Beyond Urban

Walk up to the top of my street and turn left, and you will see a brick tunnel, a footpath under the train tracks. The bricks have been painted with lemon yellow. Across them is scrawled graffiti of all sorts. The tunnel is dank and musty and warm on cool days, deliciously cool on hot ones. The rumble of trains passing overhead is rhythmic and pulse-like. It is easy, almost cliché, to build metaphors about the tunnel of wombs, birth.

On the other side of the tunnel are dirty, weedy stairs up to a back street, parallel to the tracks, which ends at King Street-- Newtown's main commercial thoroughfare. King St bustles with pedestrians and traffic. It is full of cafés, boutiques, more caf&eactues;, gay and lesbian orientated shops (including a pharmacy and a "gay emporium"?), book shops, and restaurants. If you cross King St, you can climb down a series of concrete steps to the two platforms of the Newtown train station.

Today as I sat out on the platform amid high school students in their matching uniforms, basking under a hot autumn sun and translucently blue skies, I waited for a train to take me to Circular Quay-- the most famous and busiest hub on Sydney Harbor, hosting views of the Harbor Bridge, Luna Park, the Opera House, and the place where you can get just about anywhere else in Sydney. From there, I would find a bus to take me to South Head park, the almost random destination I had chosen for the day.

Circular Quay was full of suited professionals on their lunch breaks, and among them I felt guiltily conspicuous (as a jobless bum), but simultaneously superior and liberated (as a jobless bum). As the bus trundled past hordes of lunchers in sitting on the grass at Hyde Park, I couldn't help a bubble of glee, knowing that I had the whole rest of the day to soak in the sunlight, with no air-conditioned, flourescently lit office to return to.

Then it struck me, as the bus wove through other cars and intersections, taking me to an entirely unfamiliar neighborhood-- I actually had no real idea where the heck I was going.

The bus took a curvy route roughly parallel to the harbor. I peered out the windows from behind a bald-headed man with some kind of European sounding accent-- another tourist, like me. He had a long reddish goatee that was bound together at intervals with rubber bands, and got off a few stops before I did at what looked like either a lighthouse or a church or both, tall and whitewashed on a windy headland. It turned out that my apprehension about detecting the right stop to exit the bus was somewhat unfounded-- the terminal stop was where I wanted to go. After the mysterious church-lighthouse building, the bus followed the sharply curving, downhill road down to Watson's Bay, right in front of the entrance to the park. I climbed out into the bright blue air and clean, harsh wind.

The park wasn't huge, but it provided dramatic views of the bluffs guarding the mouth of the harbor and the wide sweep of the Tasman Sea. Choppy white water rolled up against the dun sandstone rocks and crashed in impressive sprays, stark against the deep blue of the distant ocean. The water stretched to the horizon, impenetrable and infinite. The wind was even stiffer up here, pushing my hands around when I raised them to take pictures of the view. Dry brush and weather-sculpted rock decorated the landscape, and when I turned my back on the arresting sea view, I could see up the harbor to the skyline of the city.

I walked through most of the park along paved paths soaking in the sights and the sunshine. In some ways I was reminded of Whatcom Falls Park in Bellingham-- the environment was completely different, but the experience was similar. I could never completely escape the urban reality just outside the park, but at certain moments, surrounded by nature and with just a small amount of imagination, I could envision a space completely untouched by development, raw and natural and innocent. I felt withdrawn but also utterly aware, as if a certain part of my mind had been suppressed in order to allow something more vital and immediate come to the surface. I felt as if I would have been unable to speak if someone had tried to engage me in conversation.

After exploring the park I walked back down to Watson's Bay and sat down on a bench in front of the harbor to eat lunch. The wind was calmer, parents walked with their children across the grass by the water. Trees created a pleasant shade in the heat of the day. Next to the local yacht club, a lone swimmer made lazy laps across a protected, private swimming area. The water threw the light of the sun back up into the sky, blue and gold. When I had finished my food, I walked to the end of the pier to catch the ferry back to Circular Quay. Tiny splashes sprayed over the bow of the ferry as it sped back toward the city. I looked out over the water, then opened my book to read the rest of the trip home, trying to suppress a rising longing for the sea.

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Beyond Urban