The Consolations of Village Life

Early one Saturday morning I stood the balcony of my third-story apartment and glanced down at the street below.  At that hour there was no reason to expect any riveting sight, but to my surprise I saw a flock of sheep trooping up the street; filling it from curb to curb.  On the column’s left flank was one of the neighborhood’s stray dogs, surrendering to its herding instinct.  At its head was a real, live shepherd. 

I live in a village.  Its name, Görükle, has no meaning in Turkish, according to some because it represents a corruption of Kouvoukleia, the name it went by in Ottoman times, when the majority of its population spoke Greek.  By now, the Greeks are long repatriated and replaced by students from nearby Uludağ University, giving the place more in common with the Athens in Ohio or Georgia than the one facing the Aegean.

The University dates back to the 1970s; its current student body totals almost 45,000.  Görükle’s elevation from somnolent map-speck to country-fried college town must have been gradual, but it seems to have gained momentum over the past few years.   To a point, its town and gown portions are visibly demarcated.  The eastern end of town, the one closest to the campus, is filled with new five-story apartment buildings.  Farther west, the streets begin to narrow.  The houses, squatter and older, their doors and windows framed blockily in wood, sport front yards where chickens wander. 

But the two cultural strains have a way of intersecting.  Across the street from my student-swollen apartment building is a grazing commons – that's what the shepherd was leading his sheep home from.  With pricey cafes open till the very wee hours, Atatürk Cadde, or avenue, has the look of a student cruising drag.  But you’re almost as likely to see a tractor tooling along it as a Peugot or a motor scooter, even on a Saturday night.

Village life in a single word?  Convenient. If I need to restock on cigarettes, ekmek, or Diet Coke, there’s a tekel, or convenience store, within 100 yards of my front door – about half the distance between my Phoenix apartment and the nearest Circle K.  I pay my electric and water bills at an office only another couple of hundred yards up the hill and across Atatürk.  The expedition takes about as much time as paying by phone, when you count APS’ labyrinth of voice prompts.  Plus, right around the corner from the pay station, a guy named Ismail runs a combination tailor shop, dry cleaner, and laundry service.  A bit up the street from him, Şaypa, the chain supermarket, sells razors, shampoo, shower gel and – best of all, as I discovered last night – underwear. 

Village life, then, is a lot like life in a compressed urban area, only so much cheaper.

Surely yuppies have known this forever, which is why they’ve made a habit of squirreling themselves away in places like Tarrytown, New York, Newton, Massachusetts, and Hiawassee, Georgia.  For the first three months after my arrival here, I paid the price they typically pay: a daily commute to satellite branches of my school buried deep inside Bursa.  The round trip could take up two and a half hours.  The sheer routine of it all – on the minibus, off the minibus; on the Metro, off the Metro – made me feel more cramped and programmed than any cube farm ever had.   If I hadn’t been able to ease myself into each new day with a run through the breeze-kissed mountain greenery around campus, I’m  sure I’d have burned out. 

But at the beginning of July, through a series of lucky breaks and coincidences I can only describe as providential, I was offered a job at a better-run school whose headquarters stands within sleepwalking distance of my apartment.  (To be exact, it stands just across the street from Şaypa, the underwear store, and only a corner away from Ismail's shop and the bill-pay station.)  Since then, I've been living the life of a full-time villager, stretching my daily runs to nine miles, and saving close to 70 lira each week in Metro and minibus fare.

The new arrangement feels almost too good to be true.  To boot, it feels unearned -- in the eyes of a skeptic, providence, or grace, can look an awful lot like caprice.  Every hour I haven't spent on the Metro, I've reminded myself, "You'd better be making the most of this time, Buster Brown.  You could feel the crunch again any day now."  To nine of these warnings out of ten, my response has been to grunt and fart and sleep for another hour.  (The fact that I'm writing again might mean I'm all caught up.)  But, when awake, I make a point of soaking up as much ease and beauty as my senses will hold.

Also by way of keeping both feet on the ground, I catalogue all the demystifying details of the place.  It's hotter than hell, and my apartment has no air conditioning.  Morons roar up the hill on motorcycles and motor scooters till all hours of the night.  My run carries me over concrete and asphalt; my knees will take their revenge on me before long.  The other day I opened my door to find a grasshopper the size of my fist waiting for me on my doorstep, like he was collecting for Arthropod Relief Services.  My girlfriend's in Istanbul, a trip of at least five hours, door to door.  Except for working, sleeping, writing, and working out, there's fuck all to do.

No, this isn't a novel where an uptight bourgeois flees to some sunny wasteland in search of his missing mojo and either finds it (as in Zorba: The Greek) or loses his marbles (as in The Magus).  This is real life.  Providence has patted me on the head, but it's a pat of moderate force, nothing to freak out over.

A few nights ago, as I was walking home from class, I passed the grazing commons.  There was enough of a moon that I could make out the humped, wooly backs of the sheep, milling together silently.  As I came closer, one of them sprang over the curb and into the street.  Its lunge showed a power and grace I'd thought beyond the species.  After glancing around, it shuffled back to join its colleagues.  Then I noticed they were all clustered around the dumpsters, eating the leftovers from the previous night's Iftar.  Real life indeed.