On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (33 page)

In this long empty stretch, though, Finn downright
trotted
. In a trot, the rear legs catch up with the front; each stride finds a dog with the feet on one side touching toes while the feet on the other side are spread as far apart as possible. When I really run with Finn, he is forced to
gallop,
a stride during which, for a moment, no leg is on the ground. Finn’s gallop has his rear legs pushing together to launch him forward. On one street, a dog approaching us was
pacing
: the legs on one side moved together, followed by the legs of the other side. It made him rock from side-to-side, a comic gait for a dog to wear. Indeed, walking with the pacing dog was a man with his hands in his pockets, the dog’s leash slung around his wrist. Striding without swinging his arms, he seemed to “pace,” too. Evan Johnson, watching gaits with me, observed that the gaits of mammals and reptiles are unalike: in mammals, the upper back and shoulders typically move in opposition to the pelvis; reptiles are back-and-forth, moving the legs on one side of the body at a time. This pair looked positively reptilian.

Finn and I approached the start of our walk, which was also its end. Recognizing the building, or its stairs, or the smell of the flanking balusters (I knew not which), he headed toward the door without hesitation. Again I paused, this time to see if Finn’s gaze looked different to me at the end of a walk than at the beginning. I hardly got the chance. A small child tottered over, delight on her face and a bonnet on her head. Her mother had a hand on a stroller and another on a phone; her mind was elsewhere. Finn lifted his head and simultaneously turned his body to face the youngster. I heard the implied “Doggie!” as the girl reached for Finnegan’s head. At this he ducked, moved away, and the mother suddenly reached over and snatched her child back.

Finn looked up at me balefully. I commiserated. We like to touch dogs. But do dogs like to be touched? Yes and no. There has not been much research into the dog’s tactile perception, but studies have been done with horses and humans. In both species, tactile sensitivity is not the same throughout our bodies. We know that our fingertips, lips, and genitals can be extremely sensitive while parts of our back and legs are relatively insensate to simple touch. (This, too, matches areas where we are more or less disturbed by accidental public bodily contact.) Horses have, it turns out, a high sensitivity on the sides of their bellies—right about where a rider’s legs fall. They can react to pressures lighter than humans can detect. This might explain why some horses seem unresponsive to a rider: they may be getting too many tactile signals for any one to be meaningful. Dogs, too, probably have highly sensitive areas, and would prefer not to be touched everywhere, or pet hard. There is evidence that rhythmic, firm strokes are relaxing for horses and dogs—but each dog has his own tactile body map. Look at how a dog touches other dogs, and where he licks himself: that might indicate areas of special sensitivity. If one’s whole body is involved in experiencing the world, the “personal space” we feel must be mapped directly from it.

 • • • 

My walk with Finnegan had been an ordinary walk: very little of moment had happened. Nothing one would bother to report to someone waiting for you at home. But, watching Finn, what counted as momentous changed: I saw how our world was colored with scent. Our block was a patchwork of smells, and the story of its day was readable in it. Through minding his attention, I remembered the smell of childhood, ripe as the smell of crayons, the must of an old book, the smell of a new car. I saw the array of balusters, windows, and detritus at dog height. I noticed
myself
in the scene—and that I had been blindly stumbling through my walk to work, my walk to the store, my walk to the car, missing the details that Finn detected.

Finn and I stepped inside and settled down together on the couch. I closed my eyes and smelled his fur: the top of his head smelled like fast-moving rivers; the curl of his ears evoked a warmed window seat. I could feel him sniffing me back.

¹
Smelling through the nose is “orthonasal olfaction.” There is also “retronasal olfaction”: from the mouth, into the nose from the back. That is why if you plug your nose when you eat, it is hard to identify what the food is that you are lolling around on your tongue.

²
How receptors and the brain code the odors as distinctive smells is a live question for science. There is not one receptor for a single odor, nor is any one receptor activated by just one odor. There is no single receptor for roses, nor for coffee, nor for the smell of a baby’s head. An odorant molecule fits in many receptors; and many receptors fire to many odors.

³
These “geodetic survey marks” are all over the city. The first were placed in New York in the early nineteenth century as part of a land survey. Each one’s coordinates—altitude, longitude, and latitude, and distance from other marks—is noted, and one can look to see if these numbers have changed over time as buildings settle or waters rise. The marks are set in stable places, where they can be found much later—on public buildings, monuments, in bedrock—and have been made of steel, brass, rock, or other material resistant to decay or rust. Though the survey marks still have their original use, there are also entirely non-official geodetic treasure hunts on which visitors collect sightings.

⁴
As a long-time city walker, I have done some examining of these spots. While the prevailing view is that they are all spent gum, covered with city grime, the teardrop-shape of some suggest a droplet—as of a sticky liquid or a phlegmy sputum. When I began seeing the spots on the asphalt where buses stop for passengers, I realized that they were caused by some viscous liquid or oil that the engine perspired while it rested.

⁵
To be sure, he was likely just
smelling,
but the eyes follow the direction the nose points, just as our nose sticks out at the person at whom we look (but we are not “nosing” the poor fellow).

“You know my method.

It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”

(Sherlock Holmes)

“As it turns out, I was missing pretty much everything.”

I plopped on the floor and rummaged under the bench by our front door, feeling for my shoes. I needed walking shoes. Today I would return, alone, to my first route around the block, walk it again, and see what I saw.

Since the time I took that first walk, the city was substantively unchanged. Sure, some buildings were erected, a few were felled; many trees were lost in storms, a handful were planted. There were more bicyclists on the streets and more people decrying bicyclists on the streets. In our neighborhood, a grocery store opened and a half dozen restaurants closed. But it was the same space, the same block, the same city.

