I finally met a pedestrian, muffled already in a winter overcoat. He squinted at me suspiciously when I asked him why so many of the houses stood smashed and empty. "Route 91," he muttered, hurrying away.
Although I had learned there was indeed a rational explanation for the devastation, I felt no better. I was firmly convinced that a slight alteration on the highway blueprints could have carried the new road across empty marsh flats, only a few miles away. The cost of fill would have been a fraction of that expended on extensive condemnation proceedings.
I fully expected that the brick house of my early childhood lay already in ruins. I felt a thin exultation at finding it still standing. I say "thin" because of course I knew it was doomed. Already its windows were broken, its door sagged in and part of its front hedge had been ground away by truck or bulldozer.
As I stood regarding it, remembering clearly episodes of over forty years past, I reflected on the rootlessness which marks the average city denizen. By choice, or more likely necessity, he moves from one house to another. He has no anchor, nothing of continuity. When he visits his old neighborhood, he may find that his former house has vanished. The site of it may be occupied by a city-supported "project" for permanent welfare cases, or by a cinder-block garage, or by a barren parking lot. The house, the trees, the back yard, the very curbstones and sidewalks may be gone.
The returner will experience a haunting sense of loss, a sense of bewilderment, of chaos. He may finally begin to feel that he is even losing his own identity, that, in fact, he has no identity. He will feel lost in time, without either a future or a past. There will be nothing he can go back to and nothing of permanence that he can foresee in an uncertain future.
Isolated, fugacious, essentially a drifter, he will experience a loneliness of spirit which nothing can assuage. Thousands of his kind inhabit the modern city, gnawed by a sense of their own rootlessness, hungering in vain for a home, a habitation which partakes of the flavor of time, a continuing and cherished spot of earth which links their own past with some kind of hopeful future.
With these depressing thoughts in mind, I stood before the lost red brick house of my childhood. I had an impulse to enter, but I supposed it was unsafe and very probably forbidden.
Dusk fell; the mist grew heavier; and still I lingered in that area. Moving away from the doomed house I had known, I wandered along those desolate streets, peering through cracked windows, through sagging doors which never again would open to a friendly hand.
In some windows, frayed, blackened curtains, left hanging in the confusion of forced removal, fluttered in the cold October wind. Odd bits of broken furniture, dishes and ornaments lay scattered about. Entire lifetimes had been passed in some of these houses; now they stood as empty shells, awaiting absolute and final destruction.
The entire area seemed deserted, silent, drained of all life. Even the usual city noises were strangely muffled and distant.