Day under the blue whale

Beneath a cerulean ceiling in the Hall of Ocean Life hangs a replica of a blue whale the size of 24 African elephants.

Born just blocks from the Museum of Natural History, I dreamt of a career digging bones or probing galaxies. As a summer intern, I roved the halls after-hours. Without people, I realized, the museum is incomplete. One Saturday in November, I observed.

11 a.m. The museum is mobbed with kids, slicked up for the day, hair clipped and carroty. In front of a video screen a balding father in trail shoes cradles a child, kissing his head repeatedly. A girl in clogs eats Snyder's pretzels. A youth in flannel walks aimlessly, examining his world.

The purse of a pregnant woman is wide-open, inside is a crescent moon. A woman with cucumbers sits on the floor and unfolds a map. Her boyfriend wears a football jacket. A girl runs by with pigtails going “ooochooowww.”

A father wearing a gold necklace and his daughter, in a baby blue cap, leaf through a lunch cooler. The father says something and coughs heavily. Another daughter joins, in a pink beret. She takes an apple from the cooler and crunches. The father points at the whale and says, “Imagine a fish that long, and what they eat are tiny, tiny.”

“Krill dad, sardines,” says the blue daughter, “millions and millions of them.”

With an underbelly grooved and speckled, more sleek than bulky, the blue whale is like a Buddha on its side. The ceiling is arched like a great train station’s and blue shapes drift across, creating the illusion you are beneath waves. From monitors, sea birds squawk, whales bellow and bubbles grumble to the surface. A large screen on the lower floor plays an endlessly looping video: turtles swim through a sunlit column of water; wave’s pound a beach; jelly fish swarm beneath a glacier. The light in the room is grainy, like the light before dozing.

At the edge of the hall are scenes of the sea: dolphins glide against a pink sky stenciled with long-winged birds, elephant seals cavort in icy waters, seals nose-kiss on blanched rocks, corals reach jaggedly for the sun. On the wall is a monstrous crab with legs the size of human limbs.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” shouts a security guard from the floor above, “if you left strollers on the balcony you need to get your stroller.”

A girl with cow pants poses, her father has bright shoes.

“Wow, can you imagine how big,” says a dad in a morning coat. His daughter stretches out on the ground, looks up at the whale and says, “It probably died from all those barnacles.”

Two babies crawl toward each other and nuzzle noses. One has thick dark hair, like a Native American.

A Chinese man in black sits silently.

“I gain, gain, gain gain gain people,” says a girl crawling over the floor like a crab.

“Look up,” says a mother to her daughter. “Isn’t that amazing, that’s the largest mammal.” The daughter lies down and begins paddling.

Many mothers are my age, which seems fantastic, because I am my age. I lie beneath the whale and drift.

“Excuse me, sir.”

A guard is standing over me, no sleeping on the floor beneath the whale. Many are, and he wakes us all.

Three kids chase one another in circles across the floor. One has pink boots and electric white hair and is humming, “Doo-dah, dah, that I would be somebody...” Soon, she is screaming for her mother. On the video, bright blue soldier crabs crisscross the beach, making clunky dragging noises. Kid’s feet smack the wood floor and patter on the carpet.

People photograph walruses, flashes reflecting red off the glass. A child spies on me from between his father’s legs.

“It won’t fall down,” says a mother to a boy with a glowing red light around his neck, like ET’s heart.

“Daddy, look, a dance floor,” says a girl with wild hair and a hand-knit vest. She twirls, tracing an inexact pattern across the floor. Her father, in an Oxford shirt and combed hair, is calm.

“This room is excellent on a sweltering New York summer day,” says one father.

A man with new Nikes eyes me cautiously. A girl in gold joins him and they go through photos on a digital camera. They laugh and speak a language I can’t understand.

A father with a flannel shirt wrapped around his head lies on the floor and places a baby on his stomach. He has olive skin and is very handsome. The child has blonde curls. The father says something in Spanish and points to his nose then the whale.



Lunchtime. Snacks in plastic bags, one girl fingers Doritos, another, with a silver belt, eats something like a cream puff, a middle-aged woman snacks on Oreos. There are about three dozen people on the floor. Beside me is a black woman with big breasts, a wall of hair and a cross around her neck. She feeds two boys with dark glossy hair pieces of bagel then doles out cream cheese and peels a citrus fruit. To the smaller child, she hands a juice and says, “Finish it, you’re gonna be the one that’s thirsty and crying.”

