Let’s Get Meta

MEDFORD

March 25, 2015

This is the first picture I took just for Instagram.

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O'hare E to B

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on May 11, 2014 at 7:43pm PDT

It was last May. I was on my way back from a pop culture conference in Calgary. Prior to and throughout that trip, I had been casting around for some kind of writing target. I’ve written before about how, when I first undertook writing for its own sake, I found I had nothing to write about except my big stupid feelings, either my sorrow over the death of my cat Peanut or my shame and rage about failing on the academic job market. And whatever I produced on either of those topics was usually all choked up, either with sentimental garbage about how one special cat taught me how to love or a bunch of melodramatic whining about how stupid I’d been. I needed to open things up, I needed to think about something else. I read books about the writing life. I read Stephen King’s On Writing and Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I felt better. I could look around me and see things to write. I could look up and feel inspired by airport architecture. But I lacked direction. Nothing was adding up.

At the pop culture conference in Calgary, I went to a panel about graffiti. I can’t remember much about any of the projects presented, but I do remember being struck, hard, by the idea that people often use graffiti as a way to inhabit a space, if only for the time it takes to tag a stop sign. It made me think about what can happen when we’re mindful about being where we are (with or without spray paint.)

It’s funny, because I have no interest in graffiti-ing anything, and though I’ll occasionally stop and take notice of a particularly vivid or weird piece of graffiti, more often than not it just joins the mass of visual city noise. But this panel on graffiti helped me to articulate something that I’d only been intuiting since I started casting around for a writing target: as I walk across the Smoot Bridge, or past the S-Curved steps on my way to Davis, or along the Mystic to the library, as I look up and across the many rooftops that jump out in sharp relief against the bright blue sky, I dig into where I am and I find sources for things I might say. Where I live can be a writing target…but how to begin?

Instagram. Really. Graffiti led me to Instagram, a platform I had avoided and scoffed at ever since I learned of its existence. Just eat your food, people! Come on! But, sitting in that Sheraton conference room, taking in the array of graffiti images captured in cities, small towns, and on railway cars, I realized that with Instagram I could capture images of my own. I could accumulate a stylized portfolio of visuals that hit me somehow, and then maybe I could figure out how to write about them. I could even use the captions to take notes for later.

So in May, I started using Instagram.

post continues after images

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#medfordma

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on May 14, 2014 at 5:24pm PDT

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#mit #metalanimals

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on May 20, 2014 at 2:50pm PDT

https://instagram.com/p/pSMExsC07B/?taken-by=rtbhive

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Blue Duck Bakery #blueduckbakery #greenportny #northforkli #longisland #cookies

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on Jul 19, 2014 at 10:26am PDT

I was taking pictures of everything. By November, I was ready to find a picture to write about.

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Walking and running for Iris and Lateegra; Tim won (pays to read and understand maps) #meowmile #charlesriveralleycats #eileengiffordhouse

A post shared by Rebecca (@rtbhive) on Oct 19, 2014 at 6:45pm PDT

The colors and layers of this Meow Mile pic really grabbed me, and it turned out to be a useful way to introduce the characters in my life: Tim, Iris, Lateegra, and the idea of Peanut (whose love taught me how to….yuck, you get it.) My Meow Mile was my first post, written before I really knew what this blog was going to be. What it lacks in coherence I think it makes up for in cuteness…a cheap trick, to be sure.

The point of all this: In a nutshell, winter kills the muse. My Instagram has been running on fumes for months. We’ve got a few pictures of the inside of my house, or a selfie of me in a unicorn horn (because, one must!) but otherwise, just nothing. Nothing I see makes me want to write. And the longer I go without writing, the harder it is to write. In desperation, I went back and read my earlier posts — cringed a bit, copy-edited some — and generally embarked upon a labyrinthine meta adventure, thinking about thinking about writing this blog.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Boston in Cigarettes

BOSTON, SOMERVILLE

August 2004 – October 2011

Once, there was a silver seashell. It lived on a sun-porch in Jamaica Plain. Often, three women would visit the silver seashell. One by one, in pairs, or all together, the women would sit. Sometimes they would talk, but not always. But they would always smoke, and then they would stab the silver seashell with burning cigarettes.

