Tag: binghamton

Back to Familiar Grounds

While I was back East, I decided to break my Tri-State habits and actually make the 2.5-hour drive upstate to Binghamton, New York.

Making the journey there doesn’t particularly feel like traveling, but more like going to another home. The drive up route 17 is more than familiar to me, having memorized the speed traps on the journey where cops like to hide, as the road winds through the rolling hills of rural greenery with exits every 15 miles or so.

Upon reaching my destination, Binghamton was a lot smaller than I had remembered. Getting around places was easier than I expected. Some of this probably has to do with the fact that I was visiting during summer, rather than my college years in the dead of winter when it gets dark at 4:30 and you take outdoor study breaks where you have to slip over ice on the crumbled sidewalks and catch yourself falling,g or accidentally step in a huge pile of snow that you must clear off your insulated boots before tracking it into a sheltered establishment. Nevertheless, there are just a few general landmarks or destinations in Binghamton that everyone has in their minds and has memorized the routes to get there, rather than being in a city where you get confused with your range of options.

It was nice going to a place I had not been in a while and knew where everything was more or less, the food stores and the cinema savers and the on-ramps and cafes and ways to wherever. Not a bad thing to know where to drop my friend off at work, where to fill up on the cheapest gas and where to park for the Salvation Army. A good comfort in missing a place and then going back to see all the people you care to see and still having an ever-lasting place in the general social sphere of those who remain and return to this place.

The houses in Binghamton look as ever uncared for and rusted as usual. I passed my old apartment building on Walnut and Main and it looked like it had not been updated at all, and even appeared like this entire boxy three-story structure was even tilting to a side.

Of course, there is always going the laundromat for endless entertainment.

Waiting for Summer

It has been very rainy lately. I’m looking forward to summer but this constant rainfall and teasing so-called “sunbreaks” really make it seem like a distant imaginary thing rather than something that will be spur of the moment. Someone told me before that the real summer of the Northwest really starts after the Fourth of July weekend, but I was in denial because it was so nice around this time last year.

I have a few summer plans I’d like to turn into reality. I’m supposed to head up to Seattle for the Northwest Folklife Festival this Saturday. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it happen, and hopefully the clouds will finally give us a break. I went last year and it was an eventful time of marching around a new city and seeing a variety of musical acts and dancers I would never expect in the same place, all conglomerated under the Space Needle.

I’m also trying to decide what to do for my birthday in mid-June. There’s a concert I want to see in the Bay Area, plus I have a lot more friends there than I do here, but there are supposed to be some fun things going on around Portland as well. I suppose that is a good problem to have!

I talked to a couple friends recently and also may have some visitors crashing at my place this summer, which is always fun. It gives you an excuse to step out of your routine and actually check out the city you live in but take for granted.

I’ll also be going to New York from June 30-July 13. New York City is a wonderful place in the summer, maybe crowded and full of car fumes and hot concrete, but definitely also full of enhanced delight from the millions of people who wait so long all year to have the sun.

I want to try to make it up to Binghamton, NY, where I went to school. I spend most of my time in NYC whenever I’m back on the East Coast, but I’m most nostalgic for my past summer drives up Route 17, where you finally get out of greater suburban New York and into upstate, from Bear Mountain, then past Orange County, along the Catskill Mountain borders, cutting through the little fishing villages on the bridges over the gushing river. I’d like to test what I actually remember from that drive, from the strange names of towns like Downsville and Fishs Eddy, the Beaver-something Log Cabins all beautifully situated on a grassy incline, the bleak-looking factory town of Deposit, and then an entrance into Broome County, under a highway overpass, where the surrounding hills would magically get shorter, the skies darker and cloudier and the air more humid, until you voyage into its post-industrial decaying city of Binghamton, a strange place of so many of my memories for better or worse.

Well, the sun just came out…