Outsider on the Inside

 

Photo © 2009 Stan Brewer

 

 

On any given weekday around lunchtime, downtown Des Moines is bustling. Of course, you can’t see it from the street. All the action is up three stories high.

 

When I first moved to Des Moines three years ago, I didn’t have much contact with the downtown world. I mostly stuck to my little neighborhood with my then-1-year-old twins. We didn’t venture too far from home base.

 

Now that I have been working for the past three months downtown, I have been able to ruminate on what I see as a cultural phenomenon.

 

When I worked in downtown San Francisco, it felt like a city. You descend the 14 floors of your building and enter onto the street where you are joined by throngs of other worker bees, chasing the seconds to the bus or the subway or the pastrami on rye. You felt like part of a crowd, part of a force, part of a population.

 

When I first started working in downtown Des Moines, I thought it was peculiar when I would walk around the several central downtown city blocks that I would see very few people. The weather was fine, it was lunchtime, but there were hardly any people on the street. 

 

As I said, I thought it was peculiar, but I didn’t think too much of it—until the day I entered the Sky Walk.

 

It felt like I had entered into another dimension. Suddenly, here were the throngs of people I had been so used to seeing in San Francisco. Men and women in business suits, briefcases, lunch totes, talking on their cell phones, walking briskly and taking power walks in their tennis from one end of the maze-like corridor to the other.

 

It was like finding a pot of gold. Not only were there people in the Sky Walk, but there were businesses, lunch outlets and banks. There were convenience stores and private entrances to corporate offices. There was even a shoeshine shop. 

 

How interesting it was that this entirely new world existed so close but so separate from the outside world. It’s an asset to Des Moines to have this enclosed network of pathways to get from parking garage to workplace to lunch place back to workplace back to parking garage and then home. But, it’s also an asset to see the sun and breathe the fresh air.

 

Even on a beautiful day (which I have learned to take advantage of, since they may be few and far between), the Sky Walk is the preferred route of the majority of downtown workers. And this is something I can’t seem to wrap my brain around.

 

I love being outside. There are conditions, of course. I love being outside when it is warm and sunny and not too windy. But I also love breathing fresh air. I prefer it over recycled air any day, no matter what the temperature. I have to think that other humans—even if they are Iowans—prefer those things, too.

 

But perhaps I am wrong. Or perhaps it’s a matter of convenience.

 

Either way, it seems like a basic human need to get in touch with one’s environment. This may be just the Californian in me talking, but I believe that to be healthy in mind, body and spirit, one must get outside and breathe the air at least once or twice a day. I wonder if those who stick to the Sky Walk day in and day out and avoid contact with the outside world from the commute in to the commute home are missing out on a key ingredient of a healthy life. 

 

Whether or not it matters if people choose to breathe fresh or recycled air or feel the sun on their cheeks rather than be lit by the off-color light of a fluorescent bulb, and no matter my amusement with the Sky Walk concept, when I do climb the three flights of stairs from the entrance near my building to get up there, I find it such a fascinating alternative universe hidden from outsiders, like me.

 

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