits to the city were already growing so numerous as to be indistinct—could be associated with words as grand as those.
Later, when I lived in Boston, I found the association of that beloved but ordinary metropolis with an unseen or imagined one—in particular, with a metaphorical or divine city that embodies all the eventual perfection we might believe in or hope for—a little disheartening, especially when I learned that of the three hills prominent enough to give Boston its early name, Trimountain, two were long ago leveled, and the third (despite its providential title, Beacon Hill) much lowered. The City on a Hill epithet wasn’t much consolation, either, on the occasions I was nearly blown to a stop by the wind that howled through a dystopian concrete plaza I crossed on the way to work, after I’d waited too long for one of the wheezing, ancient subway trains that never came.
Now, high over southwestern Wyoming and to the right of the 747’s nose, a city starts to roll into view. I’ve never been to Salt Lake City, though I’ve seen it often enough from above. Someday, I hope, I’ll visit, and at this in-between hour it seems right to ask how its valley would have looked to the first humans to come upon it. They might have arrived from the northwest, perhaps, rather than from the east, as Mormon settlers did millennia later, or from the northeast, as my plane comes to the valley’s skies tonight.
Salt Lake City is marked out by its light, as well as by the terrain that gives way to it and the sudden absence of snow. As it shines from within the darkness that fell first on Utah’s lower elevations, I wish I could learn to recognize the pattern of its red-yellow gridded lines as easily as I can read the cool-blue letters, KSLC, near the circle that marks the city’s airport on our navigation screens.
In global terms, Salt Lake is still a newish city. The Mormon pioneers laid it out with reference to the Plat of the City of Zion, an urban plan that Joseph Smith had drawn up far from here, and to which he had added such instructions as “When this square is thus laid off and supplied, lay off another in the same way, and so fill up the world in these last days.” The metropolis was known as the New Jerusalem, and also as the City of the Saints, an epithet that formed the title of a book by Richard Francis Burton, the fabled nineteenth-century explorer who came by stagecoach to the settlement now shining below our 747 in order to add one more to the list (“Memphis, Benares, Jerusalem, Rome, Meccah”) of holy cities he knew.
Tonight, caught between the brilliance of the sunset over the west and the lights gathered below our wings, I’ll call Salt Lake City this: the high city; the new city; the city of the reddening peaks; the most striking city I’ve seen. And, from above the crimson snow on the mountains that guard its eastern approaches, and then, a few minutes later, as we bank into a gentle turn almost directly above its palmistry of lit streets, it’s not hard to believe that in two hundred years, in two thousand years, the city’s children will still learn the words attributed to Brigham Young, and to the moment he first looked out on the valley whose darkening sky the navigation lights of our jet are crossing: “It is enough. This is the right place.”
I’ve been dozing. I’m in my twenties, I’ve been living in England for only a few months, and when I last awoke on this half-empty intercity bus it was dark out and I was confused, because we were driving through a town in which the straight-running thoroughfares, modern buildings, and general spaciousness looked so American to me that for a moment it was as if I’d never crossed the ocean.
Later this evening I’ll tell one of my housemates about the place I woke to. He’ll laugh, maybe a little unkindly—at me or the city, I can’t tell—as he explains that I was in Milton Keynes, a city-sized town of around a quarter million people, I’ll learn, that was first laid out only in the late 1960s.
It’s a new town, he’ll tell me, a new city, in effect, and as he speaks I’ll remember a book, Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson, that was assigned in a college class. The book (and this is all I will easily recall of it) includes a discussion of the names of new cities of this sort: New York (or indeed Nieuw Amsterdam), New Orleans (Nouvelle Orléans), New London, etc., and when I encountered these familiar city names, all together in the course of a page or two, I realized that I had never before broken them apart.
