Travels With Mishipeshu: An American Hitchhikes Lake Superior
Part seven: Albany to New York City
For the next several weeks I am featuring a memoir of an epic, if reckless, hitchhiking trip I took from Iowa to New York City, via Canada, back in 1984. The route led me over and around the Canadian side of Lake Superior. This is the last entry.
Part seven. Part six. Part five. Part four. Part three. Part two. Part one.
I decided to take a bus for the last little section of the journey. I knew that traffic in the New York City area would be crazed, and no place to try to hitch a ride. I’d had excellent luck hitching so far, perhaps due to the ongoing protections of Mishipeshu, but I was no longer within his sphere of influence. Maybe it was the time to stop tempting fate. I was about to transition from relative wilderness to one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world.
I’d heard of New Paltz, and knew it was fairly close to New York City. I asked my ride into town to drop me off at the bus station.
The bus station in New Paltz was inside what I think was a diner, though it might have been some sort of convenience store too. All I know is that it was large enough and social enough so that there were plenty of answers when I asked, “If I’m taking a bus into Manhattan, where’s the best place to stop?”
I’d been studying the bus map: the primary choices inside Manhattan were Port Authority, Penn Station and Grand Central. I’d heard the names before, but I had only a vague idea where they actually were. A few men offered opinions, but the one I remembered (the one that made me remember the entire exchange) was this: “If you’re going to Port Authority you better bring a gun.”
I was pretty sure he was joking (he got a laugh from his cohorts), though my mind immediately went to the chain confiscated back in Canada. I’d eventually have to make my way to Crown Heights in Brooklyn that day, to my friend Toby’s apartment, but I really wanted to make a memorable entrance into the city. I wanted to head straight to the center of the chaotic thrum of crazy New York City energy I’d experienced during my last trip. I’d been out in the wilderness for two weeks. I wanted to experience a New York City moment.
Times Square seemed like the best spot to experience it, and Port Authority was the closest destination to that famous landmark.
I was already knee deep in urbanity. After weeks surrounded by trees and granite and huge bodies of water, first around Lake Superior and then the Adirondacks, my city eye had grown unused to all the telephone wires and electric wires and the transformers and junction boxes they plugged into and the utility poles used to string them along. And not just the phone and electric lines, but the roads and the guard rails and the traffic lights, the entrance and exit ramps, the highways and Interstates, the airplanes overhead, the trains rumbling by, the trucks and cars rushing past in blurs of color and noise.
I saw the trappings of civilization more clearly.
I wasn’t railing against all that humanity; on the contrary, I was actively making my toward it.
R. Crumb, the cartoonist, described the filtering out of the fine details of this visual environment, as well as documented it in his work.
“People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”
- R. Crumb
The bus took I-87 down into New York City. The trip took around two hours, the buildings of Manhattan bobbing in and out of sight amid the industrial parks and exit signs and Interstate entrances and exits. My memories of this part of the bus trip are pretty jumbled and staccato. I was excited about finally entering New York, weeks after I started. I-87 turned into I-287. We dipped briefly into New Jersey, hugging the shore of the Hudson River, the Emerald City beckoning from the far side. Frustratingly, as we grew closer, our paced slowed, inhibited by traffic and construction.
Approaching the island, we went over a tangle of bridges and overpasses, then suddenly dipped underground. I learned later that was the Long Island Expressway, followed by the Lincoln Tunnel. At the time I had no idea what anything was. I just watched, a passive traveler, a-tingle at my approaching destination.
The bus emerged from the Lincoln tunnel into daylight and the splendor and bustle of midtown Manhattan, but almost immediately dropped underground again, the city dropping maddeningly away from view. Most of the route to Port Authority, by bus anyway, takes place underground. Occasionally, a view of street level Manhattan would tease me from above, as I peered up through steel plates and I-beams and all the other nuts and bolts involved in keeping the super-structure of NYC streets from collapsing.
The last several hundred yards of the passage to Port Authority were all darkness and stained concrete and exhaust fumes. It was like being in a giant underground parking garage, and I suppose that’s because in a way it is. All those busses entering and exiting the Port Authority, 24/7, every day of every year. The City of New York never sleeps, and neither does the Port Authority.
