The New World

In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out on the high seas in search of a better trade route to India. Instead, he landed upon the shores of the Americas, which for his people was truly a new world. With that said, my appreciation of American history has evolved since the fourth grade. The binding of my Elementary school textbooks and the narrow, Eurocentric story contained there within has been busted open by the knowledge that thousands of Native American tribes populated this continent before the European arrival and were flourishing in ways that European society could not measure. Disease, violence, deceit, and arrogance were heaved like cargo unto this “discovered” land and that only approximates the real story of the New World.

And yet, as I prepare to move to Boston, I can not help but feel the tingling excitement and naïve optimism of moving to a place that is, for me, a new world. I have lived in California my whole life. Actually, my recent sojourn in Northern California has taught me to think of southern California as a totally separate, water-guzzling enemy of a state. But, nonetheless, I have been exposed to ample sunshine and a leisurely pace of living throughout. I have eaten at many Inn & Out Burger joints, studied on a palm tree lined campus, and grew up in a planned community of tilt up buildings, track homes and recreational lakes that are as new as I am to this world.

Now I am moving to a city of cobblestone and bridges, clock towers and old Irish pubs. I will stand beneath tall trees as they show me the spectrum of Autumn colors in their leaves’ acrobatic descent to the earth. And I can assure you that I will be rapt in wonder. Too distracted by beauty and New England culture to even study, perhaps. Last night, I had a very foretelling dream, in which my friend teased me about my imminent departure saying, “Oh, Maggi, I know you. You just can’t wait to start yankee-ing around.”

Yankeeing. My subconscious’ new word for galavanting around the early colonies and former Union States. As in, “We yankeed hard last night,” or “It was a yankin’ good time!” Except that I really don’t think it will catch on in Boston. The more historical associations of colonial unity may be eclipsed by the modern bloodlust of Yankee/Red Sox rivalry. So I figure I’ll just keep my new word to myself and a few California ex patriates.

But that’s the thing about discovering a new place—the wonder of a new experience elicits all kinds of creativity. New words like yankeeing surface that prompt fresh perspective and thoughts, which in turn, shape the very contours of one’s reality. And what is reality? Is it a static, fixed thing that we have to try to figure out? Is Boston a place that is absorbing me? Or, is reality just the dynamic interaction we have with place, culture and people? Am I absorbing Boston? And if so, will the reality of Boston change in the slightest bit after I have seen and absorbed it?

It only seems appropriate to entertain these philosophical questions about reality now because the inner critic in me is demanding an explanation. She wants to know what I, an unestablished, twenty-something, California girl, could possibly say about famed Boston that has not already been said by historians, journalists, Rick Steves or the droves of other young adults that move here each year to study at one of the 100 colleges and universities within the Greater Boston area? Everything, I reply.

You see I have this theory, a sneaking suspicion rather, that cities are more than just a cluster of buildings passively enduring the tumult of history’s tides. The people who built these places and the generations that follow write their lives into the stonework, they plant their dreams in the soil, they kiss in the alleys, and press their ambition across the pavement. Walls do whisper and the land, well, it speaks. And in doing so, they give me full permission to talk back. The city gives us all a voice to be in conversation with the voices it echoes of so many other people who have explored and discovered and rediscovered it again and again.

So, it’s not just new perspective that we bring to a place. It’s the marvelous ability to co-create with that perspective, to interact with the city and be open to the unforeseen ways that we both might be reshaped by the encounter. I intend to map out the terrain of these encounters in the New World through stories, little vignettes that I can piece together on the metro or in between classes. Some may be earth-shattering, landscape probing, discoveries and others will simply chart the dimensions of a day; I will document the details of my New England clam chowder and Fenway hot dog the way Lewis and Clark wrote about the varieties of fauna and flora they saw on their pioneering trek across country. I hope that something of experiential map unfolds of my wanderings in which neither Boston nor I will ever look the same.