Subway Ride

Dear Kid, 

Thanks so much for your email. I’m happy that you and Dalia are housed together in Bunk 1; glad Ava is fun and good at teaching wet-hair-towel-wrapping techniques; and very sorry about the food and the mattresses. Last night when I was having dinner (chicken caesar salad) I was remembering that you and I would normally be eating kale pasta (it was Monday), and I missed you. That said, I’m glad you’re at Wricampia and glad you can spend time writing and glad you have electives like boating and the graphic novel and glad you can be with Dalia and glad you can make new friends like Ava. 

Not much of note has happened in the 24 or so hours since your green bus left for the Poconos from the Upper West Side. So I’m going to write about a subway ride I took this weekend that I found diverting. 

I rode a southbound Q from Atlantic Yards/Barclays Center to Cortelyou Road. It was early Saturday evening, around 6:30 p.m. I stood at the platform spot we use on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to get to your bus stop at the Cortelyou library branch, entering a car near the wooden platform benches (one facing the southbound trains, one facing the northbound) so that we can exit near the Cortelyou station stairwell. The car was crowded enough so that I had to stand but empty enough to offer plenty of choices; I held a pole at the midway point of a long bench (with space for four on each side of the pole), facing the car’s rear. Directly in my eye line, at the pole near the doors, stood a mom and her two boys, maybe 8 and 6. The mom -- African-American, in her 30s, I guessed, thick-set, with delicate features that sagged with fatigue -- gripped in one hand a large shopping bag and the handle bars of two scooters, bending a bit to keep their wheels on the ground; her other hand held the center pole. Another shopping bag, filled with clothes or sporting goods or groceries, I couldn’t tell, slumped on the ground, its contents set to topple. The subway made the easing sound that indicates imminent take-off. “Hold on,” the mom instructed the younger boy, whose tight afro featured on each side delicate spirals cut with a razor. The boy stumbled back, almost into me, before catching his balance. “You need to hold on,” his mother said. His older brother (thinner, more athletic) said, “You fell!” pointing with his left hand and keeping his right hand cocked on his hip, swaggering. “You almost fell down!” The younger boy said something I didn’t catch. When the mom said to the older boy, “You need to hold on, too,” he took a minute, turning his hips toward her, left arm dangling, right arm cocked, a stance that said: What are you going to do about it? I couldn’t see his mom’s face, but, a second later, when the boy’s right hand darted from his hip to the pole that he held tight for the rest of the ride, I imagined her expression. 

At that point my attention swerved to a group of four on the bench to my left. On the far end, sitting nearest the doors, a man in his 30s (dark mop of hair, stubble shadowing his jawline, dark soft round eyes) roused himself from what may have been a nap when a man sitting at the center pole (similar age, taller, thin, with narrow dark eyes and a hawk-like nose and similarly dark tousled hair) leaned over the two people between them to say hello. They began to banter in a language I couldn’t catch. They were clearly chummy but not intimate -- I guessed friends from the neighborhood. Tall Guy leaned over, stretched a long arm to share a soft handshake with Soft-Eyes Guy, then introduced the man to his left: a square-shouldered, thick-torsoed man with razor-short hair who spent the ride leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, a posture he barely budged to exchange greetings and a much firmer handshake with Soft-Eyes. Tall Guy and Soft-Eyes continued a chat that lasted the rest of my ride, interrupted by an occasional grunt or quick comment from Stocky Guy. I was trying to catch their language (Italian?) but was distracted by the person sitting between Stocky Guy and Soft-Eyes: a woman, a generation older (late 50s? early 60s?), who wore a square-cut gray dress with a drab pattern that perhaps came from a 1960s Sears catalog or a picked-over department store in the former Soviet Bloc. She had no obvious make-up, wavy gray curls cut sensibly short, and a doughy face marked with small, sharp brown eyes. On almost no evidence, I guessed she was Soft Eyes’ mother; they sat close, and his left arm occasionally touched her as he gesticulated. But she was never introduced, and she never acknowledged either Soft Eyes nor the two gentlemen to her right; during the entire conversation she stared straight ahead. (Russian: that was the language they were speaking.) At first I thought the woman’s stare was blank, and I wondered if she were somehow mentally incapacitated, until I saw her eyes dart to a conversation near the doors and realized she wasn’t missing a thing.

