Get Herald RSSCould I really afford to leave campus? It was Friday afternoon and I had voicemails to answer, e-mails to send, maybe a few hours to nap after what had been a sleepless, normal week.
I probably couldn't afford to leave campus. But on last Friday, I was dozing and waking along with the bumps my friend's SUV made while going toward Massachusetts. I had made the facile promise in the beginning of the semester to go to a fair in Topsfield with my housemate, and now I was in for 24 hours away from all that I needed to get done.
Half-asleep and half-rescheduling my mental to-do list, I tottered out of the car among photo-snapping friends. I could hear the liveliness of the fair, the clucking of chickens and chatter of families. But I was not yet allured by the recreated country charm nor convinced that this was the best way to spend $10. Really, kettle corn and clowns and prize-winning jams? I traveled away from my bed and my inbox for this?
And then, somewhere between the pig barn and the cake stand, I fell for it all. "Let's go to the honey show!" Yes, a tent full of bees and beekeepers and beeswax. I inclined my ear to the screen of a cage to listen to their buzzing. Where else could I stick my head so near a swarm of stinging insects? Where else could I ignore all pressing responsibilities other than in the middle of Nowheresville, Massachusetts?
I was unstoppable, ecstatic. I bought baked goods from the 4-H Club, watched a chick try to hatch out of its egg, pet an ox bigger than a Prius. My housemate and I had identical reactions: "Now I can see why this can take you across the Oregon trail."
For the first time in weeks, I was seeing something new, and was in awe. Rhode Island is small, and my physical sphere of living, even smaller. It had been a month since I'd been farther than Stop-n-Shop, three years that I've passed rarely going outside Prospect, Wickenden, Cushing and Blackstone.
A study by Northeastern University tracked people's whereabouts based on their cell phone usage. It found that nearly three-fourths of the subjects spent half a year in a 20-mile radius, and that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from their homes. The study's authors' wrote in the journal "Nature" that "human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity," and that individuals show "a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations."
Or simply, we leave little. We stay put. Our minds may be on international conflict resolution or supernova stars galaxies away, but our eyes are staring at SciLi walls, our feet planted in our favorite corner of the Friedman.
I could really afford to leave campus for a Friday. It might have been the only way to remember the curiosity that brought me to it in the first place.
- Taylor Barnes