Over and over and over.

The illustrator, who loved to draw the human anatomy (especially teeth), would stab the silver seashell with American Spirits. The graphic designer and the literary critic, apparently more colonial in their tastes, stabbed it with Parliaments. The literary critic was really a graduate student learning to be a literary critic. She was home in the day quite often and terribly nervous. She stabbed the silver seashell most of all.

The seashell was large and its silvery shimmer was spray-painted. The women sat, filling it and filling it with burning cigarettes, all the year round. Even in winter, when noreasters would fill the sun-porch up to the windows with snow.

The illustrator and the graphic designer were natives of Massachusetts and had been friends since college. The literary critic was new. She’d answered their advertisement. In their initial interview, the graphic designer showed the literary critic the sun-porch and said,

“We like to come out here, smoke some butts…”

The literary critic smiled knowingly, though she thought the designer had said “buds,” and she quickly began to calculate the extent to which she cared about living with habitual drug users. In two bats of the eye she decided she didn’t. It was a huge apartment on a lovely, tree-lined cul-du-sac in a hip neighborhood. And there was this sun-porch for smoking things with people who didn’t mind if you did. Later the three women laughed together about quirky regionalisms, like “butts,” “bubbler,” and “packy,” and the zany misunderstandings they often caused.

The literary critic had been smoking cigarettes for over ten years, ever since she was fourteen years old. Back then, it was anything she could get two fingers around, but when she found a gas-station attendant willing to play dumb and take her buck-eighty, she always ordered Marlboro Lights.

“Hard pack.”

In those days, she’d walk her block, find a hiding place, smoke and feel like James Dean. Later, she’d drive around town, smoking and singing. Her favorite song to sing was the Toadies “Possum Kingdom,” and she would always belt along: “Do You Wanna Die?”

The critic, then, was seventeen. The dark humor of this scene did not strike her. At the time.

The car she had at twenty-two was old, and one day its power windows stopped rolling down. So she popped the sun roof and filled her ashtray to overflowing. All future cars, she resolved, would have the manual windows you cranked down yourself.

But that was not Boston in cigarettes. She smoked a lot in those days, but in Boston it seemed she smoked constantly.

It may have happened anyway, but two dramatic events prompted the critic to inhabit the sun porch alongside the silver seashell. She had lived in Jamaica Plain for less than a week when her grandfather passed away. She returned from whence she came. She arrived at her boyfriend’s house.

“I just said goodbye to you,” he said, failing to conceal his irritation.

Back in JP after the funeral, the boyfriend broke up with her over the phone. Both cruel and cliche. There she sat: cell phone, sun porch, cigarettes, seashell. And there she stayed, for hours and hours, smoking and crying. And once school started, on the sun porch she could study while she smoked without ceasing. Away from the sun porch, she entered into the “every fifteen minutes” phase of life.

Once she met the man who would become her husband, she tried to cool it. Fortunately for her, he was a devotee of rock clubs, and he was understanding–a lot of people he knew and liked were smokers. She almost never smoked around him. But once apart, she would return to the sun porch–six in a row for the silver seashell.

As the relationship grew more serious, she tried to cut back. Once engaged, she quit. But her arms and legs grew great rashy flames in protest. (Nicotine tricks the body. It makes the body think that without nicotine, the body can’t survive.)

Once married, the critic’s attention returned to graduate school, comprehensive exams, confusion, frustration. She began to fantasize about fancy clove cigarettes, long, sleek cigarette holders, and abalone-encrusted cigarette cases. She would peruse these fanciful products online. And then one day she bought some clove cigarettes. She started smoking again.

She lived in Somerville near Harvard now. The seashell and sun porch were long gone. She sat on the stoop and just blatantly littered the sidewalk with cigarette ends. She got to know each of her neighbors this way. A near constant presence on the stoop. Or so it must have seemed to them.

But the every-fifteen-minutes phase was long past. From the first clove cigarette, for a period of five years she tried to keep herself to under six cigarettes a day. She took up collage. She played scrabble with herself. She did a lot of online shopping. She learned that Parliaments burn too quick, leaving her wanting more. She learned that American Spirits burn far longer, and she could have just one.