At last, the bus pulled into its stall. We were still well underground. But as I grabbed my pack and worked my way to the front of the bus, single-file, I could see signs of life from the windows beyond the entrance.
I walked off the bus an into the doors of Port Authority, and the great teeming city beyond it. Right off, navigating my ways through the hallways of the bus terminal, I taken aback by the numbers of homeless. We had homeless people back in Minneapolis, but not in these numbers. Crack and AIDS and Reaganomics were beginning to take their toll.
I marveled briefly at the openness of prostitution and drugs deals, happening right in the middle of a crowded hallways of a bus and train terminal. But by then I’d taken a couple of stairways up, I was on the street level, and sunlight was streaming through the giant ceiling to floor windows, and I had to get out amongst it all. I found the banks of lockers and stowed away my backpack. I had to be in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, later in the day, as that was where my designated couch was, but I was in no hurry.
42nd St. was directly in front of me.
I wandered. I was at the tumultuous center of New York City. I turned corners randomly. I followed the flow of the foot traffic. I stopped and watched whenever I noticed a pocket of weird behavior. I appreciated the sight of the stylish and impeccably made-up women of midtown, and let myself be intimidated by the hardcore well-dressed stockbroker types. I tried to follow the ball of the three-card monte masters. I stood at the base of tall buildings and leaned back like the tourist I was, and let their height amaze me. I watched them sway in the gentle summer breeze, not overly different than the trees I walked among in the wilderness of Canada only a few weeks prior.
I turned a random corner and saw the famous canyon walls of Times Square before me. This was before the days of competing video screens the size of houses. Most of the visual field of Times Square at the time was made up of billboards and lights, with one giant video screen staring down at, appropriately enough, One Times Square (the same tower where the ball always dropped on New Year’s Eve).
The flag of the TKTS line (cheap same day Broadway tickets) flapped in the breeze. Traffic crawled and honked. Pedestrians pooled at the base of streetlights, and spilled out into crosswalks when the light turned green.
Times Square has a long and colored history, but it’s safe to say the Times Square I walked into forty years ago is not the Times Square of today. Prostitution and drug deals took place out in doorways and alleys. Peep shows and triple X porn theaters operated on every corner, screaming comically lurid titles from their marquees I’ll not bother to name now. In the early 90s the Walt Disney Corporation moved in, and cleaned things up, for better and for worse. I’ve got no problem with lowering crime and revitalizing urban centers, but the gloriously decadent world of Times Square I walked through four decades earlier is gone.
It was a different time.
I decided to walk into a Broadway theater before heading back to retrieve my pack. Back in Minneapolis, most of the theaters have a policy that, just before showtime, they sold any remaining seats at a greatly reduced price. They called them “rush seats.” So, I walked into Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, still shaggy and unkempt and weird from over two weeks on the road.
“Hi,” I said to the well-dressed man behind the ticket counter.
“Hi,” he replied carefully, wondering, I think, why I was there. I may have looked homeless.
“Do you have rush seats?” I asked awkwardly.
“What are those?” His tone was a bit chilly.
I played the friendly Midwesterner. “In Minneapolis, five minutes before the show was about to start, they’d sell any unused seats at a discount.”
Crickets.
I persisted. “Rush seats. Do you guys do that?”
He leaned toward me a little, a trace of a smile beginning to show. He may have exaggerated his accent to speak, because what he drawled next was classic New York City arrogance: “This isn’t Minneapolis. This is Broadway, son.”
I think he enjoyed the moment as much as I did.
They started selling rush seats on Broadway in 1996, but that was a little over a decade too late to save me any embarrassment.
I’d experienced my first New York City moment. With that accomplished, I headed back to Port Authority to retrieve my pack, and then ventured down into the subway -tunnels to head toward Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where a friend had promised me a couch to sleep on, and the next step in my own personal hero’s journey awaited me.
“The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss. Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.”
- Joseph Campbell
Follow your bliss, friends. But maybe pursue it a little more carefully than I did.
Peace.
The End
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