Walking in London

I cannot stress this enough.  When you look down at the street and see the words “LOOK RIGHT” stenciled on the street, you had better look right.  It’s one of those things we take for granted.  I can’t begin to comprehend how many streets I have walked across in my life.  From the time I was a little kid and holding my mom’s hand because sometimes my feet would just do whatever they wanted in my light blue Buster Browns with the leather soles to just a few minutes ago when I crossed Main Street to put a letter in the mail.  When you cross a street, everything is automatic.  Muscle memory.

Until you set foot in the United Kingdom.  Then somehow everything changes and you have to be mindful of how you do something as simple as crossing a street.  Somehow your brain cannot process that the cars are coming from another direction and if you take that step, it will be your last.  The same is true if you hear a ping or two from a bicycle bell.  You have exactly two seconds to react and get your ass back on the pavement, before it is tangled up in a 30mph mess of spokes and steel tubes and rubber and angry cyclist.  Cyclists in London have no fear.  Like the wolverine, they have a myriad of predators.  Taxi cabs, double-decker buses, and motorists.  But no greater threat has been posed to them as the mutual danger of an idiot from another country stepping into the street looking left first.  

They say that when you travel to a foreign country, you learn something about your own.  Since walking in London, I have learned to look both ways across the street and to keep looking and looking and looking.  I have also learned that the PING! of a bike bell is harrowing.  As is anything that sounds remotely like it.

It took nearly ten days for me to get used to looking RIGHT before crossing the street.  The first hour I was in London too, I didn’t realize that some streets such as Brompton Rd. had to be crossed halfway at a go.  You weren’t going to cross that whole 30 feet in one light.  The best you could hope for is to get to the island between lanes of traffic and wait it out for the next light.  After you get used to this, it’s easier.  Until then, I learned how gophers must feel as they hurtle themselves right under the front wheels of my car on an otherwise empty stretch of road.

After a week of constant reminders such as “Mind the gap” and “LOOK RIGHT” it began to sink in.  I was able to walk around the city, take the tube anyplace I wanted to be and the combined walk was half the time that it took for me to drive to get coffee every morning back home.  I began to relax.  I was able to navigate the city in close proximity to where I wanted to go and not have to worry about the absence of street names on street lights.  It eventually came into focus.

On my second to last day in London, I walked around Hyde Park and noticed a group of teenagers sitting around in the park.  Some were lounging on each other.  Others were playing grabass and fighting with sticks.  It was the two young lovers that reminded me of someone else a long time ago.  Time has an interesting way of doing that to you.  For ten days I had walked around three cities alone, speaking to hardly anyone unless it was to buy something or make smalltalk.  Oftentimes I found that once someone discovered I was American, all of a sudden I had to be an expert at American Foreign Policy.  I am not.  I am among the 99% of other Americans that just wish other people well and understand that any matter the government has a hand in will likely turn to bullshit faster than an avocado can go bad on you.

Right then, I was struck by the sight of that couple.  In 1993, that was me.  In love for the first time in my life.  I felt loneliness for the first time on the trip, before that it was merely solitude.  I remembered what it was like to have someone lying on the grass with their head resting in my lap, making daisy chains with clover stems and long strands of grass.  Tying them around my wrist like a bracelet.  So many years had gone by since that moment.  In youth, you don’t feel the miles seaping into your legs, so much that at the end of the day they just shake as you lower yourself into a hot bath. Twnety-six years later at 43, I had only so many years left in me before a trip like this would be closer to a painful journey instead of an adventure.  

I missed sharing a quiet moment with someone like that and told myself that the next time I was here, things would be different.  I would be able to remark about the purple flowers on the trees or how terrifying swans are (they are really just dinosaurs that didn’t get the memo to go extinct).  It would be another summer to share with someone, maybe sitting on the cool grass, looking up at the clouds.

Not long after I passed these students, I was met by a cluster of Austrian tourists. Middle-aged women, holding a worthless map like mine that had been extracted from a Frommer’s guidebook. They asked me for directions to South Kensington, which I provided to them—not only which tube to take, but also walking directions if they preferred.  They thanked me and asked where I was from.  “Colorado” I answered.  

“You’re American?”

“Yes,” I said.

They laughed.  I laughed.  Nobody in London is a local, or so it seems.  At least I never met a Londoner who was.

As they departed, I called after them “Don’t forget to LOOK RIGHT!”