I strode
down the waterfront from West
New York to Hoboken yesterday, just to take in the air before the weather
turned.
This is
already very late in the season and yet sunshine kept me too warm after only a
few steps.
I had
left my car home thinking I would need to walk only to and from work, only to
find out the paper needed me to cover a ground breaking a few miles north.
I got a
ride to the event, and thought about taking the light rail back, but the light
rail stop was nearly a third of the way to where I had to go, so I just kept
walking, snapping pictures of the changing leaves and the vastly altered
environment.
The West
New York mayor mentioned the fact that this all used to be railroad tracks
where many of the long time residents from the upland side of the Palisades
used to play as kids.
Now it
is all buildings and riverfront walkway, joggers and bicycles in a perpetual
play land of the super rich.
I
certainly didn’t fit, except perhaps among the few other stragglers I saw
walking to and from what in another time might have been called servants’
entrances to the luxury buildings, these stragglers serving to keep up the
illusion that life is always pleasant along this side of the tracks.
The
water glistened with the odd sunlight that always haunts the world after Day
Light Savings ends, a tainted dark light that turns everything slightly brown,
as if the whole planet was one large leaf turning with the turning of seasons.
My boss
kept calling me on the cell phone to remind me that I needed to be back at the
office by 3
p.m. , and I kept thinking it
was later than it was because of the light.
This was
a walk through time as well as distance, especially when I finally crossed over
into Weehawken and saw the houses on the hill and the ramps to the
helix leading to the Lincoln Tunnel.
Seeing
this from below as a new vision, and yet, seemed to carry me back to those days
when I used to take the bus from Paterson to New York City . One bus took me along Boulevard East so I could see
the skyline. The other bus came down Route 3 through Secaucus. But both buses
eventually came to the tunnel.
For a
moment, I was 16 again, and thinking of the adventure ahead on the other side.
Last
winter, I came here to shoot pictures. The temperature was so slow the
electronics in my camera froze and so I wound up with a lot of distorted
colors, negative images of everything I saw.
This
sense of reversal, of fall stumbling into winter, of me walking through time as
well as space is always unnerving, because I lose myself for a moment and
struggle to find myself when I finally put my feet back onto a path I’m more
familiar with – the icons of my life spread out before me, but in an altered
state.
This was
a week from hell for a number of reasons, violent stalkers pursuing me, corrupt
officials seeking to silence me, illness that I thought might be more serious
than it was, all boiling up into one mess of an inner state only a walk like
this could dispel.
This
came in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, and so personal fate seemed to
intermingle with the fate of the world, and strolling along this walkway
towards an office I have worked in for a third of my life, in a town where I no
longer feel welcome, I felt more than a little scared – not of dying, but of
being forgotten or overrun by things over which I have no control, change,
corruption, personal greed.
I’m a
stubborn person. I tend to fight the good fight even when I know I can’t win,
forcing those who dislike me to use up their resources, even when those
resources seem imposing.
Justice
is always about holding powerful people accountable, and sometimes, you have to
get run over by change in order to make a difference, and sometimes, you have
defy the all powerful to prove they aren’t quite as powerful as they think.
Things
like changing seasons, brown sunlight, and an endless waterfront, are the only
things that mean anything in the end.
Nice!! Loved reading this
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