By my teen years I had developed contrary views on the safety of a female alone in a city.
The first was formed on the ethnic city block where I spent my first nine years. My mother would send me to the corner deli with money and a note (because you could not expect a toddler to pronounce "pint of Neapolitan ice cream"). The only fear I recall was getting home fast enough to keep the ice cream from melting.
The second came from the adults who barely populated the rural area that was home for the second half of my childhood. They didn't like to go to the city and expected just desserts for those foolish enough to venture.
Since "the city" for them was Buffalo, I could just imagine how horrendous big cities would be like Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia, and (gasp) New York.
As New York City battled upstate over its bailout issues in the early 70s, local television news presented a particularly grimy and treacherous downstate view that made Sodom and Gomorrah look like Sunnybrook Farm.
Shortly before my first college trip to what upstate politicians referred to as the "Rotten Apple," I heard a campus speaker on personal security. He said the secret for a woman alone in an urban setting was not karate or mace, but a repellent attitude. Walking with head high, shoulders squared, eyes aware... and your keys balled in your fist with one sticking out between your fingers if you happen to be walking to your car... makes you a less attractive victim. Don't ask for a fight with your body language, he said, but don't show fear.
As a horsewoman, this clicked. Show a horse fear and he or she will use every edge given their size and strength, but masking your fears with a posture of strength would eventually make a fractious mount as pliable as a puppy.
So it was "High Ho Silver" and love at first sight when I arrived at Times Square (before it was sanitized for our protection). It was like finally getting the right oxygen mix after a lifetime of nearly suffocating. My repellent attitude and I walked for hours without incident, that day and hundreds since. Walking in an active city is my favorite way to think, to learn, to live.
When business travel took me to new cities, I'd always leave myself a few hours on the first day and study street maps on the plane. I came home from a week in San Francisco with rock-hard calves from the hills and sympathy for those who only saw the city from the trolley. I even enjoyed the special pedestrian challenges of Boston's Big Dig.
Personal entanglements and responsibilities have never allowed me to live in a walking city. Given the chance, I'd move tomorrow.
But for now, my repellant attitude and I grab our chances whenever and where ever they are presented. Shortly after settling at an inn in the Virginia-Highlands neighborhood in Atlanta this weekend, I dragged Charlie out to scout the location of the venue we were attending that night. The inn was billed as walking distance to Little Five Points, but the route included a six lane divided highway and few other people. We may as well have been on a treadmill.
When he took a rest later in the afternoon, I took off in the opposite direction. The neighborhood was alive and so was I. I stopped in a coffee shop to record the phrases and plot points that came to me in those few blocks and the waitress with 20 obvious piercings noted she used the same type of Levenger pocket journal.
I immediately dreaded the return to our postcard perfect island with its sanitized sameness and overgreen lawns that end on the edge of the street. Folks here don't appreciate a repellent attitude.