Archive – Day 4
Tuesday, April 13, 1993
Looking Back...
The writing starts to get a little better on the fourth day, our last day on the train. I stopped writing so much about myself and actually looked out the windows to write about where we had been and what we saw. What a concept!
We arrived in NYC in the afternoon and went to stay with my dad’s friend, Tony, in Brooklyn.
The days just seem to be zipping by now. Already it is Tuesday, four hours out of New York. Our car on this new train is not bad, but there is nothing to encourage wandering around. The other train was receptive to wandering; this one stares at you like a zombie with every step you take.
We just saw the RCA dog, en grande, atop a building in Albany. All except Tom, that is. He didn’t see it until we crossed the Hudson River. We are now at Albany, and hopefully I can mail a postcard to my friends here. In all of Chicago I didn’t find one mailbox!
Union Station in Chicago was quite an experience. We wound our way around corridor after corridor, and there were still places we didn’t see. And the smoke! Diesel smoke everywhere, filling all the passages and even the Great Hall was smog-filled. And then the train platforms themselves, with their orange lights and expanses of concrete. It was an atmosphere quite contrary to classical railroad images, yet in its own way it had a special charm. I’m looking forward to going back there and rejoining the California Zephyr, although at that time our trip will be almost over.
There was a man at our station at Albany who was a taxi driver. I could tell because he kept shouting for passengers. “Taxi! Anybody want a taxi?” After a while he got a passenger, led him outside, and came right back in shouting for more passengers. Maybe he wasn’t a driver at all, but a taxi agent who was hired by individual drivers to find passengers. Who knows?
All the trees here in upstate New York seem to be seasonal. This makes the landscape quite bleak because none of the trees have grown back their leaves yet. So all the surroundings look dead, much like Illinois only on a greater scale. There are a few evergreens, but it mostly is tree skeletons around here.
Life on this train, although restricted to only one car, seems more full than it did on the other. From my seat on the aisle I can see a cute four-year-old girl singing “Bingo” rather repetitiously. I can remember in second grade some girl was proud of her skill to be able to sing that entire song from start to finish. It seemed like a big deal back then. Now it just gets monotonous. It’s funny how age can affect attitudes. Why is that? Perhaps it is just a tradition of peer pressure, which is passed down year after year that changes our attitudes, and not the passage of time. How can we “outgrow ”something if we are not influenced against it? It seems like a conspiracy to me, one that cannot be stopped.
As we get closer to New York (forty minutes now) I can begin to see the smog on the horizon. It’s not as bad as L.A. yet, but I think it’s getting close. Maybe in half an hour the sunlight will be even more brown than it already is.
New York, New York. We have arrived. Penn Station was a bit different than Union Station, having white lights and being more crowded.
And then we went into the city and it was just as I expected. Crowded, busy, full of taxi cabs and closed in. But Brooklyn is different from what I expected. I expected high-walled, narrow streets with wall-to-wall brownstones. I expected in to feel closed in, just like the city. But what I found was something without comparison. Brooklyn is Brooklyn, and nowhere else. It has no equal.
During a drive around the area, I found the Brooklyn I had been looking for. It is (the part I saw) down by Eighth Avenue and I believe is what is called Park Slope. That is my Brooklyn, the Brooklyn I was looking for and have now found.
But also there are many other areas of Brooklyn, each with its own individual style and flavor. The Belt Parkway, after putting up with California freeways, actually seemed like quite tame driving. The streets, on the other hand, were the rough part. Double parking, New York drivers, and blaring horns added up to quite an experience. But I enjoyed it. After only a few hours in Brooklyn I am looking forward to spending the entire week here. Even a whole month I might enjoy. But, as they say, “I wouldn’t want to live here.”
The lifestyle out here is so different from back West. As Tony was saying, it’s the vertical living lifestyle that really can be found nowhere else in the country. Here, a house is thirty feet wide, and four stories tall. There is a stoop out front, a basement, a piddly little back yard, and that’s all. As I said, just the novelty of it could last me a month. I have no desires yet for open spaces, no aversion to the cramped conditions, no claustrophobia from this apartment or neighborhood, and I foresee none during our visit. It’s a nice change of pace, a vacation from the quiet freedom of Johnson Lane. But, these feelings of novelty are only temporary. After a few months this lifestyle would grow rank. So, I will enjoy the next week here and just revel in any imaginative fantasies I may have about life here. Then I will move on. But, we have a whole week to look forward to. So, bring it on!