City Hikes: Field Notes

Most of these prose skteches were written when I returned home after regular Sunday walks in Lowell, Massachusetts between 2009 and 2011. Sometimes I had companions, but usually I walked alone, carrying a notebook and pen. I would go out for an hour or two. I wanted to see what I could see and look and listen more closely to life on the streets. Also included here is a summary of the popular Lowelk Walks program initiated by Richard P. Howe Jr. in 2015. For several years, the guided tours on an array of subjects averaged 100 walkers and as many as 200 a few times. Since the start of its innovative industrial era, Lowell has been seen as a national city where everything that happens resonates beyond the city limits.

Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. His recent book is Portraits Along the Way: 1976-2024, fifty profiles of people he has met in person or encountered in books, on stage, in history or otherwise, some of them public figures and others who are not household names. His work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Ireland, and England. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.