I followed her gaze to the 6-year-old, trying to tell his mother something. I heard him utter a single phrase at least six times in rapid succession: “And then I saw...” It came out “AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw/ AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw...,” like a record with a scratch forcing the needle back to its starting point. The mother, still and calm as a pond, said, “Take your time. Stephen. You have all the time you need.” Stephen inhaled, started over, and moved right past it: “And then I saw another boy jump off the stairs...” 

I felt moved to say something to the mother, along the lines of: “I really appreciate the way you parent these boys.” But I imagined how that exchange might play out: “What are you doing listening to a private conversation?” And who was I to provide her with approbation? Why did she need a strange 53-year-old man telling her he thought she was doing a great job? At the same time I felt sad to stay silent, as if it were a loss -- a flaw in our American society, somehow -- that I couldn’t easily share with this fellow traveler my admiration. 

Just then a couple ran onto the car, barely beating the closing doors. They were in their late teens or early 20s, both laughing, full of energy and the promise of a summer night. The young man (boy, really) had short blond curls and a sharp-cut, sheeny suit; the young woman (younger than he, I thought) had long straight blond hair, a tight-fitting sleeveless light-blue dress cut mid-thigh, and a diaphanous orange scarf that fluttered behind with her flowing hair. Large-eyed, out of breath, they flowed past the mother and her boys, past the Russians, past me, up the car, seeking seats. The entire car’s energy shifted; even the people whose eyes didn’t follow them (and most everyone’s did, including the two young boys’ and the Russian mother’s) felt their rush of arrival, felt the wake of their heedless youth, felt, I calculated, envious or pitying or irked or regretful. I felt none of those things. I felt happy to be on the Q, happy to be among a crowd of Brooklynites, happy to be alive and alert to the ceaseless carnival of a summer Saturday night in the city. 

And then I darned near missed my stop. 

I love you, Kid! Hope your first full day of Wricampia has been a blast. 

Love,

Daddy

Peter's Owl

One morning last month while on vacation near the Finger Lakes, I walked. I decided against taking my sister’s dog and to walk unencumbered. The property I’d rented with my brood (sister, mother, daughter) sat on 60 acres crossed by dozens of trails. After days of walking with a dog and an 86-year-old and a 9-year-old, striding at my own pace was a pleasure. I headed east on a trailhead we’d passed the previous day, which turned out to be marked with a “1” on dozens of thin squares of yellow-painted tin nailed to tree trunks about 8 feet above a path muddied by summer rains through a thin tree canopy. I turned briefly south on a trail marked Yellow 6 (yellow trails could be used by mountain bikes), then west on Blue Trail 1 (more thickly forested, more tree roots, no bikes, less mud). I saw no one. 

As my body found a rhythm my brain traveled to Scotland, to last summer, to the Borders Abbeys Way, where over six days I walked 90-odd miles near the northern English border in a loop between towns featuring abbey ruins from the 11th-14th centuries. A travel company took my suitcase each day from town to town, leaving me with a daypack, a thin trail guide, and detailed topographical maps. Trails were marked with a symbol (a capital A smashed atop a capital W), with what proved to be long stretches between signs. I was alone and encountered almost no one on the hilly trails, which ran mostly across rocky fields dotted with sheep (who enjoy expansive areas to roam) and an occasional farmhouse and patches of second- or third-growth trees; I crossed paved roads only when nearing a town. The travel company’s suggested gear included one item I had neglected to purchase: a whistle. If I broke an ankle I could have been overnight in a field, where farmers (on the evidence) seldom walk. I wore excellent boots, for which I was grateful at least hourly. My week-long circuit ran roughly clockwise (southwest, northwest, northeast, southeast). Each day’s trek ended in a new town and a new hotel or B&B. I carried rain gear, though it rained significantly but once. I lost the trail every day. I had no one to blame but myself: no spouse, no child, no sibling, no parent, no friend, no place but inward to take my excoriating anger. The experience felt fresh. 

