Altimore City

I stood at the Center Street Light Rail platform the other day, enjoying the first hints of autumn weather as a cool breeze blew down Howard Street, and the sun was already showing signs of setting earlier. I normally occupy my time waiting for the train playing on my DS, which has proven itself to be a perfect train companion. In accordance with proper train etiquette, I always play with the volume off, and I don’t wear headphones because that would be too much hassle. As such, gaming in silence, I could easily hear the sounds of a Grackle sitting on the wire above me.

Grackles are noisy birds, and they always give me the impression they are really trying to tell you something. That something is probably “feed me,” but that’s a message nonetheless. This particular grackle was being even extra jabbery, so I couldn’t help but glance up to see what it was doing. It wasn’t doing anything in particular, it turns out. Just being a noisy bird. What lay beyond it, though, was far more exciting.

The trees that run along the sidewalk at the Center Street platform have never stood out much; this is probably because they appear to have been dead for quite some time. As such, I usually pay them no mind. Looking up at the grackle, however, I found myself looking at the dry, gray top branches of the tree on the opposite side of the platform. There, climbing up the central trunk, plain as day, was a Downy Woodpecker. I recognized it immediately, as growing up as I did in northern Baltimore county, along the edge of the woods, they were frequent visitors to the suet feeder in the backyard. This was the first time, however, I had ever seen one in so urban an area.

The woodpecker shuffled around the trunk a bit, took a few testing pecks different areas of the tree, and then finally took off to the east over the building tops. I only saw it for a few moments, but it really instilled me with a sense of hope; if this little woodpecker had found a way to survive in a place so trampled by humans, surely that was a good sign for nature in general?

The train came shortly after, and when I got off at my stop in Timonium, I quickly ran to the edge of the platform overlooking the drainage ditch and stooped down to look under the ledge where the sylphs had been residing since the incident of a few weeks ago. They were looking worse than ever, covered in grime and sleeping in what looked like half of an old car tire.

I told them my tale of what I had seen, and how I thought it might inspire them to give things another go. They hardly seemed to care, and one of them asked me if I had any matches.

Fuck them, I thought to myself; I know a sign of hope when I see one.

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Tagged birds, light rail, nature

The light at Pine and Fayette can take forever to change. I think it’s somehow tied to the construction nearby; as soon as they broke ground things got worse, like the university has managed to uncover some kind of cursed ground. A couple days ago while I was waiting, I saw two men circled round a trash bin on the other side of the street, in front of the methadone clinic. They started rapping their hands on its top like they were drumming out a rhythm, summoning something, sending a message — I wasn’t sure.

Then they stopped and there was a silence. There was a small crowd outside the clinic — it hadn’t opened yet, I guess — but no one seemed to think much of what was going on. And then there was a great flurrying from inside the bin and a profusion of birds, white birds, came flustering out out of it. The men didn’t watch the birds as they flew off into the sky, just leaned over into the bin and pulled something out of its bottom, I couldn’t see what from where I was and they hid it as soon as they got it. When the light changed, they were arguing over who had worked for it more, had done the trick correctly.

A couple days later, I saw another man trying to same trick with another bin further away from MLK. There were no birds at all when he stopped, though, and when he reached inside the trash he only found an old fast-food soda cup. He looked at it for a moment, thinking, and then he slurped down what liquid could still be found.

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Tagged birds, waiting

I was telling one of my coworkers how much I hated Baltimore summers when the explosion happened. It’s only the middle of the summer I really dislike, though. I like the beginning part, when you can feel the days grow longer and every week becomes a little bit warmer than the last, and I like the end of summer too, even though traffic gets worse in the morning and everything starts feeling more serious. I just don’t like middles, have trouble with them when I’m telling stories too. In the case of the summer, it’s just the weather. I’d always heard people comparing a hot day to an oven but I only thought it was a cliche until I started working in the city. I hate it when cliches turn true.

– The explosion, though, happened in the bed of a white pickup truck parked maybe twenty-five feet behind us. My coworker thought it was a bad idea to check it out but I couldn’t really resist. There wasn’t any fire or smoke or anything, just a boom and a poof of something powdery that looked like lime. I looked into the truck bed and there was only that lime substance — and a goose looking mildly annoyed. It seemed totally unhurt.

“What is it?” my coworker asked and I told him it was a goose.

“Is it magic?” he asked, because I guess that’s the kind of person he is.

“I don’t think so.” (Because that’s the kind of person I am.)

I gave it a couple minutes to talk, lay a golden egg, something — but no, it was seemed to be just a goose in a truck bed in downtown Baltimore in the middle of the summer, and who can say what it was doing there or what it was that caused the explosion. I thought perhaps that somebody with a little more faith would adopt the goose anyhow, feed it snacks from the vending machines (Pringles, probably, not Pop-Tarts), maybe even give it a name. And then, after you proved you could love anything mysterious, it might do something magical.

“Do you want to bring it back to the office?” I asked.

“Nah,” my coworker said and we went on.

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Tagged birds, explosions