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1 Between the Twilight Zone and the Underground Railroad “Owagea” Twilight Zone Twilight! That space of unreality between night and day, where spirits begin to roam and objects that seem perfectly normal in the daylight assume strange patterns and shapes, that gap between different realities, that zone of instability between darkness and light, that time when transformation happens. Perhaps it was Rod Serling’s fault and all those episodes of Twilight Zone I watched in black and white in my youth, I thought, which provided the pretext or at least a possible explanation. Learning that Serling was from and imagined the sense of twilight space in Binghamton justified my feelings. Recreation Park, on Binghamton’s West Side, which I passed many times to visit friends, then had a carousel that no longer functioned and seemed to invite that sense of mystery. I was not surprised to learn that it served as inspiration for some Twilight Zone episodes. It was not a stretch to conclude then that the entire Binghamton area, where I lived and worked for a large chunk of my adult life, was indeed the Twilight Zone. But this was before the now popular Twilight series of movies in which likable vampires move in and out of human habitations and as usual seduce young women with their charms. And though they are set in Washington State, they could easily have been anywhere else, upstate New York for sure. One rainy night, I find myself lost amid the emptiness and sameness of the buildings and the depressed grayness in the area around Antique Row on Clinton Street. Warehouses from a bustling past of economic vitality either remained empty or hosted quaint antique shops. Making the best of postindustrial depression! Echoes of another time, vibrant in old black-and-white 20 . chapter 1 film footage, are all over the place in beautifully carved building fronts as in aging frame buildings and leftover train tracks. Sometimes cobbled streets peek through the tarred surfaces and create a bumpy ride. Driving off the highway, I take a wrong turn and somehow end up on a back street. Not sure which direction would take me to Main Street, I panic, observing the strange shapes that meander like ghosts. I panic and breathe a sigh of relief only when I finally cross the bridge over the Chenango River, pass the occasional streetlight, and see the Metro Center, perhaps the only new addition to a dying downtown. twilight script i A Caribbean girl at heart, caught in upstate New York, attempts to negotiate her way out of the Twilight Zone, repeatedly. Speeding through the hills up over the city behind the Oakdale Mall or driving through winding highways in sleepy upstate towns, life seemed to suspend itself. I could be in the rolling mountains described in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Hilly terrain, houses that appear as the road bends; absent of human life as I recognize it, barns dated from 1876 are falling apart; occasional deer peer from the side of the road as they contemplate a crossing. People seem to vanish from their proper years only to find out that they had been sleeping all along and the world had moved on. Flying in and out presented one escape. In pre-9/11 days, I could get onto a flight swiftly and look back at the receding trees as the plane climbed to its preferred height. One could always talk a ground attendant into letting you on the plane in what seemed like five minutes before it took off, and often there was someone else after you. One day, barely making it to the airport on time, I discover that for some reason, maybe bad weather elsewhere, or some other unspoken reason, all flights were indefinitely delayed, pushed back as one waited for the ominous decision—canceled. As I stand near the wall phones (in those days before mobile phones), planning to call my girls to tell them what had happened, deciding if I should wait around or try to fly the next day, I overhear a conversation of another delayed passenger contacting his people at work, or perhaps a girlfriend or wife somewhere: “‘I’m trying to get a rented car to take me out of here. I cannot spend the night in this rinky-dink town. There’s nothing here.’ Sorry, ma’am!” He smiled, knowing that I had overheard. Me: “Oh, I’m not from Binghamton!” The thought of being consigned to...

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