I hoped that
some
thing had changed. The likeliest thing would be me.

 • • • 

It rained. This struck me as a deterrent to a walk, but then I brightened: umbrella sound! I stepped outside, experimenting with how sound was changed with an umbrella raised above my head. A satisfying pitter-plitter of light raindrops on the skin of the umbrella should have made things louder, but the umbrella seemed to slightly temper the noises of the street. Everything was just as loud, but the local noise of the rain predominated my experience. I pulled up the hood of my raincoat. This blocked nearly all street noise and introduced me to my noisy breathing. The sounds of my movement—a foot landing on the concrete, the press of my leg against my rain jacket, the rustle of the fabric between arm and body—was translated up to my ears.

I decided to forsake both hood and umbrella and simply get wet. Taking the posture of someone coming out of her apartment and greeting the day (only with a notebook in hand), I began to walk.

A sudden wave of panic overtook me. This all looked
very familiar
. There, the cherry tree; this, the neighboring bricked building; that, the fence, the ivy, the street, the street traffic. It looked just as it always did, on every one of my daily walks. The scene was not cinematic. I did not have the eyes of a child, nor an artist. I smelled nothing.

As I stood reflecting on this unfortunate situation, my gaze idled at the building. Its bottom story was covered in—could it be limestone? I stepped closer. The stone looked raked, corduroyed, and resembled concrete more than limestone. Then I saw the
O.
And a flamboyantly big
C.
I peered closer, my eyes adjusting. The surface was entirely made of sea sediment: shells, ancient fossils. The
O,
looking capital, was accompanied by many lower-case
o
’s: each probably a disk of an ancient crinoid. The
C
was serifed with an abundance of small spongelike vessels. Scattered broken shells and feathery spines lay around them. The closer I looked, the
more the surface revealed itself to be fractally patterned—from unbroken shells, to pieces of shells, to imprints where pieces may have laid.

Now this was more like it. I’d lived in this building for six years and never had noticed the population of sea creatures resting by the entryway.

The limestone face was decorated with patches of moisture from the rain. They ran horizontally, spreading toward each other from the edges between stones. A splotchier wet spot was definitely contributed by a dog. I could see where a windowsill plant had been overwatered, the streaks of dirt-laden water spreading south.

Behind me sounds registered: I heard tires, a sticky-wet slipping over the surface of the asphalt like tape being unpeeled from its roll. A series of birds whistled, one twittering, another sending a declarative, six-whistle message.

It was a new street.

My eye caught sight of something a few yards down the street. I nearly leapt toward it, rudely lunging right in front of someone happening to walk by and not anticipating nearly-leapers. The object of my lungely leaping was a gaping sidewalk crack, unfilled with mortar. I kneeled and peered in. Inside lived dozens of tiny, hopeful two-leafed plants pushing up toward the light. None bore the mark of an insect. Between them were stuffed uncountable elm seeds, dried and colorless, limp with dampness. The slit between sidewalks told the story of the season: late spring, the plants cycling through their frenzied growth and reproduction. The lack of detritus—cigarette butts, bits of paper—within it told the story of the block: well tended.

Above my head, a flurry of birds seemed to fly right into the brick wall of a tall apartment building. Another chased them in, and I realized that they had flown directly into the small space,
maybe two inches wide, between adjacent buildings. Heads poked out, tails were vainly ruffled. Occasionally a bird sprang forth into the air like a brick come alive. Grass and twigs and pieces of paper were packed into the space, forming an apartment building of nests. A row of overhanging brick served as a balcony, where a male, resplendent in black and bright brown feathers, seemed to sharpen his beak like a knife on a whetstone.

A door was propped open on a nearby building; a gaggle of men stood around, apparently assigned to bring in a handful of washing machines glumly waiting on the sidewalk. One of the men followed my gaze and smiled. “There’s gotta be a nest in there!” he offered, happily. Oh yes, it’s a building’s full, I said. Maybe the birds were moving in their own appliances. “Bird refrigerators!” he said. We exchanged greetings and I walked on, not ready to leave the sight of these crafty birds but pushed by awareness of the perfection of a pleasant, and not over-long, exchange with a stranger to leave the scene.

After that the sights came fast and furious. Caterpillars of soft green seeds lay sodden on the ground, accompanied by small, green . . . caterpillars. A truck grumbled by, advertising its business in cacophonous yellow lettering. It banged over a metal plate put down by someone working under the street. Three orange cones nearby had all fainted dead away. I remembered walking with my son on this street looking for orange things when
orange
had been an early word that he liked to get his mouth around. (
Purple
things, so much fun to say, are especially hard to find; but orange was surprisingly common.) On the corner, a long tree limb, stripped of branches, stood upright in a trash can. I looked up at a nearby tree, half expecting to see its glow of satisfaction on having finally cleaned house. A large brown dog, waist high, peered at the stick as it rounded the corner. He was walked by a woman hidden underneath an umbrella; as she passed, a waft of shampoo
told me she had recently washed her hair. The dog turned to me with deep full eyes; I smiled. As if in response, he nosed me right on my elbow, leaving a wet smudge. Behind her, a young fellow, umbrella-less, leaning deeply to his right as he thumbed a message on a phone, swerved right off the sidewalk.

A gate was ajar. It opened onto the private parking behind a building. A wall within was lined with ivy curlicuing up and out. No one was inside. I took a quick look around me, and I ducked in.