In October, 2011, two days after her husband was laid off and six months before she would defend her dissertation, the critic lit a cigarette as she waited for the bus. And then she made a ludicrous decision.

“Yeah. That’s gonna be the last one.”

And, more or less, it was.

A few years back, a student had complained on a course evaluation that they’d seen her smoking before class. The critic decided to find places to smoke out of sight. Shortly before this particular October day, she’d spent about fifteen minutes looking for a solitary smoking spot. No one’s got time for that.

And then, there was the breathing. Breathing felt gray. She felt gray before, she felt grayer after, and she felt gray during, which really obviated the whole enterprise. It was like she could feel the shit killing her.

So she stopped.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

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Powderhouse sq, Somerville, MA

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The New Grub Street

George Gissing [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

BOSTON

January 9, 2015

Grub Street

Grub Street doesn’t exist any more — as an actual street — and it hasn’t done so for well over a century. But Grub Street has, and still does, exist as a certain kind of ethos. By the time George Gissing wrote New Grub Street  in the early 1890s, “Grub Street” stood for “hack writing” — in other words, writing for pay, or writing “to get one’s bread,” as they used to say. Gissing’s novel dramatizes the cultural split between “high culture” and “mass culture” as it tells the story of two very different writers: an idealistic novelist who writes for art’s sake, with very little success, and a cynical journalist who writes for money and as the market dictates. It’s a good novel — and a great example of British naturalism — though I like The Odd Women better.

But the New Grub Street I’m talking about isn’t Gissing’s, it’s Boston’s. The ethos of this Grub Street is a little bit grubby, but the writers there don’t look at their craft as either high or mass culture. They know that it’s both.

Back in 1997, Grub Street started very small, meeting at the Brookline Booksmith. It was so small that in ’98 it moved to the founder’s living room in Somerville. In 2000 they diffused to locations in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge, and in 2002 they centralized again in Somerville. This time they rented space in an old toilet paper factory near Union Square. According to the timeline on their website, without a GPS, they were nearly impossible to find. In 2005, they moved to downtown Boston, and in 2012 they landed in their current location, where I found them.

The Steinway building on the Common.

Swampyank at en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s pretty glorious. The jewel in the crown, perhaps, is the 2013 announcement that Grub Street is leading an initiative to create an official literary district in Boston. It makes sense — their new location once hosted a reading by Charles Dickens, and apparently Edgar Allan Poe was born where the Steinway building currently stands. (And not far, across the street in the common, you can see the new Edgar Allan Poe statue, commemorating the site.)

What you get from Grub Street is an array of different classes, working in all genres and at all levels, from your first personal essay, to how to get your short-stories published, to how to market your books better. And you get a community to talk with, to help you network, and most important of all, to keep you hacking away at your writing.

This past Friday, I took an all-day, Freelance 101 class, because I’d like to figure out whether it’s possible for me to take all the things I’ve learned over lo these many years in academia and share them with a public audience. And maybe get paid. The Freelance class was incredibly informative and exciting. And realistic. There’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into a freelance career, and less certainty than just about any job I can think of, including that of adjunct instructor. (As an adjunct, you’re at least sure there will be a paycheck throughout the semester!)

“Freelance” used to be two words, and it used to mean “mercenary.” Or “sell sword,” in the parlance of George R.R. Martin. One who will hack away, for pay. And indeed, like the cynical journalist in Gissing’s novel, freelance writers hack away for pay. But if pay was all they were after, any freelance you talk to will tell you they’d have gotten into some other field.

The Grub Street philosophy tells us why any of us chooses writing: “Creative writing explores and documents the human condition and creates meaning in the lives of those who practice it. We believe the act of writing can change both ourselves and the world.” And that ain’t gonna be easy.

Whether you’re writing for art or for pay, either way I say you’re a hack writer. You have to be. Writing doesn’t just happen to you because you have fine aesthetic emotions. Writing takes a tremendous amount of work. But work is too pretty a word for the way I often feel when I’m writing. It really is a matter of hacking away at something — sometimes like I’m hacking away at my own brain.