“I’m gonna call the police, you see this man, you see, he’s watching,” I later hear her say.

“Do you want to see the furry animals,” says one mother. “What, you want to watch TV?”

A girl with a plastic backpack nervously takes pictures. A blonde with a purse like a pillow twirls a camera. She is joined by two women with identical haircuts, one busty, one thin. They all lie on the floor and nap.

Students gather. One takes a close-up picture of a classmate’s face. “That’s the brightest thing in the world,” he says.

“It’s the worst death possible,” another student is explaining. “Dark, deep trenches of the ocean suffocate and you die, blood in all your organs.”

“My name is Forrest, I’m going to be hanging out with you for the year,” says a white man in a beret, to the students. “I’d like you to write two poems, eight lines each. Poetry is about observation. It’s about recording what’s coming at you, it’s an art form, just like your sketches. I want you to paint pictures with words. Don’t tell me there’s a whale hanging from the ceiling, show me. Maybe it’s not, in your imagination. Look at the people, look at the children, spend the next 15 minutes writing this, give them to J.J. and I’ll see you next week.”

Forrest walks away, I notice he has a cane.

An Asian woman with delicate features nurses a baby and a group of men play cards. A boy spills a bag of shiny toys onto the floor and arranges them in a line, then a circle. His sister fingers a fuzzy yellow toy cat and winds a pink sweatshirt around her mouth like a gag. “You’re not supposed to look at all your cards,” explains one player. “That’s cheating.”


This is the navigation room on an inverse spaceship. The crew and passengers have been ousted and space and star have come aboard to run a ship coursing through an infinite peoplefield. The secret of the museum is the secret of the city, that you are both the scenery and the ship. Explorations are boundless, need only the fuel. And what is fuel? That which can’t be described: the child’s rambunct, the urge to twirl, anonymous attraction, impulse, fright, the grand and spontaneous escape from our torment.

On the video are blue fish and black ones with yellow eyes like bright foam balls. A boy runs by with glowing shoes. A man with wispy hair and thick brows rests his cap on a sleeping kid. The child that spilled out the toys wrestles his sister. She lies across his belly.

Their father ends a cell phone conversation. “Alright,” he says. “We’re going to see the dinosaurs.”

Bow Bridge, sunup to sundown

On a nippy April morning I planted myself on the Bow Bridge, in Central Park. An alabaster railing cool to the touch speckled with pigeon poop and grit and gaps in a floral balustrade revealed droopy willows and the brambles beyond. The Bow Bridge was crafted from cast iron just before the Civil War, thin wood planks surface the bridge and the feminine slope invites pondering. Joggers, birders and dog walkers are common, as are weddings, crestfallen lovers, and newly befallen ones. I arrived at sunup, intending to stay the day, my only objective to observe.

6:17 a.m.: A fire alarm sounds, traffic echoes and a woman in water shoes passes with a poodle. She’s smoking a cigarette and coughs going up the bridge.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Bach,” she says. “He’s the meeter and greeter of the park.”

A lady with a Duane Reade bag ruffles through a recycling bin while a bald man with bright blue sunglasses on his forehead videotapes.

Beige gutters are sketched with sand, cigarette butts and cheerios. Canadian geese flock northwest and a large snowy bird swoops to the pond and wades to shore—egret. From under the bridge comes ruffling and every so often a pigeon flies out. A mallard with a glossy green head paddles by. The building tops on Central Park West turn gold.

“Good morning!” an elderly man with a dusky poodle booms through thick gums. A turtle swims under the bridge, followed by a smaller one.

A car engine on 59th purrs loudly and a man wearing a cape-like leather jacket walks by with a yoga mat strapped to his back. The sun peeks above the trees and sirens sound.

An old man pulls doggy treats from a fanny pack to feed two goldens. One has a horrible wound on his face.

“Perfect day,” he says.

A couple, pregnant, stops to stare at the pond then moves on.

“They have a date with me on Friday and Saturday at noon I take off to the airport,” says a woman in a running suit and headband.

“Lots of redwing blackbirds,” says a man in an Army jacket, an elder in a group of five young men in work boots. One has a clipboard.

“I’ll bring my BB gun,” says another.

“Don’t you dare,” says the older man.

