Sarah Wrote That
Recent Fiction
"All the Summers Ahead" | Five Chapters
"Barnegat Bay" | The Good Men Project
"Light at New Latitude" | PANK
"Social Utility" | Keyhole
"Where the Dust Went" | Atticus Review
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D&R Canal and Lake Carnegie
Princeton, NJI’d run on the towpath between the two many times before remarking on the parallels and contrasts in their histories. The lake was excavated in 1905 as a site for Princeton University’s rowing team:
In 1903, a group of Princeton alumni began purchasing farmland that occupied areas of the projected basin. They, in turn, sold this land to Carnegie. This was done in order to avoid arousing the suspicions of local residents, and to allow Carnegie to purchase the land for the lowest possible price. By 1905, the needed land was purchased and the work of clearing the area and constructing the bridges and dam began.
The canal was excavated
mostly by hand tools, mostly by Irish immigrants. Work began in 1830 and was completed in 1834, at an estimated cost of $2,830,000. When the canal first opened, teams of mules were used to tow canal boats through it (the steam engine was not yet applied to such uses). The canal’s greatest usage occurred during the 1860s and 1870s, when it was used primarily to transport coal from Pennsylvania to New York City…
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I mis-remembered the distance of the route I chose to run today, and ended up doing 12 miles thinking I was doing 8 to 9. I feel like I’ve been wrung out, slowly; but what a day for a mistake. With apologies to John Cheever:
It was one of those autumn Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the pledges leaving Sigma Tau, heard it from the lips of the parents, struggling with their Dockers at the University Motor Lodge, heard it from the sweatshirt racks and the incense tables on Pleasant Street where the steel drum player was suffering from a terrible hangover. “Bro, I drank too much,” said Braydon Ellis. “We all drank too much,” said Madison Burrell. “It must have been the PBR,” said Cheryl Emmenthal. “I drank too much of that pumpkin ale.”
This was at the sidewalk tables of Amherst Coffee. The coffee, served in brown mugs the size of small bowls, was foamed in the shape of leaves. It was a fine day. In the west there was a low scud of hurrying cloud so like a town seen from a distance—from a car stuck in traffic on the Massachusetts Turnpike—that it might have had a name. Shaftsbury. Marion. Lowell. The sun was hot. Tara Aperstazy sat by the coffee mugs, one hand on one, one around a glass of Shiraz. She was a slender woman—she seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while she was far from young, she had dressed in capris that morning and given her own backside a smack, as she jogged toward the scent of coffee in her dining room. She might have been compared to an autumn day, particularly the first hours of one, and while she lacked a tennis racket or a yoga mat, the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather. She had been walking and now she was breathing deeply, stertorously as if she could gulp into her lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of her pleasure. It all seemed to flow into her chest. Her own house stood in Northampton, eight miles to the west, where her three plaid-shirted roommates would just be waking up and might be considering making a seasonal quiche. Then it occurred to her that by taking a dogleg to the southwest she could reach her home on foot.
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al fresco
There’s a little pavilion halfway through the route I run when I’m at my parents’ house. The light poles in their neighborhooddevelopment are wooden, flat-topped, convenient bird rest-stops. Yesterday a sharp-shinned hawk was by the pavilion. At first the hawk was completely still, but as I did my stretches and caught my breath I saw feathers falling lightly to the street. A lot of feathers—not hawk-colored—and then a small branch. The hawk didn’t immediately notice me, but when it did it looked positively furtive.“You’re going to blog about this, aren’t you?” it said.
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"Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms."
- Joyce Carol Oates
The Guardian’s awesomely-named Ian Sample writes about a Cambridge University study showing that “a few days of running led to the growth of hundreds of thousands of new brain cells that improved the ability to recall memories without confusing them.”
The new brain cells appeared in a region that is linked to the formation and recollection of memories. The work reveals why jogging and other aerobic exercise can improve memory and learning, and potentially slow down the deterioration of mental ability that happens with old age.
[via Laura.] -
Run This Town
Of course Princeton, New Jersey is attractive. Its long-standing wealth is immediately apparent in the design and upkeep of buildings private and public. When I was photographing this post I considered titling it ‘The Comforting Proximity of Millionaires’ (from Gatsby, but without Nick Carraway’s sarcasm). But the baronial interests me less, and is usually more derivative, than clever solutions to odd lots, and if you’re architecturally inclined what makes Princeton a joy to run in is the juxtaposition of disparate eras and aesthetics; the houses that have outlived the vogue for their style; a truly urban density and range of people, buildings and intentions.
Gentle hills have allowed the borough to develop along uninterrupted but varied street grids, so numerous running routes are possible, past houses from the early 1700s to the present; along a former canal tow path; and of course across the University campus. Traffic mostly sticks to a few main thoroughfares so you’re largely spared the diesel fumes that can ruin urban runs. The Princeton Running Club lists their favorite routes. Here’s the one I photographed.
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Maple Street -
Four Years Of Foliage
In October 2007 in New York it seemed one couldn’t have a conversation without someone mentioning the warm weather. Not in a smalltalk way—more like the Ancient Mariner, or someone who fears she or he has seen a ghost. The year before I’d been in Central Park shooting video at peak color, and I decided to revisit the same spots. In places, trees that had been leafless by that time in 2006 hadn’t even begun to turn. Peak color came a full two weeks late.
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