The Long Walk to Harvard Square
The winter of 1978 did not arrive so much as it claimed the city.
Snow fell with intention, slanted and relentless, as if Boston had been singled out for a lesson. By morning, Cambridge was unrecognizable—its edges softened, its routines erased. I was attending MIT’s Lowell Institute then, living inside the comfortable fiction that transit systems were dependable and that winter was something you endured, not something that rearranged your life.
The Nor’easter corrected me.
Buses stopped. Not briefly, not ceremonially, but indefinitely. Routes vanished beneath drifts. Schedules became artifacts from another era. What remained was distance—and the human body’s ability to cross it.
So I walked.
Each morning I stepped into a city hushed beyond expectation. Snowbanks rose like unfinished monuments. Parked cars became white suggestions. Footsteps creaked and whispered, the only sound brave enough to travel. The air sharpened the lungs and clarified the mind. Breath came out visible, a reminder that being alive was an active process.
The walk to Harvard Square was long enough to feel consequential. Boots sank, lifted, sank again. Scarves stiffened with ice. Time slowed to the pace of muscles and balance. And in that slowing, something remarkable happened: the city revealed itself.
We were everywhere—students, workers, neighbors—moving in loose alignment, like lines of thought converging. No one hurried. No one complained aloud. We nodded, sometimes smiled, recognizing in each other the shared resolve of people who had accepted the terms of the day. The storm had leveled us. Titles disappeared. We were all just walkers.
Harvard Square, when I reached it, glowed faintly with defiance. A coffee shop steamed. A newsstand opened its door. Civilization, it seemed, was a small flame that survived on stubbornness and caffeine.
Weeks passed. The snow grew old and granular. Pathways narrowed into shared corridors of effort. Life resumed in partial measures. And somewhere between MIT and Harvard Square, repeated step after deliberate step, I learned what no syllabus could teach: when systems fail, community improvises; when speed is removed, attention returns.
Eventually, the buses came back. Engines roared. Schedules were resurrected. And yet, something had shifted. I boarded again, but part of me remained out there in the cold, walking the city back to itself.
Now it is 2024.
Another Nor’easter is forecast. Screens glow with maps and probabilities. Alerts chirp. We brace efficiently, expertly. And as I look out at a city preparing once more to be tested, I find myself remembering that winter of 1978—not the inconvenience, not the cold, but the quiet dignity of moving together through uncertainty.
If the buses stop again, I know this much: the walk will still be there, waiting to remind us who we are when everything unnecessary falls away.
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