On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz Read Free Book Online Page A

going west and then east. Now we were heading past elm petals and a parked funny truck: already, these were old news. Now he was nineteen months and three hours, and he was too cool for those infant entertainments. He ignored these finds and instead insisted that we walk backward. For my son, backward, sideways, and serpentine routes were just as good (maybe preferable)to a forward gait. Behind us, the setting sun cast long shadows, and it lay our own shadows at our feet, hounding us.
    “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at his shadowy doppelgänger on the sidewalk.
    “That’s Ogden’s shadow. And there’s Mama’s shadow. Hello, shadow!” I waved. My shadow, probably six feet taller than I am, waved back.
    My son was something between alarmed and transfixed. I encouraged him to talk to his own shadow. He did and, to his delight, the shadow returned his greeting. Passing a cast-away bookcase on the street, left on the curb for trash pickup, his shadow leapt onto the bookcase, crisp and dark against its white painted pine. This shadow was shorter, almost matching the height of my son. As he went to examine it, the shadow got shorter still; stepping back, it lengthened and enlarged.
    And that was how we spent the next ten minutes: running up to the shadow (“Little!”) and scooting backward (“Big!”), accompanied by the guileless laughter of a toddler discovering another way the world works.
    Even between the bookcase shadow and home, I noticed more shadows. A perfect silhouette of a water tower (I thought of its standpipe comrade) was graffittied on the familiar tall building down the street. Every object on the sidewalk had a shadowy appendage. The shadows reminded me of the complexity of our landscape, the sheer numbers of objects on top of one another in the city.
    At the steps to our building, my son roared in recognition and prepared himself to step up. I looked at this small, wondrous boy facing a too-high stair and lifting his knee to his chin to climb it. I held his hand tighter. This was a walk I did not want to come to an end.
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    1  Which neurons, and which synapses, is another, wooly question, one yet to be answered. And how neural activity comes to feel like a stub, or like remembering, may be unanswerable.
    2  The proliferation of McDonald’s and Starbucks in far-flung locales notwithstanding. Chain stores abort vacation-vision.
    3  It is almost reason enough to have moved to our current block that on its corner sits one of the last handful of telephone booths in the city. Seldom used but by children shooed inside by their parents, it is nonetheless a fine anachronism in a city filled with phones unboothed and tethered to our ears.

“To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.”
    (John Burroughs)
Minerals and Biomass
    “A pretty, red brownstone, with a gracious, curved stoop, sat between a large stone building and a handful of white- and red-bricked specimens. But I barely looked up. There was too much to see on the ground.”

    Find yourself pushing past a man stopped on the sidewalk to examine the stone slabs under his feet, and you might have just missed Sidney Horenstein. This would be a shame, for what this man knows about that bluestone, you want to know. A geologist by training, Horenstein began teaching college, eventually dropping the teaching but keeping the field trips that he had developed in his classes. He has spent forty years coordinating environmental outings for the American Museum of Natural History in NewYork City. And he can still be found enthusiastically leading small walking tours around the outcroppings of earth found in upper Manhattan.
    I found him at the staff entrance to the museum on a chilly day in autumn. Horenstein approached me smile first. With my reporter’s microphone over my arm, I was recognizable as the person who had telephoned him yesterday on a whim; and he was as easily recognizable as the geologist who answered his own phone after one