Good and Lost

In all my life, there have only been two places where I really feel at home. The first is the great American wilderness areas out west, in the desert or the mountains, miles and miles from the nearest human habitation. The other, paradoxically enough, is on the streets of New York City.

After my return from Istanbul, I settled again into my life in northern Virginia, working and reading and planning future adventures. It wasn’t long, though, before my feet started itching again, and I began to think of other things to see in closer range of my restricted budget. I was in touch with Marc and Kate, friends I’d met in Paris, and found that Kate had moved to New York and Marc would be visiting. So, I planned a trip.

That turned into two trips two weeks apart with the development of Marc’s business plans. So, on a Friday afternoon in a balmy DC heat, I boarded the DC2NY bus from Dupont Circle in Washington and settled in for the five hour trip to Penn Station, Manhattan. I arrived an hour before midnight and met Kate on the corner of 33rd and 7th, and we headed back to her apartment in Brooklyn.

On my previous visit to New York, I’d divided my time between fellow students of my then college and a second group–a dancer I’d known during my childhood in Montana and her four Kuwaiti foreign exchange student friends. I’d stayed in the lower East Side over Thanksgiving, and visited some of the little French bars and big tourist sights of Manhattan. This time was rather different. Spring was in the air, and my first day in the city was a balmy, perfectly clear day with a warm sun and a cool breeze. I was in Brooklyn, and immediately liked the quieter atmosphere of the borough. Manhattan, with all of its rush and noise and excitement, is wonderful to visit, but it’s nice to return in the evening to a slower, easier place.

The people, too, were different. Kate, my Australian friend, is working as a photographer’s agent. She has two roommates, Bethany and Courtney; Bethany (”Bettaaaanya,” according to Kate) is a photographer, and Courtney works in a local preschool. Kate was in the midst of a rush of redecorating, fixing up and customizing the room she was moving into; Bethany is herself a rush, constantly acquiring new furniture pieces and odds and ends to assimilate into the apartment or to use in her studio. She is a goddess of Craig’s List (by Kate’s and my judgment), and a wonderful photographer. While I was there the second time, she even managed to find a free piano; more on that later.

First, New York, and why I love it. There’s a certain energy here I have yet to find anywhere else in the world. I think it’s no mistake that so many of America’s great creative minds have come through New York at some point in their lives, and found themselves inspired there. The city exists in a state of constant evolution, with districts forming and reforming every few years, buildings being built, demolished, redesigned, and co-opted for every possible human activity. A walk through its streets will mean hearing a different language on every street corner, smelling the echoed scents of a hundred cultures in front of every restaurant, and still somehow sensing the overarching community that unites it all. Turn a block, and you’re in Little Italy, complete with street sellers peddling gelato, sidewalk cafes, pizzerias, and Italian music; in the center is restaurant offering “authentic Malaysian cuisine.” Another three blocks and you’re in Chinatown, with every sign written in Chinese and English, and a wizened old man plays a two-stringed erhu fiddle in the subway.

Look up, and you’ll find that the people of New York are dwarfed by their own creations. A constant stream of pedestrians trickles across the Brooklyn Bridge as cars and trucks hurdle by beneath them and the old bridge’s double stone towers loom impassive above it all. To navigate in the city is to think in three dimensions; down into the subway, west under the river, up onto the street, north through the park, up into the building. Movement is constant, and whether the time is four in the afternoon or four in the morning, somewhere in town things are just getting started.

To someone like me, who trades in stories, New York is a confluence of tales. Spend a day talking to a dozen people and you’ll find a dozen stories; the Japanese-American boy born and raised on Staten Island, the grinning Jewish mechanic from Albania, the talkative Pakistani taxi driver with family in Dubai, the Brazilian-American journalist who divides her time between Brooklyn and the northeast coast of Brazil.

A few scenes from my own visit:

Kate and I attended an art showing in Manhattan. It took me a few minutes to realize that the art-watchers were far more interesting than most of the “art” on display; hipster guys and hippy chicks gazing at stick-figure fish stitched in black thread on blue velvet and asking each other what it means. Modern art appreciation, it seems, is a developed skill, a learned vocabulary. You may not feel the awe you might if you looked at a Rembrant or Van Gogh or Monet, but if you can coin a good polysyllabic interpretation of a clay sculpture of a sneaker, you’ve got what it takes to become a sophisticated New York art connoisseur. The free wine helps the ex nihilo art criticism to flow smoothly.

The High Line Trail. Built in the thirties and abandoned in the eighties, the High Line was an old elevated railroad track around the middle of the city. After falling into disuse, it quickly became an example of the impermanence of the urban world. It filled in with soil and then grass, and by the late nineties, trees were growing where freight trains once rolled, a sort of accidental park in the middle of west Manhattan. These days it’s official; the city is in the process of building long walkways and benches down the old rail line. Kate and I spent a sunny afternoon exploring it.

Kate’s birthday was on the last day of my first visit, and I had the pleasure of meeting several of Kate’s friends. We went out for the night to the Dove Parlor, an establishment designed to “democratize decadence” by mimicking one of the luxurious parlors of the 1920s at a reasonable rate. These were, for the most part, interesting people; and people, of course, is what New York is all about.

The reunion dinner with Kate and Marc. All three of us met for the first time at a restaurant called the General Greene, and enjoyed a good evening of conversation and food. Afterwards, Marc and I went to his friend Bill’s restaurant in Brooklyn. Bill works as a sommelier, and is fortunate enough to divide his time between Paris and New York. The wine at his establishment (on the house) was some of the best I’ve ever had, and made me want to learn more about wine so that I could talk about it and sound all sophisticated.

Visiting Bethany’s photography studio. On the day Bethany found her free piano and had it delivered to her studio (not free), she brought me down to see it and to see the rest of the art collective where she worked. The entire establishment was built in an old warehouse in one of the eastern industrial districts of the city, and from the outside looks to be little different from the various factories and warehouses around it. Inside, though, is a different story. The entire bottom floor is set up as a community art and crafting studio, with a full woodshop, photography studio, and various other amenities. By paying a monthly fee, artists and craftsmen can use the facility for their own projects.

Upstairs are the studios, housing carpenters, musicians, artists, and photographers like Bethany. Terrance, “the man with the van,” showed up with the piano and we moved it up to the studio in an old freight elevator. A few other people stopped in, including Rebekah, an artist whose current project is conducting interviews with other artists, and David, the head of the downstairs wood shop, who talked about his work and an amazing unpublished manuscript he has his hands on–the story of a black con man, criminal, and victim of the system who on his deathbed asked that his story be told. Any of you journalists out there, if you want to tell an amazing story from a new angle, send me an email and I’ll put you in touch.

As always, it was over too quickly. Yesterday morning I boarded the bus in downtown Manhattan and slept much of the way back to Washington.

And here I am, in northern Virginia, though not for long. This weekend I’m driving back to Montana for a few weeks. I’ll be moving back there for good (ie at least five or six months) this summer.

As for the future? Well, dear readers, fear not: there is more travel on the horizon. Starting sometime in 2011 I’m going to begin a new voyage–around the world, without ever taking a plane. It’s going to take a while, maybe even two or three years. Whenever it happens, wherever it leads, and however long it takes, I hope you’ll enjoy reading about it.

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