The first day, scheduled for 18 miles, I misread an ambiguous trail marker, failed to cross a stile, and walked more than two miles off course. Borders Abbeys Way was crisscrossed with a half-dozen and more trails maintained by various groups, some national, some regional, some local. Junctions came marked by a mishmash of signs, or no signs at all; mistaking a trail was easier than falling down. After a fruitless half-hour seeking my conjoined A/W, with my ears detecting what I decided was a highway, I turned around and walked back two minutes before deciding I’d been right originally, turning back until hearing again what was most certainly a highway, at which point, in a moment that felt absurdly like defeat, Self-Preservation triumphed over Foolish Stolidity and I broke out the day’s topographical map. The sizable hill to my right should, I realized, have been on my left. Shit.

The wrong path had led mostly downhill through a rough trail along the fenced edge of a sheep field. I realized I could triangulate and cut off a sizable chunk of path by taking a route at a traverse angle. If I kept in sight a cell tower two hills over, I calculated, I’d return to my A/W trail. This required hopping the fence and walking through a field of what looked like high grass. I set out with renewed energy. (Map skills!) My vigor lasted two minutes, as the field proved to be hip-high gorse, untilled for years, studded with viciously-thorned vines, and pocked with stones and pits and slick mud that harbored, it turned out, black flies. The day was warm; I had already sweated through two cotton shirts. Head bent to the next step, dodging thorns, swatting a ceaseless buzzing menace, I launched a stream of ever-more-imaginative curses. The cell tower seemed to get no closer. My knees and shoulders throbbed. It was nearly noon; once I regained my path I still had nine or 10 miles to walk. My body hadn’t worked this strenuously in a decade. What the hell was I doing? Who was I kidding, thinking I could enjoy a carefree stroll in a foreign land over the course of days by myself? I had no whistle. My phone had no bars. My body could lie in this field for days. Death by twisted knee. Death by starvation. Death by stupidity. Forty-five minutes later, sweat drenched, joints aching, bloody handed, light headed, I stumbled to the field’s edge, climbed a fence, and rejoined a smooth track, where two minutes later I saw an A/W sign and surged with unalloyed rage. Fucking arrow at the last stile had pointed almost perpendicular instead of up. Who the fuck had marked these trails? Ten minutes later, pounding downhill alongside a tree stand, it started to sprinkle. Jesus H. Jehoshaphat. Then I heard a bird call. Could it be? No. Could it be Peter’s owl? 

My friend Peter and I had spent the previous week in Edinburgh and points north enjoying plays and parks and good restaurants and other urban pleasures. At our last meal, discussing the separate journeys upon which we were to embark the next morning, Peter, who knows me better than anyone, wondered how I’d fare walking solo. I confessed to fear. “At your lowest moment,” he said, “when you’re tired and broken and filled with self-loathing, I’ll send you a message.” I knew where this was headed. Peter knew that in middle-school I, the youngest of four, had rebelled against my siblings, had demanded they stop calling me “baby,” an insult that had rankled for years. My 12-year-old self had spent a weekend family therapy session sobbing over my plight; at weekend’s end, I swore that no one would ever call me “baby” again. (When my sister did the following month I smacked her across the face; when my brother did a couple of weeks later, I jumped off a ladder and flailed at him until my dad pulled me off.) For years now Peter, when he sees my self-pitying worst, has gently mocked me in falsetto singsong: “Baby! Baaaay-bee!” Drunk at our final Scotland dinner I said, “You’ll send a message through a bird or something.” Peter laughed. “Exactly. I’ll send an owl. And you know what my owl will say.” We said it together, in an accent approximating falsetto owl: “Bay-beee! Baay-beeeeeee!” We laughed so long a waiter came to ask if we needed anything or just the check. 

Now, trudging downhill along a stand of trees, miles from my destination, wet, aching, bitten, Peter’s call arrived. It couldn’t be. Was it a mourning dove? I stopped. “Bay-bee!” Surely I hallucinated. Again, clearer: “Bay-beeeee!” Unbelievable. Peter’s owl! I breathed in, then laughed out loud. I shucked my pack, drank water, donned my rain jacket. I listened: no bird. I read my guidebook. Only three miles until a tiny town with a pub that promised a late lunch. Then six miles after that. I was not roughing it, not trekking the Outback or Andean peaks or the Alaskan wilderness. I was walking between tumblers of Scotch. New rule: Pride wastes time. Seeking help signals no defeat. Go too long without a trail sign, break out the fucking map. 

Fucking Peter.