A walk to the store...

Even in its most wild places, in the hilltops of forests belonging to national parks, or in under-utilized clear glassy reservoirs upstate, New York, the entire East Coast really, has the feeling of a place where nature has long since been conquered.

It realized this, belatedly, only after visiting my sister in San Jose, after more than a decade not living on the West Coast. This was a few years ago and my boyfriend and I spent a week wandering around the San Francisco Bay area, proudly mooching off my sister's honeymoon absence by crashing in her apartment, much to the chagrin, we suspected, of our new in-laws.

We walked through San Francisco, and visited a lonely and empty beach on a gray day, just next to Golden Gate Park. I think we were hiking up a small hill, looking at juniper bushes and a pond with an Asian pagoda next to it, and I realized I felt this almost imperceptible tingling. It was vague, but familiar, and seemed now and then to be a sort of throbbing, like the air itself was vibrating.

Everything in California felt that way, and had, I realized, informed what I thought the whole world felt like as a child growing up there.

Being fond of anthropomorphizing natural phenomena in all ways, I immediately decided it was the last remnants of an angry, but-not-yet defeated earth god, still reeling from hundreds of years of being pushed this way and that by the settlers who dug for gold, among other things, pillaging natural resources and exploding outward in concentric circles until they eventually built strip malls and suburban enclaves of tiny, identical houses.

This, of course, explains all the earthquakes, I thought to myself. And mudslides, and fires, and droughts, and occasional pummeling Pacific storms. Of course.

And, of course, New York, having long ago killed any remnants of its gods, with skyscrapers and subways trains and the artificially branching networks of apartment complexes and streets, would remain free of those things, if somewhat denser and duller.

Being fond of creatively applied self-justifying mythology, it seemed a good explanation to cover any myriad number of half-baked descriptive theories I have about the world.

In the Midwest -- where no one walks, and life quickly becomes a pattern of moving from house to car to job to car to store to car to house again, where one immediately plugs into a media device and forgets that outside exists at all -- the sky is the only thing that seems left untouched by the blight of Hardy’s and Wal-mart. Thus, tornadoes.

The South, what parts of it I have been in, feel old, but unguarded in an inexplicable way, as if the residents there know they have lost the battle, but go on anyway, in that demurely gothic fashion awaiting the apocalypse, which could come via hurricane, or flood, or ironically devastating slew of coal muck pouring from long ago raped hilltops.

Texas, not quite the South, not quite anything else, felt different. I once spent an afternoon in the hot sun exploring a suburban enclave of Houston on foot. I got lost, almost immediately, after having brunch at a highly recommended, though somewhat obscurely located, diner. The taxi having reluctantly taken me to the outskirts from downtown Houston, I decided to try my hand with the bus system. I asked about four people at various local establishments -- including a vintage clothing store and several tatoo parlors -- and got nothing but blank stares.

I realized that if the crunchy, alterna-retail employees didn't know where the bus stops are, then there was probably little hope of finding one. Still, I wandered, hoping to avoid the $30 cab ride home, and tripped over broken concrete growing up with weeds, and tried to navigate my way through moving streams of air-conditioned SUVs, worlds unto themselves in a city where places had been replaced with the well-worn roads of getting to and from.

Houston represents itself on postcards showing a tangle of downtown traffic, architecturally dull buildings, and a stadium named after orange juice -- a nod, according to a friend of mine who used to live there –- to the unremitting war the city had placed on the snaking growth sidling its way into hard-fought civilization.

Walking along the sidewalks where so few people actually walked anymore, I saw green things sprouting, uprooting concrete and pipes as if in a quietly planned rebellion, which will, someday, I have no doubt, take back the land and overturn the SUVs in a coordinated strike of moss and tree roots.

I'm thinking about Houston, in particular, because I had to walk to the store tonight -- or well, decided to -- because it's Sunday and I am both bored and lacking a car, mine being back at the dealer for the second time in less than a month of ownership (ah -- used cars).

At any rate, the walk from my apartment complex to the very large, brightly lit supermarket is five minutes at most. It's only just up a hill, and then across a somewhat perilous strip of highway, which doesn't have a crosswalk or pedestrian-friendly sidewalks to speak of.

Actually, no roads have sidewalks here. No one walks anywhere, unless they have to. Thus, you will occasionally see a gaggle of teenagers, well below driving age, walking dangerously along the median at odd times of the night, much like in Midwestern suburbs. And I'm sure some people walk in the villages -- where the roads are smaller and more similar to pathways leading between clustered houses.

On the main roads though -- they're all called routes here and have unevocative numbers instead of names -- walking is done at one's own risk, and almost no one does it.

I got offered a ride from someone almost immediately after taking off up the hill, which I declined. Even so, I would have preferred to take my car. It's not just that it was hot and muggy and dark, or that I had to carry my groceries home by hand.

Going outside feels like an intrusion, almost. At the very least, being outside in the unregulated spaces draws a sharp contrast to the spaces where civilization has built walls, or roads, or parking lots and housing complexes. It's not quite the same as stomping around the boonies with a bottle of water and backpack. Those places you know don't belong to you, and the trails are marked, even roughly, to accommodate the fact that you are a visitor in patches still accessible on foot, and you tread warily.

But it's a different feeling to have the wild encroaching upon all the spaces that have been dug out, and cleaned and made to be square and concrete. When you look out the window, it's always there, the ever-increasing jungle, which must be pushed back and tamed constantly, to avoid overtaking even the most staid of buildings.

And the air here feels neither tamed nor as if angrily revolting against foreign invaders. Nature clearly has the upper hand. And outside does not feel fenced out. It's everything else -- cars and the concrete -- that feels fenced in.

People here seem to know that they cannot win against the elements, so they whiz past on highways, headed to shopping malls, or air-conditioned workplaces or homes, as if whistling past the graveyard.

I made it back perfectly fine from the grocery store -- if hotter and stickier. But, I am eagerly anticipating the return of my car.