They stop on the west end of the bridge, examine something in the water, bang on the railing, then leave.

Small birds gather straw from a patch of bush across the pond.

The woman in the running suit on the cell phone returns. “Non-existent,” is the only word I hear.

The old man with the dusky poodle returns. “Writing love poetry?” he asks.

A large green Ford with a kayak on the roof and the words Geese Police on the side parks beside the pond. Two men unstrap the kayak. One gets in with a black and white dog and starts paddling briskly. When they come close, I ask what they’re doing.

“We’re chasing the Canadian Geese,” he says.

“Chasing them away?” I ask.

“Yep.”

A school kid in a tank top walks by. A man with a camera stops, changes film, then continues. A woman with a red shirt and a fluffy black dog takes long slow strides beneath a line of willows.

“Birds?” I ask a man with binoculars.

“Yup,” he says, “it’s the season.”

The man in the kayak comes ashore and the Geese Police drive away. An elderly couple with two dogs discuss their first Earth day. A muscled black man with binoculars round his neck scans and an old black man with a soiled beanie peers past the railing, etched with lover’s scratchings: Alex y Diana, Borislava y Camilo 01-01-07; Danny I Love You.

More passerbyers: an Asian jogger with a digital camera, a woman with a shirt that says Player on the front and Nocturnal on the back, a bum smiling sadly with arms hooked into the nooks of a purple sweater and a business man with an Oxford shirt and a black valise. An elderly man taps his hand on the railing and a woman in pink stops, stares, then moves on. A beagle owner digs for a tissue, an old man shuffles like Frankenstein and a woman clutches a bag of poop. Two German shepherds sniff each other, and one owner yells. A man in scrubs on a headset speaks about chunky monkey ice cream. Bright red fish slap around in the reeds.

“Good day for sunglasses,” says a bald man with peeling skin and a wet dog.

“That’s the Dakota,” says an old blonde in pink.

A suited man snaps pictures of a pregnant Spanish woman.

“Excuse me, sorry to interrupt your writing,” says a man with a European accent. I take a picture of him and an olive-skinned woman with curly black hair.

A couple stops to shoot the skyline. The man keeps his hands in his pockets and looks annoyed. On the way back across the bridge they discuss buying a scrap book.

A dozen high school girls walk by. Nearly all wear black tights.

A woman with birds embroidered on her handbag peers through a pair of mini binoculars.

A Ben and Jerry’s ice cream bar floats in the water and a turtle hangs with its head just above the surface and its body pointed down at a 45º angle. On a nearby rock five more sun themselves. The lake is murky and I can’t see the bottom.

A bright orange bird rockets by my head and a thin botoxed woman with an unleashed poodle carries its poop in a bag. I look back and the poodle is rolling on the ground and the woman is feeding it something. A bum rests on a bench beside a gazebo across the pond, his filthy bare feet facing me. A kid with a backpack that says Born to be Wild takes a picture then moves on.

“Right now I’m facing the great lawn,” says a giggling man into a cell phone as he spins round. “Right now I’m facing the rambles.”

A man in a black suit and sneakers walks by on a cell phone. The only word I catch is, “torture.”

A couple examines the pond. “You could wake up early and just take a day,” says the man.

“I might be left handed but I’m always right,” says a man with a Southern accent.

“Doesn’t get any better than this,” says a man walking with two woman.

“Ahyhe!” says a European girl goes as she notices the turtles, 16 in total now, sunning on the rock. She goes down to take a picture. It’s just after 9 a.m.

“Sorry, I have to get back,” says a bald man to a British couple who asks for directions. He points to his watch.

Eight mothers jog with strollers, one has a pink umbrella.

A woman snaps a photo for two tourists then continues a conversation about warblers.

A drooping old man carries a white plastic bag filled with something heavy.

The chubbier of two graying female birders lights a long cigarette. “Jeez,” mutters an overweight birder with a book of maps open and glasses clenched in his mouth. A man in a safari jacket, each pocket filled with things, wears new binoculars round his neck. Of a group of twelve elderly birders, eight have hats.

An Asian power walker wears a shirt that says “I love candy” and a French girl sports a shirt that says “New York is for dreamers.”

A bald man with a blue jacket draped over his shoulder leans against the railing and looks across the pond as if he’s examining the sea from the deck of an ocean liner.