Years from now, after I’ve become a pilot, my housemate’s words—a new city—will often come to my mind involuntarily, when the jet I’m flying emerges from the clouds above the parallel and numbered streets of a roomy metropolis on the west coast of North America, say, in the same week in which I returned from an Asian megacity that might be multiples older and denser, and whose earliest days might be mythical or lost.
But the idea of a new city will strike me most forcefully whenever I overfly an obviously modern settlement that lies near or forms part of an ancient one. Along the Nile, for example, on flights on clear and dry winter nights, I’ll sip my tea as I look across metropolitan Cairo at the new cities shining from within it like electrified engineering schematics, or like new sets of holiday lights, plugged in to be tested before they’re pulled from the plastic scaffolding on which they come neatly arrayed. Later I’ll look up their names: one is simply New Cairo; another, New Heliopolis; while several bear such unique names as Sixth of October or Fifteenth of May—like recent birthdates, it’s easy to believe, rather than commemorations of historical events, so new do their patterns of streets appear to be.
On a cool February morning my husband and I are in Vatican City, circling the center of St. Peter’s Square. Mark is taking photographs and I’m stepping between the oval markers in the stonework that display the names of the winds, such as the Scirocco, the Tramontana, and the Ponente, that arrive from different directions and in different seasons.
Arranged here as if on a compass, these markers form a stylized version of the chart known as a “wind rose.” Those who design airports rely on wind roses in order to align new runways favorably, and pilots may consult them in order to familiarize themselves with an airport’s weather patterns. The wind roses that I may scroll to on a cockpit-mounted tablet computer don’t feature personifications of winds, such as the Old Man Winter–style blowy faces that here in Rome I’m carefully stepping over or around, but with their arrangements of straight lines, complete circles, and fragmented arcs, they, too, appear to be as much artistic as scientific constructions.
As Mark and I complete our loop and stop, I think, as well, of the direction in which Pittsfield lies from here; of the absence of fabled winds in my hometown, as far as I know; and of all that Dad, as a former priest, would have been able to tell me about this square and the basilica above it, from which blessings are periodically offered urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world.
My parents have been gone for some years now. Nevertheless, Mark and I still return to the Berkshires and Pittsfield often, not least because there remain in the city members of the “Berkshire gang,” the group of families I grew up with. In the Berkshire gang, those of my parents’ generation are like aunts (“Worst Thanksgiving I’ve ever had!”) and uncles to me, and their children are my extra siblings. Three of the four families lived across the street from each other or in adjacent houses early on; and Mom, in her last years, after her divorce from Dad, and once her health and finances meant that she could no longer live alone, shared the home of one of my aunts. Even now, in my late forties, when we all still gather for holidays and important birthdays, the presence of these old friends is so warm and familiar that I sometimes forget that my parents have not, in fact, only briefly stepped out of the room.
Among the Berkshire gang, almost everyone of my parents’ generation grew up in deeply religious environments. Indeed, in addition to Dad, several others had also been priests or nuns before their faith altered. This shared religious background, as much as ordinary neighborliness and the similar ages of us kids, was the foundation of the collective friendship that turned us into an extended family.
And I was struck, growing up, when my parents and their friends observed the life of the church that many of them were no longer really a part of, to hear them sometimes speak about Rome exactly as Dad spoke about his bosses in Boston—Rome can’t allow that, they might say, or, Well, Rome will have to find a balance—and in this way I came to understand that Rome, too, might act like a person.
After I grew up, left Pittsfield, and became a pilot, I flew to Rome dozens of times, and I was often pleased to note on the flight computers that the city’s latitude, despite its much warmer climate, was within a degree of Pittsfield’s. On a typical journey we’d take off from Heathrow and turn southeast. We’d say good-bye to the last British controller somewhere over the Channel, talk to our journey’s first French controller even as we were still climbing, then a Swiss controller as we drank our tea above the snowcapped serrations of the Alps, and finally a series of Italian controllers as we overflew their country’s scenic west coast and began our descent. We’d touch down, taxi in, park, and complete the shutdown checklist, and if it happened to be a breezy day in the Eternal City the silvery blades of the cooling engines would slow but never stop.
