Urban Hiking to the Dragon Boats

Sunday I decided to do an urban hike. I knew the Dragon Boat festival was going to be on the Charles River along the banks of Cambridge owned by Harvard. I knew that the Harvard part of the river was, theoretically, just behind my Allston neighborhood. In fact, I can see the Doubletree Hotel, which is on the banks of the Charles, standing over everything else when I stand behind my grocery store about 3 blocks from my house. The Doubletree Hotel looked to be only a mile, maybe a mile and a quarter, away from my neighborhood, as the crow flies. So I reasoned as I set out Sunday morning for my hike to the Dragon Boat races that the river shouldn't be that far away. I even took a map with me and planned my route in advance; it honestly didn't look as far away as it turned out to be. I hiked ten miles Sunday.

Good thing I had a hat on and some water with me.

The problem lie in the fact that on my map, it looked like Harvard Avenue/Harvard Street ran straight to the river. It doesn't. There's a miniscule jump in that road on the map, a place where the line stopped and started again. On the map this blank space was so tiny I missed it the first time around. In real life, a giant factory with the word EDISON on the outside of it interrupts that road, so you can't go straight at all. It's part of a block that's far too long to walk around - so I turned left and took another route, one that took me right over to the Doubletree Hotel. But the Doubletree was about a mile farther down the river than I needed to be to see the race. You can see where this is going, right? Just before I reached the doubletree I walked across a bridge, and I could clearly see the grocery store just three blocks from my house - and it was, indeed, only a mile, maybe a mile and a half away. But you can't get there by only walking that distance. Nope, you have to take a long way around that's at least a mile longer.

The main problem with navigating yourself as a pedestrian in relation to the Charles River on the Boston side of things is that there's a parkway called Storrow Drive along the river that is much akin to Briley Parkway in Nashville. It's illegal to cross it on foot, and you wouldn't want to anyway if you valued your life. There are only a few pedestrian footbridges across it - one at BU, and a few others - but they're all at least a mile or two away from each other. So even though I could see the lovely river and the parks that ran along each side on my walk, I couldn't get to them. Storrow Drive was in my way.

On the Cambridge bank of the Charles, access to the grassy riverbank is super easy. Because it was a festival day, they even had a large section of Memorial Drive, the street that runs along the river opposite to Storrow, blocked of so there were no cars at all. When the street is normally open, there are lights and painted crosswalks so it's not a bother to get where you need to go. Of course, all those lights make Memorial a pain to drive; but hey, if you live in that ultra-nice section of Cambridge you probably can't afford a car after they're done shaking you down for rent anyway.

I had a canvas bag with lunch and blanket to sit on and I spread out under a big old elm tree and watched the boats and read a book. It was a great day. The dragon boats were long crew style rowboats, and there were four of them with identical heads but with bodies painted green, red, yellow or white. The boats had a leader who sat at the prow with a big drum that seemed fun to beat. Teams from distant cites and local charities raced the boats from noon until five.

I met up with my old roommate from Simmons Hall, Jennifer, and we talked a bit. Children ran around with dragon masks on their faces and construction paper tails tied around their waists. That was pretty funny, really. I noticed a good deal of Asian children with white parents, and Asian immigrant grandparents with their Americanized children.

It was the kind of day by the river I had wanted to have since I first moved here. And for the first time since I moved into the new apartment, I knew exactly where I was.