“I wanna see everything and do everything,” says a female jogger to a friend.

Two lovers in a rowboat take a picture of the egret.

Black guys in black boots, jeans, tanks, and black doo rags walk with a swagger.

A Chinese man with pursed lips takes pictures with a long telephoto.

“Making haiku?” he asks me.

He is shooting rowboats; there are four on the water. In one is a balding man without a shirt; a two-inch scar cuts diagonally across his back. A woman leans in close and speaks softly in his ear. In another is a family, kid in life jacket. “This was a good idea,” says the mom. In a third boat are two giggly white girls. “I cant do this anymore,” says one. The other takes over rowing and fields a cell call, holding the phone between her ear and shoulder.

A heavyset Brit with a sweat stain in the shape of a duck on his lower back walks by with a petite Asian. A shirtless man with “Ronaldo” tattooed in black script on the base of his neck has a pit bull leashed to each arm. A bald man, toothless except his canines, has a fully packed duffle slung over his shoulder. A woman in high heels makes out with a man in khakis. A chubby guy has a bedroll atop his pack. A man with a lip tattoo is with a chubby girl in a skintight shirt that says “New York” in fake diamonds.

Hookeying middleschoolers stare across the pond, talking in English and Spanish.

Four kids in a rowboat. “Jack, sit down,” says the mom from above. “Jack Avalone, sit down!”

A chubby boy with glasses and gym shorts sits. “Leave the turtle alone,” says mom.

Drumming comes from somewhere.

“Mom, we’re stuck,” Jack yells.

“You’re not stuck, just push off,” she shouts. One kid pulls a giant black root from the muck and uses it to push off. “Yeah!” shriek two of the four, and throw their arms in the air in triumph.

A European balances his camera on the rail and takes a picture of him and his girlfriend; two teens with beginner’s mustaches and designer sunglasses pose on the rail with biceps flexed.

“Sorry to hear that,” says a kid in a cap. “Was it a sudden thing or was it expected?”

Just before 1 p.m. three men in tuxes and an Asian woman in a white dress arrive for wedding shots. “Okay, I’ll call you to make a rain check,” says the bride, into her cell phone. Her dress is dragging on the ground. The groom has a moosed mullet. He nods to me when I move out of the way of their shot. The photographer is a skinny man with a drawing of a woman holding a revolver on his shirt.

“Go from here and you’ll get the white crane in the background,” offers a passerby; the photographer doesn’t understand.

Seconds later another Asian couple arrives. They are more well-to-do. “We actually scheduled it for last Tuesday but it rained,” says the bride. The groom smokes a cigarette.

A third couple arrives and then a fourth. The bride of groom number three is white. She wears a traditional dress, red and vibrant.

The first couple moves to the gazebo across the pond and actually get married. There are eight guests. The bride continuously rubs her eyes. A man reads briefly from a book then those gathered shake hands and hug.

A skinny kid with homemade tattoos carries a Mexican blanket and holds hands with a girl in a dress. They look like they’ve been making out in the bushes.

“Hola papa, que paso? Bien, aqui en Central Park en Nueva York,” says a kid on a cell phone munching an apple.

Another Asian couple approaches the bridge.

Lovers on bikes with arms outstretched take pictures of themselves.

“Wet dog,” says a tall blonde woman with a wet dog.

Two chic girls eat pretzels and do catlike poses against the railing. A homeless black man clutches a small, folded white object.

“Who can use some additional income?” says a man in jeans.

“Remember when we played Frisbee here?” says a kid to friends.

“I get depressed when I go there,” says a woman in a green dress to a woman in Gucci glasses. They go to the top of the bridge, turn, walk down, back up, then down again.

A barefoot woman ringing a bell leads a small tourist group.

A wedding couple in a Venetian gondola appears. The groom is in black shoes and slacks with a morning vest and the bride has a ruffled gold dress. The gondolier is in pinstripes. A crowd of guests has gathered on the bridge; a dancer in moccasins jangles bells and a jester fiddles.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” says a plump woman with grey hair to the jester, “we met before; it was a while ago.”

“It’s my old spot,” he says, then turns to a guy in a top hat: “Tunnels were depressing, the carousel was psychedelic.”

Another Asian wedding photo shoot.

A Latin bride-to-be and two friends host their own shoot. “Honey, you can’t be holding your hair,” says one friend, “just let your hair do what it does.”