And I would not leave Rome’s airport. Indeed, I might not even leave my seat. Once the arriving passengers had disembarked, departing ones would board and we’d fly away from the navigation beacon whose coding, OST, is a very-high-frequency shout-out to Rome’s ancient port at Ostia. We’d make our best time for London and, if my journey to Rome had started early enough, I’d be home for dinner.
Only now, in my forties, have I had the opportunity to come here—to the city that Ovid declared coterminous with the world—as an ordinary traveler, with Mark. A few days ago we stepped out of Rome’s Termini station, bewildered by the brightness of the teeming morning that the night train from Munich had so deftly snuck us into. In the hours since, we’ve drunk our coffees standing up, as we watch the locals do; we’ve nearly been run down on an ill-advised walk along the edge of a fast, narrow, and sidewalk-free portion of the Appian Way; we’ve taken several guided tours, afraid of how much we might otherwise miss; we’ve joked that everything, especially the laminated menu at the pizza restaurant we visit and revisit, must be a palimpsest.
Among all this, I’ve been particularly struck by my encounters with the city’s emblem, a gold crown above a maroon shield on which +SPQR is written: Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. So I began to look for it everywhere, and to consider it all the more marvelous an ancient acronym when I found it in so many ordinary and even unsavory places in the modern city, on the sides of buses and shared bicycles, for example, but also on the grates that cover drains.
Equally remarkable is an image that, like SPQR, you can’t walk far in Rome without encountering: that of a wolf with two boys. The story of the she-wolf, and of the twin brothers she saved, is memorably recounted by Livy in his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, or From the Founding of the City.
In Livy’s telling, the scheming Amulius seized the throne that was rightfully his brother’s. He killed his brother’s sons and consigned his niece, Rhea Silvia, to a virgin priesthood, a role that might have been expected to prevent the birth of potential rivals for the throne he occupied. “But the Fates were resolved,” Livy writes, “upon the founding of this great City,” and Rhea Silvia gave birth to Romulus and Remus (and claimed that Mars was their father). Amulius ordered that the twin brothers be put in the Tiber. The river had flooded and the king’s servants left the boys in a basket; the waters receded and a she-wolf, who came down to drink, “turned her steps towards the cry of the infants, and with her teats gave them suck so gently.”
So the brothers survived. Later, from their troubled fraternal relationship—and thanks also to augury, the interpretation of the behavior of birds—the Eternal City rose:
Romulus and Remus were seized with the desire to found a city in the region where they had been exposed and brought up….Since the brothers were twins, and respect for their age could not determine between them, it was agreed that the gods who had those places in their protection should choose by augury who should give the new city its name, who should govern it when built. Romulus took the Palatine for his augural quarter, Remus the Aventine.
Remus is said to have been the first to receive an augury, from the flight of six vultures. The omen had been already reported when twice that number appeared to Romulus. Thereupon each was saluted king by his own followers, the one party laying claim to the honor from priority, the other from the number of the birds. They then engaged in a battle of words and, angry taunts leading to bloodshed, Remus was struck down in the affray….
Thus Romulus acquired sole power, and the city, thus founded, was called by its founder’s name.
On a March day I’m standing in a graveyard old enough not to have a proper parking lot, so I pulled up on the grass outside its gate. It seemed wrong, especially when I imagined carriages where my rented Nissan stands now, and scenes of funerals from period dramas (the steaming breath of the horses, the women all in black, the grim-faced men holding their tall hats), but there’s nowhere else to park, and the frozen ruts indicate I’m not the first driver to stop there.
The cemetery, roughly square, is enclosed by a stone wall that’s collapsed in places, and, I conclude from a few beer cans wedged into the gaps, intentionally pulled down in others. On the west side of the cemetery two trees form parts of the wall, as if its builders chose to borrow from their strength, or save on materials, and all these years later my eyes contentedly follow their riff on this most New England of lines: stone, rough bark, stone again.
