There are three places on our planet that stay with me wherever I go. One is a little town in Colorado that sits quietly below the 14,000-foot Collegiate Peaks. One is a place on the coast of Scotland where the sea roars through an opening in a cliff and a person can look down into the chasm and realize that combination of terror and awe that Immanuel Kant called “the sublime.” The third is Manhattan, always large in the imagination, but which now includes an unasked-for bereavement as a part of what makes it one of the world’s memorable places.

I want to write about Manhattan. I want to portray it in 2000 or so words without leaving out any of its complexity, barbarism, refinement or beauty. I cannot. Others have. Manhattan inspired one of its most famous literary inhabitants, Walt Whitman, many times over. In Mannhattan, he wrote “Numberless crowded streets, high growth of iron, slender, strong,/ light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,” and “... vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and/ shows ...” and, deliberately or inadvertently, describing both himself and the city in Leaves of Grass, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,/ Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.” His descriptions still fit when I was there about 130 years later, and because of the absence of coal fires, the skies may have been a little clearer still.

My husband and I lived at 116 Riverside Drive, just one street down from Broadway and Columbia, and two streets and a universe away from Harlem. We were there in 1989 and 1990. I was there, ostensibly, to study in the graduate program, though I spent far more time investigating hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants, crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, and movie theaters than I did my studies. Had Columbia not been one of the more progressive universities (the program I was in didn’t issue grades), my reports would have reflected my preoccupation with the city. As it was, I did what I had to do to get by and squandered golden opportunities of the academic variety while availing myself thoroughly of the cultural kind.

My husband often called Manhattan “its own little Third World country,” and he was right if you go by Webster’s definition of a Third World country as “an aggregate of minority groups within a predominantly larger culture,” since that is precisely what Manhattan is. Almost every day I walked through that mesmerizing mix of minorities and cultures up from our two-and-a-half room apartment on Riverside Drive to my classes at 115th Street and Broadway. In those winter months of our brief tenure in the city, I wore my hair very long. Always in a hurry, I often left with it wet, and I loved how the wind off the Hudson froze it in incongruous chunky dreadlocks before I entered my class on Chaucer, or W.H. Auden, or German language review (for the desperate Appalachian student who translates badly but must pass the exam to graduate). I loved the freezing wind because it reminded me that there was something more powerful even than this city which had allowed me entrance and then swallowed me up and left me to my own tiny devices. For the same reason, I loved torrential downpours when the sidewalks were a warm and seething stew of damp bodies and black umbrellas, and the heavy snows which cleared the streets and covered, at least for a few moments, the pavement and ever present refuse.

My husband, on the other hand, had to take the subway downtown, first in his job as a bicycle messenger, (he had to replace his first bike — it was stolen the first day on the job, and the bike lock was guaranteed everywhere except Manhattan Island), and then in his second job as an art photographer’s assistant, which paid much better, was generally safer, and allowed him to photograph “great” works like Andy Warhol’s urine on copper paintings. He had several near misses with aggressive New York drivers during his time as a bike messenger, walked away from an enraged mugger near midnight on Times Square one Saturday night (with my 17-year-old brother), and grew angrier and angrier at the professional beggar whom he saw regularly on the subway, who kept his child out of school and used him as a lure to get money from people like us. My husband did not want to remain in New York. He wanted to leave as quickly as possible, and then go back someday to visit. It took us 11 years to do so.

New York’s beggars have a nose for Southerners and suckers — in our case, synonymous. They always spotted us, no matter how big the crowd. Although my husband did eventually adopt the infamous New York demeanor, enabling him to survive the places he had to go as part of his work, in the beginning we were both wide-eyed and vulnerable. A friend from Chicago would tell beggars and homeless people to go away, even as my husband and I dug into our pockets and wallets, giving 50 cents, a dollar, a five, and once, to a woman with a thin child and eviction papers, whether real or bogus, a fresh 20 that had been meant for a frivolous lunch and a movie.