“Arch youre back, arch your back,” says another. “Do something with your hair; you look like you’re constipated.”

A short Mexican man drinking soda through a straw stares at them. His pants and shirt are splattered in paint.

Three foreign girls with fitted jeans and colorful blouses pass, one red, one blue, one purple. They have long dark hair and look like models. I track them until they disappear around a bend.

“What are you against then?” says a tall pretty mother to her pre-teen daughter in Catholic school girl garb, “painting people’s toes, painting people’s fingernails or hermit crabs in general?”

A man pins his lover against the rail. They look French. A group of high schoolers watch.

A grown man covered in dirt greets a woman at the bottom of the bridge.

“How did it go,” he asks, “A lot of traffic?”

“Yup,” she says.

I nap on white and pink flower petals. Pebbles make impressions on my elbows. In the gutter are a reddened Popsicle stick and the rim of a baby stroller wheel. “This guy is drunk,” someone whispers.

A tap on my shoulder wakes me; it is the girl in the purple dress and her two friends.

“We are going to get a coffee,” she says in a European accent. “Do you want to join?”

Her name is Patricia, all three are from Portugal. They are in New York for three weeks, but Patricia wants to stay longer, maybe go to design school. She is slender with olive skin. I tell her I can’t join them but get her number.

The city enables love, but love in New York is improbable. Those who can’t find love first and fast may never find it. Those who are slapped by love each time they step on the subway, walk in the park or wait in a line will always find it but may never attain it. The loveless are constantly coming; they travel to New York from all over, intoxicated by grandness, seduced by opportunity. We are a city of seekers and strivers, sapped by our own wherewithal.

You can try to step out of the city, unzip it and exit, observe from the outside, but it will re-envelop you, because you never, really, left the envelope in the first place. In New York, you are a part, never apart. To show up is to become. The bridge is not just the cast iron and the floral balustrade, it is the pigeon poop and grit, the stroller wheel in the gutter and the Geese Police and the jester with the fiddle, the Asian weddings and lovers pinned against the rail, and the exotic girl in striking color, and me, and my notes. It is it all.

A mother and daughter close their eyes and tilt their faces to the sun. A man with guitar and harmonica accompanied by a woman with a banjo ramble, singing an Irish tune. A girl in a loose purple shirt holding a purse studded with glass beads leans her elbows on the balustrade and gazes across the glassy lake. She is pale with auburn hair and at one point laughs aloud.

The setting sun sets high rises aflame. A child races a matchbox car along the rail, pigeons swoop from under the bridge, the strongest breeze of the day blows cherry blossoms my way and an old man sniffles, smiles then wobbles westward into the dusk.

I called Patricia the following week; her number had been disconnected.

Overnight on the One

As the sun set behind the Palisades on a frigid January Sunday I went underground at Times Square. I boarded an uptown 1 train and stood by the door, not planning to get off until sunrise.

If New York City is a melting pot, then the subway is the ladle that stirs the slurry. But the subway ride remains anonymous, the perfect paradox; the most New York thing in all of New York: crowded but lonely, filthy but sterile, careening but cramped, cosmopolitan but coarse.

Color is ubiquitous in the subway but we often miss it, hiding behind iPods, magazines and blank stares, confined in ourselves, confined in cars. The subway is a ride quickly forgotten, a string of throwaway moments connecting where we were to where we’re going. Funneled through tunnels, a passive motion felt in halts and lurches, we arrive at whatever our other side may be and get off. Only that day I stayed on.

The subway cannot be summed up in a routine ride or even a lifetime of rides. But perhaps, I thought, a continuous ride without destination in which I recorded everything that I experienced could reveal something significant. Here is what I saw:

An elderly man with a worn face dozed with his hands crossed over a stack of oversized manila folders. He wore one leather glove.

A black teen in a bubble coat spoke to a pimply white kid with a Yankees hat cocked sideways. “I can’t stop thinking about that chicken,” he said, and started laughing.

At 145th a homeless woman with a puffy parka and a puckered face walked through the car. “Good afternoon, I’m homeless,” she said, in a raspy voice through shattered teeth. “Good afternoon, I’m homeless,” she repeated, before turning around and leaving the car the way she had come.

