CA[31,353]............22-May-73............17:44............Page 1

This morning I have some hope of reaching the petition-windows.

The tight-packed column of citizens four abreast stretches back along Church Street to the corner of Elm and around toward Orange and out of sight but not imagination. I have been on this line since deep dark, since before five.

I have now come within a couple of hundred yards of the bureau building. There is less than an hour till I must start for work. This is the sixth day in a row I have tried to make it to the windows.

I felt a flash of line-fear just then, but I am all right now.

As usual at this hour, downtown streets are glutted with busses and cargo conveyors and people shuffling on foot to their jobs. Every square inch of concrete and asphalt is taken up. Wheeled traffic worms along at the stipulated pace. On this sidewalk, at the outer edge of our waitline to the right, one solid mass of pedestrians, facing us, inches toward Elm, and another, beyond, toward Chapel. It takes them fifteen or twenty minutes to move a single block. This is the familiar suffocating physical crush of the morning hours: breast touches shoulder blade, hip rubs hip, one's shoes are scuffed by others' shoes.

In the street, the busses and cargo vans creep along so close together they almost touch each other. The vans, uniform in design, squarish and chunky, white and immaculate, with no writing on them

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CA[31-353]

22-May-73

17:44

I had a flash of line fear justt then, but I am all right now.

As usual at this hour, downtown streets are glutted from wall to wall with busses and cargo conveyors and people shuffling on foot to their jobs. Every square inch of concrete and asphalt is taken up. Wheeled traffic worms along at the stipulated pace. On this sidewalk, at the outer edge of our waitline to the right, one solid stream of pedestrians, facing us, inches toward Elm, and another, beyond, slugs for Chapel. All these people are massed in suffocatingly close ranks: breast touches shoulder blade, hip rubs hi hip, arms overlap.

Across the street, over the tops of the chunky busses and cargo vans, which look like creeping ovens, I can see the upper part of the wall enclosing the Green. It is a long time since I have stood at the windows in the wall, looking in: at the empty grass, crosscut and gleaming; the ten majestic maples, standing apart, whose leaves turn to each other on stirring air, I think, and whisper, "Forest! Forest! Forest, brother leaf!"; the vaulting wire cages with great murmurations of sparrows in them; the three nineteenth-century churches, two built of red brick and white wood, one of brownish stone, their spires pointing the way to uninhabited regions aabove.bove. The public is not admitted inside the wall.