Snow shelters in the deep shadows to the north of the wall and the larger grave markers, but it’ll melt soon. As I drove here I listened to the radio, and after the weather forecast came an interview with several Berkshire farmers. They said that the conditions—frosty nights and thawing days—are nearabout ideal for placing the taps in the maples; that as the season unrolls their sap will change, and be refined into syrups of deepening color and intensifying taste; that there’s one late and dark grade you may encounter only rarely, because it’s not popular among pancake lovers. I know I won’t retain these new maple facts but still, as I listened to the voices of the farmers, I had the feeling that, after all, the world will be okay.
The street this graveyard stands on, Williams Street, is one of those I know best in the world. It’s much busier than it was when I used to bike along it as a kid, though Pittsfield’s population is now smaller. Past the cemetery was a turkey farm, a four-generation family establishment we’d visit in the run-up to Thanksgiving, but not only then. Up the mountain to the east of the cemetery the Christmas tree farm remains, where you can still stagger through its snowy fields to cut your own.
On Williams Street two battered green posts mark the beginning and end of a measured mile, as if, as I once thought, Pittsfield had its own versions of such units. On one of its side streets lived Mrs. Johnson, my senior-year high school English teacher. A tear comes to my eye now as I step among the headstones and recollect the eyeglasses that hung from a chain around her neck when she was not wearing them, and the day she whirled around from the chalkboard, when she heard a comment I had not, and snapped: There’ll be no homophobia in my classroom.
Williams Street is also memorable to me for its nearness to Canoe Meadows, a nature reserve whose land originally served Native Americans as a burial ground, which the Mohicans would continue to visit for some time after European settlement, pulling their birch canoes out of the river and inspiring the site’s English name. Now, decades later, when I jog or ski through or drive past Canoe Meadows, I sometimes think that my brother and I must have retained some fragment of this story when we decided to scatter a portion of Dad’s ashes in the river there, and when we did the same with some of Mom’s ashes two years later.
Pittsfield is in the north-central part of Berkshire County, in the far west of Massachusetts. Only one town lies between it and the New York State line: Hancock, formerly a Shaker settlement and once known—echoing a bygone name of Baghdad, and the name of La Paz, too—as the City of Peace, and also as Jericho, as the Berkshire hills were said to resemble those that shelter that distant place.
My first city lies in a valley, at an elevation of around 1,000 feet. Following the height chart of the world’s cities as a pilot might, its airport stands a little higher than Ouagadougou’s, and a little lower than Geneva’s. Pittsfield is surrounded by hills that are dotted with lakes, farms, and much smaller settlements. Otherwise forest runs out from it to as far as the eye can see, though it turns out these woods aren’t as ancient as I once liked to think; in the nineteenth century much of the primeval forest had been turned to pasture, or into the charcoal that could supply the county’s iron and glass works with the temperatures that ordinary wood could not. The forests have regrown; in ecological terms, I often struggle to remember, they are still young.
Pittsfield’s population peaked in the 1960s, near 60,000. It was around 50,000 when I was little and it’s heading now toward 40,000, the number it last possessed in the 1920s.
Pittsfield may be a small city and one relegated, despite its plentiful and loyal Red Sox fans, to one of Boston’s outermost orbits. Still, it has reasons to be proud. A 1791 bylaw, enacted “for the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House,” is America’s first known reference to the national pastime, and as baseball’s origins are obscure, a less scrupulous citizenry would certainly get away with claiming their hometown as the sport’s birthplace. In 1811 Pittsfield held the first American agricultural fair. In the early 1850s Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick at his farmhouse here. In 1859, the town hosted the nation’s first intercollegiate baseball game.