At 191st a kid in sweatpants with a beige scarf wrapped around his neck ran to the middle of the car and climbed onto the orange seats. With his knees on the seat he pressed his forehead to the window and cupped his hands against the glass, staring at the subway tunnel blackness.

After 215th the 1 crosses the East River into the Bronx, goes through a short tunnel and then runs above ground.

At 225th a black man with bright blue shoes and a blue bubble coat hurried onto the train carrying two black plastic garbage bags and started speaking rapidly into his cell phone. “Yo, where are you?” he said. “Okay, I see that. That’s why you never tell no one.”

When the subway stopped at Van Cortlandt, the end of the line, it was about 6:00 p.m. and dark outside. I was alone in the car.

In New York, to be hemmed in is to be lonely, and one is always hemmed in. New York loneliness is seeing a poster for a film you will never see or walking past a crowded cafe you will never eat at or passing a park filled with lovers you will never love. New York loneliness comes from a fear of forgottenness, that you can never do it all, that even you if did, if you did every last iota of things there were to do in the city, it would still move on around you, without you, and you would just be a person who did every last iota of things there were to do and then ran out of things to do and got passed by. I wasn't alone long.

Near Christopher Street appeared a skinny white kid with straight brown hair, pinstriped pants, a red scarf and a face white as gypsum. He sat hunched in the corner, head bent, face against the shiny metal wall of the subway and looked as if he were throwing up or sneaking drugs. He seemed well off and restless.

At Houston Street seven loud black kids got on. They wore warm-up pants and matching jackets and were filled with the energy of youths who have just played sports. One was eating McDonalds and the smell of fries quickly filled the car. Another two scarfed ziti with plastic forks from Styrofoam containers. At Canal, the gypsum-faced kid got off. I noticed a fat black Sharpie in his hand. He met a friend on the platform who had been in an adjacent car and together they started sneering at the black kids.

“Come in,” taunted one of the black kids, “You scared?”

The subway began to pull away and the second white kid ran after it. He reached up and with a thick piece of white chalk scrawled something on the window.

“What he write?” yelled one of the black kids.

“He wrote Nigger!” said another.

“That white boy wrote nigger!” said a third.

They inspected the graffiti. You could make out an “N” but the rest was scribbles.

At Chambers they got off and I was alone in the car. I walked over to where the gypsum-faced kid had been hunched in the corner. Freshly written on the metal in the shaky scrawl of a teenage boy was a list. The first item was crossed off and the rest read as follows:

JFK
2 PAC
Biggie
John Lenon
gandi
Malcolm X
YOU

I reread the names then turned around to see if anyone was watching me. This was the universal New York child, the clever aching restless youth, the ever-evolving effort to flick off the whole word: Walt Whitman’s yelp and Alan Ginsberg’s America and Holden dropping out and Kerouac cruising west.

I was alone through South Ferry, the other end of the line, and at 7:28 p.m., passed Times Square and completed my first loop. At Van Cortlandt, the conductor announced that the train was headed for the yard and I got on the subway across the platform. The car smelled of flowers and chemicals. I looked out the window and saw a nearly full orange moon rising behind silhouetted trees.

At 23rd I looked to my left and noticed an old man with a white beard and a blue cap seated across three seats with his legs outstretched, facing me. He was completely cross-eyed and looked insane.

“Excuse me, South Ferry?” asked a man with gray slacks too short that revealed blue and purple bruises on his shins. He spoke with a thick Russian accent.

“Yup,” said the insane-looking man.

At South Ferry they got off. A dread-locked man keeled over a garbage bag with his head lost under a hood. His socks were curiously clean. At 14th an older woman with permed gray hair wearing a dress that looked like it was made of fake jeans peeked her head into the subway car. “Is this going uptown?” she asked. No one responded. She held the doors open with her arms, and thrust her upper body into the car. “Is this the 1,2,3?” she asked?

“Yes,” I said.

She had several layers of clothing below the dress and wore a jacket over it. She stepped into the car followed by a woman of the same age with a fake leopard skin purse, a flowing black dress and a suede jacket with a fox lining. They seemed out of place on the subway and I instantly detested both of them.

“What is that?” the woman who had held the doors open asked as she passed the dread-locked man, who was still resting against his garbage bag.

“That’s my dad,” I said snidely, but she didn’t hear.

“That’s disgusting,” she whispered to her friend.