Like, with an axe.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Inhabit My Desk: New Year’s Resolution

MEDFORD

January 5, 2015

Though I will be exercising more, this is the only serious resolution I have:

Write every single day, before everything else.

So far, it has been a challenge. First of all, the phone beckons. I’d gotten into the habit of checking my calendar, to-do list, and email on my phone almost the instant I got out of bed. This would, inevitably, turn into checking facebook and twitter. I’d stand there in the middle of the kitchen in the dark, swaying zombie-like, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. In truth, this morning ritual never takes very much time, but I think it may have a deadening effect on my mood and creativity.

So, no more phone until after I write. I also used to give up about thirty minutes a day to reading while I drink my coffee. It was quite glorious, to be honest, but then I found that I wasn’t writing nearly as much as I wanted to be. So, now I’ll be writing before everything else…buuut in order for my brain to function I do have to include some caveats: eat breakfast and have coffee on hand. There must always, always be coffee.

This resolution isn’t an uncommon one, but it occurred (or re-occured?) to me after I found a link to Henry Miller’s 11 Writing Commandments.

“11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all of these come afterwards.”

I don’t remember where I saw this, and that’s because I saw it during one of my morning zombie scrolls. But it resonated — “Erh?!” — and I put the phone down.

A lot of Henry Miller’s commandments don’t make sense for me at the moment. In addition to music, friends, and cinema, I also have this day-job thingy. And his first rule doesn’t work right now either: “1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.” I think that’s a great idea, honestly, but my “one thing” is currently made up of the chaos of a million things. So, I prefer Ann Lamott’s theory of index cards and short assignments, in which a writer collects insights and images as she moves through the world and then dedicates herself to writing at least 350 words a day, keeping an eye out for the moment things start to cohere. When that happens, I will gladly work on one thing at a time. And this post just clocked in at 403 words.

Where I write.

America’s Rest Stops: Ryann Ford’s “The Last Stop,” on Slate

In preparation for my upcoming Christmas-Eve road trip from Boston to Youngstown, Ohio, I thought I’d share the following photo essay from Slate: Ryann Ford photographs America’s rest stops in her series, “The Last Stop.”

Tim and I will either take the Mass Pike to the NY Thruway, with its uniform sequence of rest stops (each with a guaranteed restroom, any time of day), or we’ll take  the Pike to 84, to 81 in Scranton (passing through Wilkes-Barre, grazing at its palatial Wegmans), and then pick up 80 and ride that the rest of the way. We won’t see rest stops (what my father has called “road-side rests”) on the level of Ryann Ford’s. Just the same, we like this annual 12-hour drive to Youngstown. We listen to our favorite records, talk for hours and hours, and get to know each other again.

A Word from Hubway

Hubway saw Tim’s Hubway Adventure through Twitter and shed some light on a few mysteries…Thanks, Hubway! (Also note what I think is Boston Twitter spam from Dara brennan…as soon as I tagged the tweet with Boston, I won some kind of lottery…)

Competition

Ohio, Boston, Somerville, Medford

(behind the blog: This is a short piece that I wrote in April, 2014, as my last semester as an adjunct instructor was coming to a close. I’ve been keeping it safely nestled in my writing files, not sure where it might belong.

When I wrote this, I had a lot of uncertainty in front of me. I did not know it was going to be my last semester adjuncting, but still it was around this time that I decided to stop looking for tenure-track jobs teaching Victorian or British modernist literature, and instead to try to capitalize on a decade of experience teaching writing and communication. And I was going to do that in the Boston area. My resolve to stay here eventually developed into this blog, which I see as a collection of essays about the place I love and why I’m staying here.

What I didn’t want was to make the blog about how I feel about the academic job market. And yet, lurking behind every post, there is a little piece of this essay. I thought I’d pull it out and let some other people see it.)

COMPETITION

The roller rink itself is mythic. It seems to exist only in my memory. It did so even as I approached it on that autumn evening in 1984. At five years old, I was only just gaining consciousness; most experiences were draped in surreality.

