My first winter in Boston · xydac

More than ten years ago now, I landed in Boston. Winter, 2014. I came from India knowing a handful of people in the entire country, and none of them well enough to call at two in the morning.

The skyline on a long winter exposure — one of the first nights I went out shooting. Nikon D7100 · 35mm · ƒ/5.6 · 30s · ISO 125 The skyline on a long winter exposure — one of the first nights I went out shooting. Nikon D7100 · 35mm · ƒ/5.6 · 30s · ISO 125 ×

The first thing I learned was the T. How the metro worked, which line went where, the particular logic of a city that had grown up long before anyone thought about grids. That felt like an accomplishment at the time. I could get from one place to another without asking. In a new country, moving on your own is the first small proof that you can live there.

Then came the first blizzard. I want to be honest: I did not know what the word meant. Not really. I had read it, the way you read a lot of English words without ever standing inside the thing they describe. So I was genuinely surprised — walking into grocery stores and finding the shelves stripped of bread, water, milk. People buying like the city was about to be cut off, which, in a way, it was. Then the power went out during the storm. I remember sitting in the dark thinking that “blizzard” had turned out to be a much heavier word than the one I’d learned.

A storm over the city — still the best lightning frame I've ever caught. Nikon D3100 · 30mm · ƒ/4.5 · 4s · ISO 100 A storm over the city — still the best lightning frame I've ever caught. Nikon D3100 · 30mm · ƒ/4.5 · 4s · ISO 100 ×

Not all of the lessons were gentle. The first room I rented was in a three-bedroom house, a good room, shared kitchen. The landlady seemed fine until she didn’t. She found ways to trick us, then turned hostile — at one point threatening to call the police, claiming we had tampered with her food because we shared the kitchen. One by one she pushed everyone out. I lost eight hundred dollars of my security deposit in my first four months in the country. As a first lesson in how a place actually works, it was expensive and it stuck.

Learning the city by showing up

I spent a lot of that first stretch outside anyway, photographing the city. Snow does something to Boston. The brick and the light and the quiet after a storm. I walked and I photographed and I met people, which was the other project of those months — turning a city full of strangers into a city with a few faces in it.

The way I met most of them was Meetup, which was itself a new idea to me — the notion that strangers with a shared interest would just post a time and a place and show up. I went to photography walks, tech nights, whatever looked interesting. One of those turned into a free ferry ride: someone I’d met offered to take a few of us out on the harbor, no reason other than that it was a good day for it. I’d been in the country a few months and a near-stranger was handing me the water and the skyline. It reset something in my head about how this place worked. The landlady had taught me one lesson; the ferry taught me the opposite one, and the second lesson turned out to be the truer one.

Out on the harbor. Boston is a city you understand differently from the water. Nikon D7100 · 210mm · ƒ/4.0 · 1/2000s · ISO 100 Out on the harbor. Boston is a city you understand differently from the water. Nikon D7100 · 210mm · ƒ/4.0 · 1/2000s · ISO 100 ×

Another one of those nights was an Intel Arduino hackathon — a room full of people I’d never met, wiring up little boards to make something blink or move by morning. I barely knew anyone walking in and left with people I’d keep running into. That was the shape of a lot of those early months: show up somewhere on the strength of a listing, leave with a few more faces you recognized.

A town that runs on a schedule

There were other new concepts too, and the biggest ones ran on a schedule. I had landed in a sports town without understanding what that meant. Back home the calendar bent around cricket. Here it was three sports on rotation — the Patriots in the fall and winter, the Celtics through the cold months, the Red Sox once the weather turned — and the whole city would tilt toward whichever one was playing. I learned to read the mood of Boston by the score of a game I didn’t yet know how to watch. On game day the T filled with jerseys. Bars I walked past would go silent and then erupt a beat later, and I’d know something had happened before I knew what. When the Patriots won the Super Bowl in early 2015, the city felt different for days — lighter, louder, briefly all one thing. None of it was mine at first. It’s the kind of belonging you have to be taught, and the city teaches it whether you ask or not. By the end I could feel a Sunday coming.

Skating on the Common. Winter here wasn't only something to survive; it was something the city did together. Nikon D7100 · 90mm · ƒ/4 · 1/2500s ·...