At 12:22 a.m. the doors opened at Van Cortlandt Park. The train was going to the yard, and there was no train across the tracks to transfer to. On the platform temperatures were in the teens and a howling wind made it feel like below zero. MTA workers wearing orange and yellow reflector vests walked by with large plastic garbage bags. Several of them wore ski masks, which hid all but their eyes. They moved like drones. I felt like I had been transported to some apocalyptic future. The world was a vast icy wasteland covered with garbage. The garbage pickers were the only ones who still had a purpose. The rest of us merely stood behind poles trying to escape the wind. A hunchback with a puffy red parka staggered past me. He stopped at a pole and began to pee. An MTA worker in a ski mask walked by and said nothing. I hoped for the train.

Five minutes later it came. I walked through three cars until I found one where the heat was working. At 145th the guy next to me began snoring, making a noise that sounded like a mating seal—“schwick schwack, schwick schwack, schwick schwack...” I fell asleep near 96th.

I dreaded the next wait on the platform but there was a train already there the second time. At 231st a man with a paper bag, a tan cap and shoes that were gooey and melted as if he had been walking on lava sat down and began examining the ads on the ceiling. We were alone until 137th when two high school age kids embarked. One was white and one was Puerto Rican.

“If we get pussy we get pussy,” said the Puerto Rican kid. He had bushy eyebrows and a shaved head and wore a camo jacket. The white kid had long blonde hair, a goatee and a ruddy face. They were planning some sort of trip.

“Yo,” blurted the Puerto Rican kid, “I like Jenny, she’s mad dope.”

“Tell Jenny to come with us,” said the white kid.

“Jenny is mad cute. If you can get that shit, mad props,” said the white kid.

The Puerto Rican kid told a story about a time when he was hanging out with Jenny and someone had asked her if they were married. The story made no sense.

“Jenny is a girl you can settle down with,” said the white kid. The Puerto Rican kid agreed.

At 225th Street I looked outside. It was 6 a.m. and the sky was purpling. “I’ll see you up there in about 15 minutes with milk and sugar, okay?” said a woman to her son.

I thought about the feeling of knowing a cup of coffee was coming on a cold morning, it was a wonderful thought. Outside, factory smoke billowed into the sky. At each stop the subway grew colder as doors remained open to let in the crowds. My knuckles were blue and green. Had my skin turned green or were my eyes seeing green? At Van Cortland a handful of young perfumed women got on. I wondered if I would get off before them.

By 168th all the seats were taken. A man by the door was reading a Russian newspaper with what looked like a UFO on the cover. We reached Times Square just after 7. The man beside me kicked the door with rage as he got off.

Perhaps we get angry at New York because we know it will go on despite us. It’s a sprawling, churning mess of interactions set in motion tens of thousands of years ago when advancing glaciers first scraped its slate free. The city exceeds us, splashes over us, swells around us and sometimes sinks us. The only way to stymie it is to slow it down, and the best way to do this is to sit down, and observe it. And what better place to observe than the subway, where immigrant workers first blasted tunnels through bedrock, the heart of the city jack hammering into the heartwood to create a living conduit that conducts its charge continuously; every day, every minute, every second.

I climbed the steps to Times Square. The sun had risen and the night was over.

Sunrise Bridge Run

I left my apartment on West 44th at 4:45 a.m., jogging north up Broadway, 134 blocks, six and a half miles, aiming to cross the George Washington Bridge at sunrise. In the wee hours of Sunday morning the city is a secret, something you’re not supposed to be watching, an R movie as a kid you’ve snuck back into the den to see. Those who borrow the street, the tourists, the commuters, the suits, the slackers, the gazers, the bar-hoppers, the shoppers, the diners, they are all gone. What’s left is the resin, the always present film at the bottom of the coffee pot. This is the city after darkest night has settled and 'the city' has gone home.

At 45th St. three cop cars surrounded a red sports car. Behind it was a scrappier sedan. The owner of the sports car opened his wallet and passed several bills to the owner of the sedan. The cops watched.

At 49th one of a group of five shadowy men called out, “that’s good calisthenics you.”

At 57th a man whose face was hidden under a cape’s hood stumbled across the street looking like a deranged prophet.

