Hike the Heights - every first Saturday of June!

https://vimeo.com/1085113524

Produced by Place Forward, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (2024)

I planted myself in New York. The city was never an accident or adventure for me, anymore than life itself is. The only American city where feet rule the streets - that was my place. We were made for each other in that way... because I was in desperate need of grounding.

In 2015, three years into my rerooting, I was preparing to start my master's program at Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. With summer lull, I picked up a book I'd grabbed at a used bookstore in my parents' then-homebase of Cleveland, Ohio three years prior - Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It by someone named Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D. The cover had intrigued me, and the title. But I'd never had the calm enough to open it until then.

I've relied largely on serendipity to guide my life, and nothing has been more validating of that approach than the day I flipped to the biography of that book and saw that Mindy Fullilove was a professor at my new institution. That moment of realization is burned into my memory. I'd already accepted my enrollment where the author based her work, and I knew that Root Shock contained wisdom that I felt drawn to - how to make our world more livable, more rooted, more human.

Less than a year later, I was deeply involved in Hike the Heights - a community consensus group in Washington Heights, NY, that Mindy Fullilove had co-founded with Lourdes Rodriguez to activate the neighborhood around public parks. Their recognition of the need for physical activity, positive social connection, and a reclaiming of public green space that had become synonymous with substance use and danger in a neighborhood experiencing some of the worst effects of the drug epidemic sparked a new tradition. Each year, this community-organized hike and party uses a "potluck" approach that invites each person to contribute in their own way towards celebrating, and often advocating for, the beautiful green spaces of Washington Heights and uptown Manhattan on the first Saturday in June (National Trails Day).

For the four years following, I was a lead organizer for Hike the Heights. I had never been so connected and felt so much belonging as I did through that community. It has been one of the most prominent stepping stones towards personal empowerment on a long journey of healing from my socially disconnected and isolated past. Without going into gritty details, I never attended school with other children, moved frequently, and had very few and fleeting outlets for healthy social (and personal) development until I left home for college. Everyone's experiences and reactions to those experiences are unique. In my case, being homeschooled in my particular environment resulted in an internalized perspective that I was fundamentally unworthy of respect or social value, and cultivated subsequent mental health and related social challenges, things I've worked hard to undo since leaving home. Finding a community in Hike the Heights, where I could contribute and feel I belonged despite my limitations socially and mentally at that time provided a critical opening for change in my life.

In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I had competing priorities with Hike the Heights - working long hours as part of pandemic response and starting my doctoral program. This simultaneous lock-down environment combined with demanding work hours isolated me from the Hike the Heights and triggered old (and some still-unattended) traumas - it was like going back to the isolated home-bound world where I'd grown up, disconnected and rootless. While I didn't recognize how my mind and body were responding to Covid-19 immediately, the lasting effects of Hike the Heights were critical for pulling me through. I remained a supportive part of the annual event - sometimes stepping up as a coordinator, sometimes supporting from a distance. It still gave me a place to belong, to see and be seen, to find purpose and joy, and to stay connected in the only home city I've known. It had also given me a vital nugget of empowerment to find my way forward even as my mental health journey took new dips and turns.

Hike the Heights had also helped shape my approach to professional work. I had learned to learn by doing. Though I had tried, I had struggled to read Root Shock prior to starting the master's program - it took me another two years, and a stint in Mindy's final Columbia course, to finish it. This was common for me, something I refer to as "reading anxiety." The ability to fill that nervous energy with action gave me a way to embed myself directly in the realities of the city rather than struggling just to reason through them on paper. Despite not growing up here, it gave me the soil I needed to really root down, making myself a part of the city and the city a part of me. I had learned to listen, to trust, to question, and to be curious when in community with the city around me, prioritizing lived learning as part of a wholistic knowledge practice.

Root Shock teaches that largely Black neighborhoods targeted by redlining in the mid-1900's led to displacements of many kinds. As people were systemically barred from investing in their neighborhoods, they experienced not only the economic displacements that prevent communities from building stability and wealth, but political exclusions and physical displacements as entire neighborhoods were slated and relocated for "urban renewal" programs. The lasting personal and communal pain of disinvestment can be read in the landscape of buildings and health outcomes in the impacted communities to this day. But the book is hopeful - focusing on healing through equitable design and reinvestment in systemically neglected neighborhoods as an essential step for uplifting whole cities.

It was critical for my own personal healing that I find myself within this story. I learned early on that a world built on increasing social isolation had been harmful for me. As a child I connected this experience very keenly with cars and life in a suburbs, which I understood intuitively and logically (as children often do better than most) was also connected with paving over and destroying our planet. I knew that I wanted the world to be beautiful, healthy, and vibrant. What I didn't realize was how social isolation also disempowers us from learning and working collectively to achieve that. The more I learned about systemic inequities through Rootshock and public health, the more I understood that the goals of caring for our planet are impossible without equitable empowerment so that communities can attend to the social and ecological problems we face together.

Until Hike the Heights, I had felt hopelessly outside of any community - learning to be in community, not just reading about problems impacting "other people", was the most powerful way for me to move forward for myself and my world. I was able to shape myself, to identify my strengths and my dreams, and hone who I am in true relationship others. This molding of myself could only have occurred given adequate time, belonging, and space to connect, learn, and change. I found myself in the story through Hike the Heights.

As a tradition based in the full recognition of inequities and the hope and joy of a positive future, Hike the Heights and the person I became as part of it has been one important foundation for my identity as an advocate, researcher, and community member here in New York City, and in the world.

Learn more about Hike the Heights (hiketheheights.org), and join us for the next hike the first Saturday of June!