Gallivanting about Gotham

I've been to New York City many times, but during my recent visit--after an absence of about three years--I was able to make pilgrimages to places previously unexplored (the lovely Cloisters, for one). Thanks to an energy level that has been compared favorably to that of a certain pink bass-drum-beating bunny, I mostly made it from point to point on my own feet (now nicely criss-crossed with the unmistakable badge of Chaco tan-lines). Certainly traipsing about in the kind of ridiculous "heat bubble" that has entrapped the City in the last few days is not for everyone, but I must advocate an ambulatory (or perhaps bicycle- or scooter-based) mode of exploring New York as by far the most rewarding.

(1) Hoofing it assuages the "I'm-not-a-tourist-I-swear-but-I still-want-to-take-a-picture-of-the-sun-glimmering-on-that-lovely-Beaux-Arts-facade" guilt for those of us--who really must be most of the people walking about Manhattan at any moment--who are familiar enough with the place to qualify as a cut above those nice folks packed onto the double-decker Gray Line buses, but are nothing approaching "locals." Especially as the qualifications for being a New Yorker are higher than a busker on Venice Beach.
Walking (particularly in frigid winters or insufferable summers) seems partly to soften for me the conundrum between pulling out the cam and stashing the damned giveaway a little deeper in one's pack, walking just a bit faster and looking a bit more bored. Then again, perhaps living more "in the moment" would be not such a bad lesson for the good folk of the East Coast to learn...

(2) Funny that this post is making me seem such a New Age-y Leftcoaster, but, building on the last bit, walking allows one to fully engage all of one's senses. I love running as a mode of exploring new places as much as any nutty Runner's World subscriber, but walking, fast or slow, is vastly easier to maintain while remaining immersed in the smells and sights all around. Something tells me that's how our long-ago ancestral hominids managed to make it through savannahs and glacial mountainsides. Attentions otherwise demanded by the exigencies of survival can be turned easily to sucking down the greasy fumes of mystery-meat hot dogs, as there's probably nothing stalking you for supper in NYC, but I guess that is no certain matter....

 

Here's someone getting her supper by hunting (your recyclables, anyway).

(3) While staring at things with unusual intensity thanks to the mental alertness granted by walking steadily, one comes to notice the kinds of things that help one achieve that all-important sense of a place, the essential bouillon that can be subsequently dissolved to excellent effect in the simmering water of any conversation.
This time, as in the past, I of course saw the diversity in which New Yorkers rightfully take such pride, but came further to realize that it isn't merely all the different varieties of humanity that happen to be represented in Manhattan that makes up this diversity, but how closely said varieties live, walk, eat, sleep, work. Now, for me, it is the sheer density of humanity and its encrustations upon an environment that, though nearly hidden by the anthills built by people, still pokes through in awesome ways that makes Manhattan so devastatingly alluring.

 

Flowers in Highline Park.

And writ large, I find myself agreeing with a hypothesis I first heard on a podcast a few days ago about the gravitational field of big cities: imagine, as in Stephen Hawkings's tableau of the universe, a soft stretchy sheet upon which marbles were put. The heavier the marble, the more deeply it sinks into the sheet, pulling other marbles inexorably toward it. Manhattan is a quasar. The only reason I have for not immediately trying to move there as that pinnacle of Romantic Delusion, a Would-Be Writer, though, was made as clear to me in the few days I was just there as was the City's attraction: my oh-so-svelte graduate-student wallet. I'm doomed. I could never become naturalized as a citizen of  the City. On top of my skinny funds, there's my lust for seasonal produce and organic teas over 99-cent pizza slices and Oriental-flavored Maruchan and my preference for a dwelling-place not larded with vermin, traffic noises, or raucous roommates. Not infrequently I long to breathe something other than the indolent perfumes of the nut roasters' carts.

No way I could afford THIS on a regular basis if I lived nearby.

I wonder how I will feel after a couple of weeks in, first, farmburbia, then what must be one of the most perfect strip-mall-McMansion paradises of a suburb in the nation. Probably considering whether it would not be wiser after all to mutter "fuckitall," pack a bag, and start scanning Craigslist New York for a day job...