The one beggar to whom we gave nothing, and whose memory continues to stay with me, was one who knelt, sobbing and asking for help, in a thronging sea of New Yorkers leaving the 7 p.m. viewing of “Walkabout,” an Australian movie concerned with the trivial and superficial nature of civilized 20th century life. My Chicago friend kept her hand on my shoulder (and her trust fund intact) as she steered me around him, and I obeyed the pressure of her hand, not wanting to hold up the throngs behind me, not to be the one obvious sucker out of the whole crowd, not wanting to admit that I was soft in the soul, maybe soft in the head. We were all ignoring him, parting around him like the solitary island we wished him to be, all diminished by his cries, all going for pie and coffee or beer and a burger. Later, I told this story to a Muslim student I taught at Rabun Gap. “A good Muslim,” he told me, “would have taken him home, even if he knew this beggar would take advantage.” There were no good Muslims, good Jews, good Buddhists, good Christians, nor good humans coming out of the theater that night.

But New York had a way of taking our assumptions and standing them on their heads. From our apartment I could see Riverside Park, and when my eyes and brain grew glazed, I often looked up from Colette, or Faulkner, or Baldwin, to watch people there and envy them living outside their own heads. There were a number of regulars. One was an old man whom I thought homeless. He sat on a bench, ill-clothed, in rain, snow, or sunshine, and fed pigeons and squirrels. My husband and I were eating one night at a little Hungarian restaurant and the old man walked in and sat down at a table in the rear. The waitress brought him a glass of milk, but nothing else. He looked even shabbier than usual, so I thought someone would probably ask him to leave. We wanted him to have a hot meal before he left, so we called the waitress over and told her to bring him whatever he wanted and add it to our bill. She laughed, then told us he owned the building. I felt both stupid and delighted.

New Yorkers, however, had their own set of assumptions. I learned this one day when I disembarked from the subway that released its passengers at the Columbia platform. As I emerged from the rank stairwell into a heavy rain, a young woman with wet clothes and bad body odor asked me for change. (I thought of her when I read Will Harlan’s worthwhile piece on homelessness.) I had none that day, and told her so. “F---in’ Ivy Leaguer,” was her response.

I wanted to explain that I came from a background that was poor, Appalachian, that the town I came from had the same problems as the inner city. I wanted to tell her that my father was, at the time, a truck driver, that I was there in New York only because the powers that be at the great university were filling a geographical quota, that they had told me in admissions upon my arrival they didn’t know what to expect when they accepted me, but that my essay about Appalachian life had stood out among the applicants from Princeton, Brown, Penn, and Yale, so they financed my studies, and there I was. But I didn’t tell her anything. I tried to do as I was learning — to follow the survival instincts that keep the less predatory animals alive — averting my gaze from her angry stare, withdrawing into myself, allowing her resentments and biases to remain intact.

And when a fellow student in my class on Postmodernism detected a trace of my background in my accent (recognized from memories of his family’s summer vacations) and asked me, with no segue, following a discussion of Joan Didion, if it was true that all the members of an Appalachian family slept in the same bed (a question that, in its earnestness, still astonishes me), I also allowed him to keep his assumptions. I lied. I told him that, yes, my entire nuclear family of seven plus a great aunt had shared the same bed. At that time it brought me a mean pleasure to fit the Dogpatch stereotype, though my lie gives me less pleasure now. I think of his question sometimes when, in the middle of the night, my coltish, leggy 9-year-old has a bad dream and climbs into the bed between my husband and me, bringing with her half the animals in our household. I could honestly answer now that, yes, all the members of my Appalachian family sleep together.

Every stereotype, as the saying goes, has a little truth in it, and as I watch new stereotypes being created after the fall of the World Trade Centers, I am glad to see the qualities that I loved about New York brought even more to the fore of the public imagination the authentic toughness, the resilience, the lack of sentimentality, the ability to persevere in the face of great odds. These were qualities I learned from and wanted to develop in myself as I tried to become part of a city whose grand nature was already legendary before the attacks and subsequent heroism of Sept. 11. I don’t think I ever came close to resembling a New Yorker, though, not even when I donned all black, wore red lipstick, and was as thin as Dorothy Parker dictated. I remained, and remain, a product of the Appalachian Mountains.

But anytime that I call a spade a spade, or stare down a rude driver in a traffic jam, or remember an erudite and useless pronunciation of a word from Middle English, I know I brought something of the city back with me, and that it haunts my dreams not because I succeeded in becoming a part of it, but because the city, in its juxtaposing elements, entered my psyche in a way that no other place ever has. However, when my family and I returned for a visit last spring, a full 11 years after Eric and I crossed the George Washington Bridge in May of 1990, I noticed there was one thing that hadn’t altered at all. Southern and a sucker to the end, I still dig in my pockets and give what’s there if someone asks for change.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young lives in Cullowhee and teaches in the Swain County public schools. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)