At Columbus Circle a bum slept against a Lens Crafters store with an old quilt covering him that said, “Hole in the Wall,” along the bottom. I left Broadway and headed up Central Park West. The streets were quieter and the light was less overwhelming. Specific glows stood out. The whimsical tree branch-wrapped lights of Tavern on the Green. Street lights, red green, red green. Two beacon-like lights atop the twin towers of an extravagant old apartment building near The Dakota shining into space like buoys marking a channel in the sky. Large dinosaur topiaries lit up with Christmas lights on the steps of the Museum of Natural History.

Near 64th St. another jogger passed. He had on headphones, a backpack and blue warm-up pants and I wanted him to acknowledge our common errand, but he didn’t look up, and continued south into the night.

At 81st I turned west, headed back to Broadway. Opposite the museum’s planetarium three men in their twenties were returning from a night out, walking quickly and silently.

“Nice night for shorts,” remarked a dreaded man with a briefcase at 81st and Amsterdam.

On Broadway glowing menorahs decorated the wide center island and birds began chirping. A tree outside Harry’s Shoe Store near 82nd was covered with bright red lights and an elegant-looking older woman with a black coat walked a mini schnauzer-looking dog wearing a red sweater.

At 90th a man outside a newspaper kiosk arranged bundles of New York Times and Daily News, and a cop car with its sirens silently flashing sped across Broadway and pulled onto the curb in front of the City Diner.

At 94th a man in a leather coat clutching a brown paper bag inspected the gutter at the side of the street, chanting something in an unknown tongue.

At 104th Broadway veers slightly west, and runs due north for three blocks. A cold wind rushed down the avenue, icing my bare legs and slowing my pace. Two kids with black hooded sweat-shirts on trick bikes zigzagged down the sidewalk, one with a lollipop in his mouth.

At 5:40 a.m. I stopped to stretch on a bench outside the Journalism School at Columbia University. The quad was deserted until two girls walked by dragging suitcases. One also carried a rectangular musical instrument case. I yelled across the quad, asking her what instrument was inside, but she didn’t respond.

In Harlem garbage littered the streets and groups of people stood on corners. Beyond the trestle bridge that carries the 1 train briefly above ground I could see the Hudson River and the lights of Jersey glittering on the other side.

At 135th a whirring sound like a chainsaw seemed to be coming from an abandoned building on the west side of the street. A family with three kids, one on her mother’s shoulders snug under a pink hood, waited for the light to change. A woman beside them held a large plate with tinfoil wrapped across the top. Just north at Hamilton a bus stopped and nine people got off. One shouted, “faster, harder…” as I ran by.

Five men argued outside a store at 142nd and at 143rd a hooded man waited next to a phone booth with his hands in his pockets. At 144th two men in the middle of the sidewalk were selling plastic cups of steaming coffee from a blue cooler.

155th smelled of deep-fried chicken and french fries, and memories of street food in South American cities flooded back.

Between 159th and 160th I passed Africa Store, between 163rd and 164th, Willy Food Corp., at 171st, Washington Heights Grocery Discount, and at 175th, 24/7 Candy Discount Store.

At 178th there is a large industrial-looking bus terminal and I turned west for the bridge. It was 6:40 a.m., the sun would rise at 7:19. Lightening shades of dark blue crept across the sky. The bridge glowed in the beginning dawn. To enter the bridge’s pedestrian path you snake up a ramp at the end of 178th. In the east low wispy clouds stuck on the horizon turned pink, orange and yellow. On the bridge the wind howled and it was frigid. Groups of bikers in bright blue spandex raced towards New Jersey and 18-wheelers noisily barreled into the city.


Jogging across the George Washington Bridge as the sun rises surely won’t mean as much for someone who has never circled it on their map as the beginning and end point of all road trips. For me it has been a gateway to the rest of the country and a beacon when returning home. I-95 starts you south through industrial Jersey and the farmlands beyond. I-80 sling shots you west across the Delaware Water Gap, the Midwest, the Great Plains and a million mountains and deserts until San Francisco and the next shore. The N.Y. State Thruway leads north to quieter country and eventually another country altogether. And then there is New York City, south across the 'wine-dark' wind-swept waters of the Hudson, the shapes of familiar buildings nubs on the horizon, the silence of the distant cityscape jarred by thundering wheels and rushing wind, the biggest circle on any map, where 8 million people will soon wake to a sun that is about to rise, that is right now bluing the black of night and yellowing yesterday’s clouds, and when they wake the city’s strange night will be over, and a whole new scene begun.