It was tall and round. It looked like a huge barrel, but that October evening the crisp air and the yellow lights of the parking lot seemed to shroud it in mist — more like a cauldron. It is the ur-rink, site of first-failure.

Inside, the air was hot and the music was loud. Older children skated past me in a rush, “We’re not gonna take it / Anymore!”

My father sat me down by some lockers to lace me too tight into my little brown skates.

We practiced skating in the kiddie rink. The experience was slippery, but I felt I knew what I was doing. They announced the race for the little kids, and being one I rolled up to the starting line. The voice on the speakers said “Go!” and the herd of elementary school children went. Their roller skates clattered and their arms and elbows pumped hard as they tried to gain momentum. The frenzy surrounded me and my ability left. I fell to the ground, my little fingers splayed upon the shining parquet, nearly crushed. I cried; the race left me behind. I couldn’t skate. Not like they could, any way. I remember crying into my father’s thigh, full of shame. He patted my head and said I was still a little girl; all those kids were bigger and had been skating longer.

There were many skating parties after that, at a different rink. I opted out of future races, even though I loved to feel myself gliding through the air, “is this burning / an eternal flame?” It was better to turn inward as my body did the work. It was better not to compete, because the feeling of having mastered this movement itself was like winning.

Though I’d opted out of roller races for all time, I had to run among my peers in gym class. I was not speedy. With every passing year, in fact, I grew heavier and more firmly anchored to the ground. A moebius strip of failure and shame helped put on the weight, and the troupe of cruel neighbor boys seemed always to know when I’d be outside. Better to stay inside; better to eat and read or watch TV; better to listen to my walkman in my room, “Roam if you want to,” alone. But in gym class, when the whistle blew, the other children rushed by. I wouldn’t fall, but I’d finish the race long after them.

I spent a lifetime learning how to deal with my failure to keep up physically, but I certainly was never dazed upon the parquet when it came to writing. And yet in these last two years I have felt the old roller-skating shame. I don’t know how to do this; I’ve made a mistake, I’m not ready. There must be something wrong with me, if I can be this unprepared after ten years in graduate school. I should have been watching how the game was played, how to choose the right tricks and stick all the landings.

There’s a metaphor that “failed” academics like to use on job-market apologists: Life-Boater. Accordingly, the ship Academia has gone down. Some people got lifeboats. Most, we are told, are drowning. The life-boaters say that life boats aren’t for everyone, and if you’re in the water there must be a reason. As a metaphor, it only goes so far, but I’m often struck by a feeling that arms and elbows are pounding the water all around me in a great din of splashing, all of us struggling to gain purchase somehow, on something.

I quit this panicked competition, and as I swim away to where there’s more room, the shame and frustration sting. But now I’m floating over here. I must believe it is better to turn toward a life outside the frenzy than to let the competition crush me. Because it surely will.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Tim’s Hubway Adventure

MEDFORD, SOMERVILLE, CAMBRIDGE, BOSTON

and back again

Hubway bike sharing

Tim’s bicycle has a broken axle. He bought it when he was 23, when he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey back in the spring of 2000. The bicycle before that was purchased the previous summer, in Delaware. It traveled with him–first to Richmond, Virginia, where he stayed for one month in late summer ’99, then to New Brunswick, where he stayed a bit longer, for basically the whole ’99-2000 school year. Somewhere in there, Tim left that bicycle under a tree in the side yard of the blue split-level colonial where he lived with five other twenty-somethings. The bike got stolen. He replaced it with a black Jamis, which he has ridden ever since — until the day he crossed the railroad tracks near Kendall Square in Cambridge and busted the axle.

Though Tim is a freelance editor today, he used to be a math teacher, and before that he worked raising money for environmental causes. After graduating from college, Tim took a job as canvas director for the Fund for Public Interest Research. He would travel from town to town setting up canvas offices and deploying teams of college students to knock on doors, raising money for things like Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and Human Rights Campaign. He worked for the Massachusetts bottle bill his first summer (a new version of which just failed…again). He had a big win the year his bike was stolen: he helped protect about 90 million acres of national forests from the logging industry.

