My roommates and I were all young idealists, four girls in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of the Washington Monument, swapping stories from our various nonprofit day jobs: providing microloans to farmers in Southeast Asia and escorting pregnant women past the picket lines at Planned Parenthood. One of my responsibilities as a communications intern was the “hill-drop,” where I literally walked the halls of Congress, knocking on the doors of senators and representatives to ask if I could drop off a memo about preserving wilderness for future generations. I felt at home and purposeful. In a letter to a friend, I described my job as “the real deal,” a marriage of writing and activist passions.
The city was like a bolt of lightning: brief and luminous, electric. One Friday afternoon I had off from work, the skies burst open with a sudden hot rainstorm. Thunder shook the building and wind whipped bare tree branches down the empty gray streets. I opened up our fourth-story living room window and sat on the ledge, closing the window over my face to protect the room from the water and myself from my fear of heights, and let my bare legs dangle out into the summer rain.
A GRAFFITI CAMPAIGN sprung up around the city that summer, a single four-letter word spray-painted all over our Northwest neighborhood, on metro station walls and cement park trash cans and stone pillars around Dupont Circle: BORF. For most of the summer, I didn’t know what it meant, just saw the word as it grew, lacing itself around the city. In mid-July, a young student at a city art school was arrested on a tip and made to explain himself. “Borf,” he said, was the nickname of his friend Bobby Fisher, whose image he had also used in stencil, a friend who had committed suicide by hanging when he was sixteen. The campaign was an homage, a mourning but, most of all, an act of outrage, the frenzied, messy, artistic expression of a group of students who had nowhere to put all their hurt.
In a video piece released the next year, the Borf Brigade, as they had by then become known, spoke over images of secret stenciling: “This epidemic cannot be medicated into remission. It is not a problem confined to our family bloodline. ‘Trouble at home’ is not the only trigger for depression.”1 Although seeing the mysterious letters on traffic lights and skate park slopes was always a little thrill, a discovery, once the story came out, the whole campaign seemed haunted, a reminder that there were forces at work in this city that I could only guess at, could barely see.
One night, some friends gathered at the apartment of my roommate’s boyfriend and his brother, the two of them sharing a studio in a secure building in Columbia Heights. We played Scrabble, ate cheese with wine, played at being thinking, cultured adults. I wandered around the small, single room they shared, admiring the construction-paper artwork on their walls. Red smears on a yellow sheet of paper. Thick black lines on green. One of the residents of the apartment was an art teacher at an elementary school in Southeast D.C. He explained that these were portraits he’d asked his second-grade students to draw: the red smears were how they painted the view outside their apartment windows; the thick black lines were drawn by one boy when he was asked for a portrait of his father, in prison.
In the summer of 2005, we were two years into a war I had protested on these streets, on the same streets where some of these children lived, on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, where rock attacks on buses were so common drivers were advised to wear safety goggles. The Southeast quadrant of D.C., where my friend worked, had a population that was more than 90 percent African American, only two grocery stores per ward, and diabetes rates higher and household incomes lower than anywhere else in the district.2 Just blocks from the White House, where I had once marched.
The heat of a mid-Atlantic summer oppresses slowly and softly, a heavy wet blanket of lethargy that spreads gradually, first up over your legs and then onto your shoulders. Finally, your chest heaving in sleep, you’re unable to breathe through the weight. We didn’t have air conditioning, so we slept with the windows flung wide open, the sirens and shouts of 18th Street echoing into our dreams.
In mid-July, the nonprofit I worked for threw a company picnic. We drove a fleet of rented vans to Maryland’s Rock Creek Park, about an hour away, and spent the day grilling hot dogs and veggie burgers, playing volleyball, wandering by bike or on foot the loops of wooded trails. Almost as soon as we arrived, a few other employees and I walked down to the edge of a small river running through the park, to a patch of warm sand where we could take off our shoes and wade in. I stood ankle-deep in the cool water, my toes curled and digging into wet, murky sand, and realized this was the first time I’d stood outside, barefoot, all summer long.
Summers growing up had always been barefoot: the burn of hot pavement, the tickling of cool grass, the stickiness of dripping fruit juice popsicles. But now, rather than playing outside, letting my toes burrow into the soil, I was spending my summer, cardigan shrugged over my shoulders against the office air conditioning, phone pressed to my ear, speaking to unknown reporters in Montana on behalf of the great outdoors. Over the last eight weeks, I’d researched and written about some of the most beautiful, exotic wild places in the United States: the archaeological treasures still undiscovered in Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients, the sunset striations on the stones of Utah’s Grand Staircase. But I’d been staring at a photo on a computer screen. How would I visit them? When would my palms know the warmth of that rock, if I continued working for them, in the city?
HERE’S HOW IT should have worked: I became a vegetarian. I began trying new vegetables: asparagus and leeks and bean sprouts. I used only cloth grocery bags. I shopped entirely at the local farmers market. I learned to bake my own bread, white knuckles kneading fresh dough daily, or how to make my own cheese, weaving long rubbery braids of mozzarella. Through my food, I communed with the landscape around me, raising my own diet up from the soil, cradling little green pots of basil, chives, cilantro in the warm light of a kitchen windowsill, constructing a raised bed out back and planting rows of sweet red peppers. I walked amid my produce, fingers running lightly along tomatoes staked in the ground, their green vines reaching towards the blue sky like hope. Yellow squash and cucumber flowered along the ground, their spiky skin pricking my hands as I picked them every Saturday morning in the sun.
But that’s not how it worked. I ate frozen, microwave-ready meals, vegetarian tofu potpies topping a thousand calories per individual serving. I didn’t even think about the bleached flour and sugar in my processed white bread, the chemicals in Miracle Whip, or the sodium content of fake bologna slices. Potato chips and Cheez Whiz were vegetarian, not to mention cheap. I heated and reheated chemical compounds, oblivious to the carcinogenic potential of red dye #40.
I had the best intentions, but I was a child of the suburbs, changing my diet without changing any world view. These meals were ethical by only one standard—no meat—vegetarian by technicality. In college, being a vegetarian seemed easy—I was surrounded by young upper-middle-class suburban radicals, most of them vegetarian. My boyfriend was a vegetarian. The campus dining hall had a vegan station. Here in the city, I was eating bad food because I couldn’t cook for myself, and I was alone. I was living the reality of most people in inner-city environments—fresh, healthy produce was difficult to find, and either of poor quality or too expensive to afford when I did. And the fake meat products that became my dietary crutch were chemical creations with a big environmental impact. I began to feel overwhelmed by how much work it was going to take to live and eat true to these ethical ideals. I wasn’t well prepared for what vegetarianism or postgraduate life would entail.
ONE NIGHT, I went out into the city alone, to wander along the neon signs of 18th Street, smoking cigarettes—which I smoked for years without realizing how incongruous they were with my goals for a healthy, vegetarian lifestyle—and feeling despondent. Lost. I don’t think I admitted it to myself then, but the city was too much for me. Sure, I’d learned plenty about poverty in college, but I couldn’t handle seeing it up close, in the stark reality of limited food access and homelessness and addiction. I wandered the streets and thought about leaving, wondered whether leaving would make me a hypocrite.
A man rode a bicycle towards me on the sidewalk, plastic grocery bags slung heavily over both handlebars, the gray hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and masking his face. Although the sidewalk was wide, I stepped aside to let him pass. But as he rode by, frustrated with the awkward dance of who-goes-which-way, he barked, “Bitch, I’m not in