Pittsfield is also where the practical electrical transformer was perfected in the late nineteenth century. One 4,000-kilowatt model, built here in 1893, was said to have been the world’s largest machine, while in 1921 an artificial lightning bolt of one million volts was generated in the city. And Pittsfield, skilled in electricity and so often thigh-deep in snow, is where night skiing made its world debut in 1936, on a slope that rises from the site of a former mink farm. Bousquet Mountain has produced more than its share of Olympians, not because it’s especially challenging but because, rather, it’s unusually accessible—being within the city limits and inexpensive—and as a result many Pittsfield kids could ski there most every winter afternoon or evening.
Such a severe climate delayed the European settlement of what would become my hometown (one early Dutch mapmaker ominously wrote Win-ter-berg-e, winter mountains, across this otherwise blank region of his map), as did border disputes between Massachusetts and New York, and conflicts with those whom one of my high school history books still referred to in the early 1990s as “red men,” “heathens,” and “the painted.” Nevertheless, by the early 1740s, three men of European descent—whose surnames, Livingston, Stoddard, and Wendell, are affixed, respectively, to the streets on which stand my family’s first house, the office of the pediatrician who looked after me and my brother, and the public library—had acquired title to the land on which the future city would rise.
In 1752 the first families took up residence in the log cabins that the original wave of settlers had prepared for them. The next year the General Court of Massachusetts granted the “Proprietors of the Settling-lots in the Township of Poontoosuck”—a Mohican name that means “the haunt of winter deer”—the all-important right to levy taxes. In 1761 the town was incorporated in honor of William Pitt (“the Elder,” as we now know him), the British official who “by his vigorous conduct of the war against France, had made himself the idol of all parties in New England.”
Thirteen decades later, when its population had grown to around 17,000, Pittsfield’s citizens agreed to give up the traditional New England form of government by town meeting, and became a city.
The snow that fell as dawn broke on January 5, 1891, was understood to be “a benediction from above.” A few hours later, Judge James M. Barker addressed the gathered populace. Among his first words was the term that recalls the observations of birds that midwifed Rome’s bloody foundation: “We are at home. We meet under happy auspices.”
Indeed, no one could accuse Judge Barker of shying from the day’s import: “The old order is about to pass, the footfall of the new City as she comes to take her appointed place and assume her allotted work approaches!” After the grand speeches a ball was held at the Academy of Music. The 800 guests, among whom both “matronly dignity” and “masculine stability” were said to be well represented, were serenaded by 25 musicians and lit by a star formed of 42 lights and “1,000 candle power strong.” Supper arrived after midnight and the dancing continued past four in the morning.
Drawn so strongly to every Pittsfield story, I sometimes enjoy trying to calculate the significance of these celebrations. (For how long did Pittsfield remain the world’s newest city? A day? A week?) And in particular I love to imagine the hour of their conclusion: the newfangled, yellowy light falls through the academy’s doors and casts shadows of the danced-out citizenry as they sway out onto the snow; the bitter cold takes their breath and waters their eyes as they step or ride farther into the surrounding darkness; while far to the east, the light of the new city’s first dawn rises from the ocean, crosses the forearm of Cape Cod, and strikes the dome of Boston.
I’m slightly disappointed, however, to have found little in these stories that’s mysterious or mythical. Perhaps it’s that the details are too well documented, or perhaps they have lacked sufficient centuries to season into legend. After all, as Livy wrote, “It is the privilege of antiquity to mingle divine things with human, and so to add dignity to the beginnings of cities.”
Still, when it comes to origin myths, it’s never too late to create new ones.
For Pittsfield, framed by its famously picturesque hills, a more fable-like foundation story might be formed from the city’s setting. In his speech for Pittsfield’s inauguration, Judge Barker said, “Just how much the fact that Rome sat upon a throne of beauty helped her to rule the world we may not know.” From the Eternal City he then drew a line nearly due west to the newborn one that lay before him: “Who shall say how beauty of situation, fine scenery, and a healthful and invigorating climate have helped us hitherto, and how they shall hereafter aid to stimulate and ennoble thought and life.” A myth rooted in a particular arrangement of hills, lakes, and waters would emphasize Pittsfield’s impressive natural context; it would also remind us that all cities—so often built along rivers, or on natural harbors so faultless as to seem fated, or at the intersections of roads or rails themselves steered by topography—are sculpted by nature before they are by people.