Tim is tall and thin with light, wavy brown hair, big blue eyes, and a smile that digs deep into both cheeks. Though he looked younger than most of the college students on his team, for as long as he was in town he was an effective manager, running things with an air of good humored sincerity.

His work involved a lot of hustle and bustle, but he also spent a lot of time alone. When the kids were canvasing, Tim would canvas too, walking miles all alone, knocking on doors, sometimes getting donations, sometimes not. On these jobs, there was plenty of time to think — he would, for example, theorize the correlation between the outward appearance of a house, the likelihood of donation, and if they gave, how much. He once told me about how on his rare nights off in West Hartford, he’d stop at a nearby used bookstore, buy a paperback and read the whole thing in a night. This reminded me of the time he fell asleep under a tree near Spy Pond (Arlington, MA) while reading Kafka’s short stories. A solitary but contented man.

On our second date, in the spring of 2005, I saw him crumple his water bottle up into a little ball and stick it in his pocket to recycle at home. I thought that was so weird, I fell in love a little. I soon learned, Tim does not just throw things away. His bike is a prime example. A couple of years ago, when we brought our bikes in for their annual April checkup, Tim and the bike guy shared a little moment, laughing at how long the old Jamis had been hanging on. A few years before that, Tim noticed with chagrin that someone had stolen his bike seat and replaced it with a lesser model. This seat tips up and down and is generally a pain in the ass. I have suggested that he go buy himself a proper seat at least once a year for the last eight years. “Eh…it’s fine,” he says. “Now it’s rusted in place!”

But, this past August, the axle broke. The Jamis is currently unrideable. Fortunately, Hubway exists, and it is right in line with Tim’s sensibilities. It’s a bike-sharing program with bike stations all over the greater Boston area. There are annual and monthly memberships, or you can get a 24 or 72 hour pass — you swipe your credit card at the Hubway kiosk and you can ride as many times as you want within the time-frame you select. You just can’t go over 30 minutes a ride.

The day before I wrote Smoot Bridge, I got the urge to ride my bike over there. I used to ride across the bridge every day, but it had been years and I wanted to recapture the feeling. For a tense moment, we thought I would have to do this alone…the Jamis’s axle is broken, after all. But then we remembered Hubway. Tim decided to do the 24 hour pass. If he could switch bikes in under 30 minutes, he could get away with paying only $6. Challenge accepted.

We walked from our house to the Tufts Hubway station and grabbed the first bike. Being the first one, this transaction took the longest. We rode from Tufts, down to Mass Ave, and through Harvard Square. We heard the noontime bells ringing, and Tim realized he only had 7 minutes to return his first bicycle. I was totally oblivious to this. He charged up Mount Auburn and Mass Ave, on the lookout for any sign of Hubway. He found a station at the Central Square Post Office, with only a couple minutes to spare.

He had a little trouble with this one, because the original 30 minutes wasn’t up yet. For a second, he thought he’d misread the website and he’d be stuck bikeless in Central Square. Once the 30th minute arrived, he tried again and was immediately given his next bike. He figures either the time was an issue, or the kiosk needs a couple of minutes to recognize that the bike is back. (here’s a word from Hubway about what happened.)

We kept riding down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, where I stopped to take some pictures for the blog. Tim didn’t say anything, but he knew the pictures were going to make it difficult to get to another Hubway station in time. He thought he could make it once we got going across the bridge, but, as he rode out to the patch of Esplanade across from the Lagoon, he realized that I had disappeared.

In fact, I had stopped as soon as I got down to the Esplanade from the bridge. The sailboats were looking perfect and I wanted a picture. I tried to call after him, but he was way out of earshot. Once we met back up, everything was swell until, on the foot bridge at Mass General, Tim realized he had 2 minutes to find a Hubway station. I was in mid-sentence when he realized this. “Time’s almost up! Gotta go! Gotta go!”

Tim’s Hubway Adventure was truly excellent. He may try it again some time, but he wishes we had a station closer to our house. We both feel lucky to live somewhere with a service like this, but we both love our own bikes. I asked him what he wanted to to do about his, fully expecting that at long last he would agree to replace it with a new bike. I don’t know what I was thinking. The Jamis isn’t going anywhere.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Hubway Adventure Route!

