After my trip to Utah, I got back, and spent an afternoon in Union Square to readjust to the city.
I call it recompression, because that’s what it felt like.
The City Canyon in the morning
It was louder. There are a lot more sounds in the city.
Everything moves faster. It is harder to stop.
My good friend Tiven welcomed me back from reality when I got home from Utah, and he was right. While I was out in the middle of nowhere, walking amongst giant, strange, colorful rocks, and sleeping next to the Colorado River, I felt a certain realness about the place.
That realness was hard to find in the City at the moment.
I sat in the square for an hour or two, watching everything. Ate a sandwich. Talked to a homeless guy. I felt like a rock in a river, everything moving past me, things were gone before I even realized they were there.
The sound in the city is a cacaphony, a mixture of dozens of sounds, combines into a rolling jumble.
I started to think of the building walls as the walls of our own canyons, and the streets as the deep cut wash ways in between. The city is it’s own Fiery Furnace, it has it’s own Devil’s Garden.
Most of all though, it has people. People that flow through these canyons, scale the canyon walls, and climb the mountains. People carve this landscape, like the water carves the landscape of the desert.
That is the big difference between the desert and the city: people.
People shape this place, and people make the city what it is.
Without people, this city would be nothing but canyons made of concrete and steel.
It is people that make the city worth living in.