A creation myth of Pittsfield could also turn, Rome-like, on its wolves, which at the time of my hometown’s foundation remained a terrifying presence in this part of New England. Bounties were paid for their scalps, and one early matriarch of the settlement, known in her golden years for her high manners and “fine, erect form” had once, when still a young wife, heard her family’s sheep “rushing wildly” against the door of the cabin. On opening it she found a “huge, gaunt, and hungry wolf in eager pursuit” and shot it dead.
Or a Pittsfield mythmaker might turn for inspiration to the story of Sarah Deming, who arrived here aged twenty-six in 1752, riding pillion on the horse of Solomon, her husband. She knew war, sacrifice, and the birth of not only her town but of a nation (her son Noadiah is one of three Demings listed in Pittsfield’s records of Revolutionary Service). When Sarah died, aged ninety-two, in 1818, she was Pittsfield’s oldest woman, and surely the last of its settlers to depart from the earth.
Here in this cemetery on this cold March day, I walk up to the four-sided white monument that marks her grave. As I shiver and stuff my hands into my pockets, and fidget with the rental car’s clunky key chain, I remember playing in Deming Park, and how, as a high school student, I would cross Deming Street at least twice every weekday. But I knew none of her story then, in part because I never stopped to read her epitaph, though it’s still perfectly legible on the obelisk before me, which my brother and I must have biked past many hundreds of times: A mother of the Revolution and a mother in Israel.
As I return to the cold car, start it, and steer left onto Williams Street, I try to imagine The mother of Pittsfield carved in the marble, in the same script as the rest. I can’t quite imagine, however, the legend that might depart from the handful of facts known of Sarah Deming’s life; nor can I guess how she might have told her story, or that of the birth of the city that would grow up mostly to the west of her grave.
Alternatively, we might come up with many myths to explain Pittsfield’s beginning, and let time choose from among them. As I head toward my favorite downtown café I pass by Canoe Meadows again, and the nearness of its unthawed waters reminds me of a winter night when I was maybe seven. My brother and I were in our backyard in our snowsuits, having our Daily, when he chased me onto what we called the goldfish pond, though we never had goldfish; it was swampy in summer and solid ice in winter. Or so I thought until that night, when I fell through.
Looking back, the water was perhaps only a foot and a half deep, but that was more than enough to terrify me. In my cold and suddenly lowered position I thought I was about to die or to get into serious trouble—or both, somehow. I scrambled ahead, breaking through one great pane after another, until my brother grabbed me and lifted me out. As we ran back I was shaking, my coat and clothes were heavy, the yard was blue-white in the near-darkness, and our house appeared to be made only of light.
That evening’s events took place at around the age when I began to think a lot about cities. So let me try this for the origin myth of Pittsfield, or of the city that I imagined so often in the years that followed:
On a clear winter night two brothers went out on a pond, long after they should have been in bed. There were no wolves, but there was a sort of augury: a cardinal flew over the ice, its crimson barely perceived in the near-darkness by the elder brother, while at that moment the younger brother saw something glint ahead of him. He went closer, but it was only the moon’s reflection, and as he realized this he fell through. His older brother pulled him out, and carried him back to the house, where under heavy blankets they both slept more deeply than they ever had before, watched over by faces on which worry and the light of the fire flickered. Soon after the start of this long night’s sleep the new city formed, and the first of its centuries began to unroll in the air that crackled between them, in the course of the dream they shared.
And as for which of the two brothers would be remembered as the city’s founder, well, let’s say they fought constantly about that, and much else, as brothers will.