Tim on a bike path in Wales, holding bikes that look exactly like ours…yet which are not.

Smoot Bridge

CAMBRIDGE AND BOSTON

It stretches across the Charles River, between the MIT section of Memorial Drive and Beacon Street in Back Bay. A steel haunched girder bridge, its design is less ostentatious than the Zakim and less stately than the Longfellow. Still, it is sleek and purposeful as it crosses the longest distance of any Charles River bridge. It is 659.82 meters, or 2,164.8 feet, or 364.4 smoots long. Plus or minus one ear.

Smoot tells his story in The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT

The non-standard unit of measure known as “the smoot” is equal to five feet and seven inches, or about 1.70 meters. This was the length — or, I should say, height — of one Oliver Smoot in October, 1958. This Smoot was a pledge that year for the MIT chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha. Having become frustrated with the seemingly endless trek across the bridge, his pledgemaster declared that the bridge should be measured and demarcated in pledge-lengths. Oliver Smoot was chosen both for his diminutive stature and for the sound of his name: “the name sounded ‘scientific,’ like ‘meter’ or ‘watt,'” reports MIT Newsoffice Editor, Susan Curran in her salute to Smoot.

And lo, Oliver Smoot was laid down “end over end,” and the long walk from Boston to MIT was measured. Ever since, for over fifty years, the pledges of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha chapter repaint. Over the years, the smoots became such a fixture in the culture of Boston and Cambridge that when the superstructure of the bridge was renovated in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department asked the fraternity to come and repaint the markers. You see, smoots had become useful in reporting the precise location of accidents. During renovations, officials even agreed to “score the sidewalk at 5-foot-7 Smoot intervals instead of the usual six-foot ones.” I have to look for that, next time I walk across.

the total distance, recently repainted; also, note the scoring of the concrete.

Plus or minus an ear. If you look at the total-distance marker now, it only says “+ 1 EAR,” but according to Robert Tavener, in his Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity (Yale University Press, 2007), the original measure of “plus or minus” signifies the MIT frat’s choice to build-in error, to express the uncertainty of measurement, and to recognize the fallibility “ever-present in human affairs” (xvi). This care for precision through recognition of uncertainty embodies something so important about science — the findings of each new study don’t increase certainty, but rather they open up new questions, new avenues in the pursuit of truth.

I’m no scientist, but I’ve dedicated the better part of my life to asking questions and looking for the many forms truth. Multiplicity, uncertainty and the slipperiness of meaning are some of my favorite things to think about. But a head full of things like that can soon feel far too full. Over the last 10 years, I’ve found respite from thinking and feeling too much on the long, straight stretch of bridge across the Charles.

For five years, when I lived near the Somerville-Cambridge line, I’d ride my blue-green Raleigh to work. I’d ride down the bike lane on Hampshire Street, along the Vassar Street path (past Frank Gehry’s Stata Center), down Mass Ave, across the Smoot Bridge, into the rush of Back Bay traffic, and over to Northeastern University to teach writing and work on my Ph.D. In graduate school, a lot feels uncertain, a lot of the time. On top of that, I was settling into a new marriage and trying to forgive my parents for being fallible human beings. When describing the dark brown muck of my worldview to my therapist one day, I realized that the only relief I felt from an otherwise constant state of anxious depression came to me as I rode my bike across the Smoot Bridge. I have since expanded my Smoot Bridge feeling; the dark brown muck has receded.

Over the river, the world opens up; the blue of the sky, the smell of the water, the sun, the sailboats, the quiet. Riding or walking, I often shift into automaticity, fading into and out of awareness of my movements. Nice and long, on the bridge you can forget yourself, then remember again, and maybe, once across, see things a little differently than you did on the other side.

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

featured photo: friend and colleague Lana Cook’s “Sunset of Yarn.” A good walk to work.

PS: In 2011, “smoot” was added to the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Also, check out this Panorama from the bridge in winter, at Wikimedia Commons.