letting my toes burrow into the soil, I was spending my summer, cardigan shrugged over my shoulders against the office air conditioning, phone pressed to my ear, speaking to unknown reporters in Montana on behalf of the great outdoors. Over the last eight weeks, I’d researched and written about some of the most beautiful, exotic wild places in the United States: the archaeological treasures still undiscovered in Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients, the sunset striations on the stones of Utah’s Grand Staircase. But I’d been staring at a photo on a computer screen. How would I visit them? When would my palms know the warmth of that rock, if I continued working for them, in the city?
HERE’S HOW IT should have worked: I became a vegetarian. I began trying new vegetables: asparagus and leeks and bean sprouts. I used only cloth grocery bags. I shopped entirely at the local farmers market. I learned to bake my own bread, white knuckles kneading fresh dough daily, or how to make my own cheese, weaving long rubbery braids of mozzarella. Through my food, I communed with the landscape around me, raising my own diet up from the soil, cradling little green pots of basil, chives, cilantro in the warm light of a kitchen windowsill, constructing a raised bed out back and planting rows of sweet red peppers. I walked amid my produce, fingers running lightly along tomatoes staked in the ground, their green vines reaching towards the blue sky like hope. Yellow squash and cucumber flowered along the ground, their spiky skin pricking my hands as I picked them every Saturday morning in the sun.
But that’s not how it worked. I ate frozen, microwave-ready meals, vegetarian tofu potpies topping a thousand calories per individual serving. I didn’t even think about the bleached flour and sugar in my processed white bread, the chemicals in Miracle Whip, or the sodium content of fake bologna slices. Potato chips and Cheez Whiz were vegetarian, not to mention cheap. I heated and reheated chemical compounds, oblivious to the carcinogenic potential of red dye #40.
I had the best intentions, but I was a child of the suburbs, changing my diet without changing any world view. These meals were ethical by only one standard—no meat—vegetarian by technicality. In college, being a vegetarian seemed easy—I was surrounded by young upper-middle-class suburban radicals, most of them vegetarian. My boyfriend was a vegetarian. The campus dining hall had a vegan station. Here in the city, I was eating bad food because I couldn’t cook for myself, and I was alone. I was living the reality of most people in inner-city environments—fresh, healthy produce was difficult to find, and either of poor quality or too expensive to afford when I did. And the fake meat products that became my dietary crutch were chemical creations with a big environmental impact. I began to feel overwhelmed by how much work it was going to take to live and eat true to these ethical ideals. I wasn’t well prepared for what vegetarianism or postgraduate life would entail.
ONE NIGHT, I went out into the city alone, to wander along the neon signs of 18th Street, smoking cigarettes—which I smoked for years without realizing how incongruous they were with my goals for a healthy, vegetarian lifestyle—and feeling despondent. Lost. I don’t think I admitted it to myself then, but the city was too much for me. Sure, I’d learned plenty about poverty in college, but I couldn’t handle seeing it up close, in the stark reality of limited food access and homelessness and addiction. I wandered the streets and thought about leaving, wondered whether leaving would make me a hypocrite.
A man rode a bicycle towards me on the sidewalk, plastic grocery bags slung heavily over both handlebars, the gray hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and masking his face. Although the sidewalk was wide, I stepped aside to let him pass. But as he rode by, frustrated with the awkward dance of who-goes-which-way, he barked, “Bitch, I’m not in your way!”
I barely made it back to my apartment without crying. The man on the bicycle had seen an out-of-her-element white girl, a scared upper-middle-class girl pressed against the side of a building by a black man on the street. I wasn’t that girl—or I didn’t think I was, or I didn’t want to be. I hadn’t stepped aside because of the color of his skin. But I knew I lived in a different world now, one burdened by the reality that I needed more than good intentions. Becoming a vegetarian had been a gesture of activism, but putting it into practice was more difficult than I’d expected. Moving to a city was what I thought I wanted, but I felt lonely and out of my depth. When I think about it now, I see my liberal privilege exposed, no longer sheltered by the safe confines of a college classroom, or the sterilized enclave of a suburb.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there was something complicated about the city: something uncomfortable in the space between the progressive I wanted to be and the discomfort I felt walking through Columbia Heights at night. I was living in the midst of systemic poverty and institutional racism, and deep down I knew that no amount of boycotting, no well-organized rally, could fix that. I also felt a little hypocritical. I worked in an upscale air-conditioned office, cold-calling reporters and putting together press events to raise money and awareness for wild spaces that were as far removed from this city as possible. How many children from that Southeast elementary school would ever visit Zion National Park? Did the work I was doing matter, in the context of the crime rates and rampant addiction right outside my door?
When my roommates asked me what was wrong that night, I was too embarrassed to tell them that a man on a bicycle had yelled at me, so instead I just said, “The city makes me sad.” Knowing that they, in their liberal hearts, would understand, I told them, “There’s so much broken here.”
I began to daydream about the West, a place where I could escape these messy complications. A place, I thought, where I could live fully: where there would be easy access to the local food and fresh produce I knew I needed to be a better vegetarian, where it would cost less to live and I would have more time to write, where there was more space to wander and fewer people, where maybe I could dig down deep and truly join the community. I set my sights again on Montana, where Kevin was still in college, where I could start over.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
