Which One Next
North Front Street in Harrisburg does not suffer from its lack of snaking alongside the Susquehanna River. It runs straight and true with nary a pothole to dodge.
The caretaker was taking a break from the task of avoiding duty and although arguably benefited by the absence of his kitten, who on the previous trip had heaved up wet, soggy kibble into his lap, still felt the missing of some key ingredient to happiness. Was he suffering from more of the same wanderlust that as a toddler had him unlocking gates and crawling across six lane thoroughfares, as unlikely a hitchhiker as any passing motorist had ever seen? Was it congenital, this need to move away from the familiar? Should he surmise that his mother and father had felt the same needs, even as they carried out the functions of his upbringing? Perhaps there was some comfort in this notion.
The river to his right was wide but low and hard to imagine as a raging force that could on occasion rise up 12 to 15 feet and flood the lower lying finely built homes of historic Harrisburg.
The caretaker passed by all the neatly maintained stone and brick buildings and up a ramp onto I-83. After merging into traffic he exited immediately, onto 13th Street, took a right on Sycamore and drove until it dead ended into a parking lot for a driver training school. At the first available turnoff he pulled into what looked like another giant parking lot, and, in front of two people being taught proper driving skills, made an illegal U-turn and traversed back out the way he came.
Driving in this higher elevated part of town above the network of train tracks which cuts Harrisburg in two, the caretaker noticed the people in cars alongside him represented an ethnic diversity which he lately had been missing. And there was, like in another highly flood prone town in which he had once lived, a blending of poverty and wealth, one very near the other and each unpredictable in its breadth.
In a commercial district of fast food restaurants and used car lots and rent-to-own businesses, he turned corners where rising up before him were grandly designed structures from the last century, apparently abandoned.
The caretaker was in search of an historical perspective as represented by architecture. He had once subscribed wholly to the notion of the here and now, but was lately feeling limited by this concept. He wanted some of the then in his here and now. Trying to piece together some meaning from all the ideas floating around in his head he said out loud, Yesterday's now is today's past. Tomorrow's yesterday is now. There is no time like the present.
Not to be bridled by his disdain for the Harley's chain of fast food restaurants, he stopped into one so he could use the restroom and while there ordered a cheeseburger, which, when unwrapped, appeared every bit as appetizing as the wads of phlegm in the cigarette clogged urinal. He ate some of it anyway, until gagging on a bitter and rubbery pickle he decided his use of the restroom did not warrant this punishment by cheeseburger.
He had heard about a three story Victorian with an unattached three car garage on sale for $12,000, but he wasn't sure where it was and he hoped to just run into it by accident. The seller was motivated, which was more than he could say for himself. He imagined meeting the seller and saying, nice to meet you, I understand you are motivated, I am restless. But instead of finding the three story Victorian he kept driving by the same set of ramshackle row houses and began to feel intimidated by the casual glaring from teenage boys on porches.
It was hard for the caretaker to get a handle on just what motivated Harrisburg to keep on chugging. It was the state capital but beyond that he was uncertain about what made it tick. For almost 60 years it has been experiencing a negative population growth. There was an irony not lost on the caretaker that one of Harrisburg's more lively downtown restaurants was called The Quarter, as in French Quarter. The caretaker had left New Orleans a couple of years before the water had its way there. He was currently residing in a small Virginia town that appeared on track to preserve its tranquility by forcing out everyone but the richest of the rich. It was beginning to appear as if the caretaker was attracted to troubled communities, but as so many of them existed, it was hard to choose which one next.
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