If you asked average Mainers which is scarier, miles of snow or the inner city, I have a feeling that more than a few might answer “the city.” After all, it’s one of the guarantees of life in Maine, along with 4 p.m. sunsets in December and black flies in May, that you will have a lot of snow and, relatively speaking, not that many people.
So when I tell you that moving to the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area is just as — if not more — adventurous for me as moving to the South Pole was, I’m not kidding.
My first experience with urban living was typically deep-end — as a junior in college, I moved to Madrid to study abroad. My Spanish was weak and my understanding of urban infrastructure was nonexistent. I had the address of my host family written on a piece of paper, which I handed mutely to the taxi driver at the airport. After being dropped at the address, a tall apartment building on a street lined with tall apartment buildings, I spent 10 minutes gathering my gumption and figuring out what to do next.
I had never been inside an apartment building before.
Finally, I took a deep breath and pressed a doorbell-like button labeled 7-D next to the main entrance — the same number as was specified on my address slip. To my surprise, this turned out to be not a doorbell, but an intercom. After a few false attempts, I managed to reply and identify myself, stuttering so unintelligibly that I’m still surprised they decided to let me upstairs. To make matters worse, I didn’t understand at first that the sudden loud buzzing sound after “come in” indicated that the door was briefly being unlocked. I had to call my host family on the intercom twice more before I figured out when I was supposed to push on the door.
Though I learned my way around Madrid eventually, overcoming my fears of public transportation systems and trees that grew out of small squares in the concrete, I still confess to a degree of trepidation when it comes to metropolitan areas. And I never have really experienced a large American city — an environment that is the everyday reality for more than half of my countrymen.
After returning from Madrid, on a visit to Boston, I was surprised by how much more comfortable I felt navigating the busy streets than I had before. But I was also surprised to have so much language come at me at once. Unlike in Madrid, I wasn’t able to simply “turn off” my ability to understand the language spoken in the streets, and every conversation and shouted greeting came to my ears in irrepressibly comprehensible English. I began to wonder what it would be like to live in an American city.
This summer I will be taking classes at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. I will be living in Baltimore, a more economical, if reputedly grittier location, not far from a former college housemate and a friend from the Antarctic program. I will commute between the cities four days a week, exploring new and unfamiliar terrain: the urban wilderness.
Maine has 43 people per square mile of land, compared with 8,996 people per square mile in the District of Columbia. Contrast that to the population density of Antarctica and, well, you’ve got quite a change for this explorer.
In my excitement for this new adventure, I contacted several of my more cosmopolitan friends living in New York City, relishing the idea of seeing old classmates for the first time in a few years. “Baltimore is just a three-hour bus ride from you,” I wrote. “I’ll be so close!”
“Your world traveling and my not-leaving-the-NYC-Metropolitan-area has caused us to define ‘close’ differently,” wrote one of my friends in reply. “For me, if I can’t get there before the ‘White Album’ finishes playing, it’s not close.”
It’s certainly closer than Antarctica.
Alongside our nation’s capital, I aim to discover just what life is like in the metropolitan centers of the United States, and what it means for a city to be “American.” If I am more comfortable with snowshoes than I am with urban living, then it will make this adventure all the more challenging for me. After all, I do love the unknown.
Meg Adams, who grew up in Holden and graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor and Vassar College in New York, shares her experiences with readers each Friday. E-mail her at madams@bangordailynews.net.