Traveler

clack. clack. clack. New Jersey rolls by in the distance, the urban sprawl of Newark and Seacaucus giving way to the wider fields past Elizabeth, onwards to Metuchen and New Brunswick, until, at last, in the fields near Princeton, the Garden State resembles its sublime moniker.

Or, all the same, as I fly down 95 after a detour by my home, across the George Washington Bridge, the radio playing, left for this connection, right for the other, through the turnpike and into the express lane.

I've traveled a lot lately, sometimes for fun, sometimes for work. Though my office is in New York City, my company has another office in East Windsor, New Jersey, closer to Trenton. My boss lives in Pennsylvania, as does a former colleague. We have a huge project on hand, and the Windsor office has become the central command post in our campaign.

A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Tulsa for my brother's wedding, departing out of Newark, the smoking steel towers of the region giving way quickly to fields and streams before we climbed so high that we might have been anywhere.

Before that, I went with some friends to a paddlesport expo, driving through the Holland Tunnel, the air blowers of which form one of the corners of our kayaking area. I've driven under, and paddled over, the same spot in the river, and that seemed kind of surreal to me.

While I'm at it, every day I walk three blocks up a hill to take and escalator nearly as far down, to board a subway that whisks me to work, in a building that, curiously, is built immediately above the train station that would take me to New Jersey.

I applied for a job out there, and almost took it, before deciding my current job wasn't so bad, and I wasn't prepared to leave the city.

I wrote some years ago that I feel at home in a terminal; there are signs, there is order, there are goals and destinations, rest stops and a feeling of motion, sometimes paused. I'll say that is my life, though I have carved out a home, and the stability I crave. I have a home base, but I am an interloper, seeing all these places, from all these angles.

The wind whips through the fields. I've seen the same marshes around Seacaucus in spring, summer, winter, fall, in howling rain and driven snow, in sunshine and in darkness. Past Newark, where all the inexperienced travelers que because they think it's the airport, then past the airport, and onwards, away from sprawl, to suburbia, to exurbia, and eventually to the municipal haven of New Brunswick.

How much space does one man need? In the end, not a lot, at least not all at once. But to see it, experience it, traverse it all, there can never be too much.

Redneck Weekend

I'm walking through a CVS parking lot in Binghamton, NY, the soles of my cheap hiking boots clapping like flip-flops, when suddenly, the sole on the left boot comes completely off.

"Guess I'll have to tear off the other one then," I told BW, my companion, reaching down to the right shoe to continue what had started only a day earlier.

Thus I wound down my Redneck Weekend in update New York.

--

I met BW last year through a mutual friend who lived in Ithaca. She was fighting cancer and had briefly been getting treatment in New York City before switching to a hospital at Cornell. BW would accompany her down to the city sometimes, and they would stay with me, and I would stay with him when I went up to visit her.While she has since passed away, we've kept in touch, initially working through our grief but subsequently forming a friendship.

BW is self-employed business owner. A self-described redneck, he lives more like a country gentleman - he cleans up well, has done a lot of work himself on two houses he owns, and he runs a small business in Whitny Point, renting things like excavators and generators to farmers, construction, and contractors in the area.

A few months ago I took an interest in firearms. My father was in the military, and most of my brothers shoot, either for recreation or professionally, and I thought I should at least try it. When I mentioned a shooting range in NYC, BW balked at the prices. "We can do a lot more up here," he said. So I had a standing invitation to come up and fire a few rounds.

When we finally set a date, he'd already signed up to participate in a scavenger hunt run by a local bar ("a dive bar, where people are missing teeth", he promised). My visit would be short, curtailed by my work schedule. I arrived late on Friday and left early Sunday afternoon, giving us basically a day to do things. So, we settled for hiking on his property in the morning, skeet shooting in the afternoon, and the scavenger hunt that night. 

From start to finish I was promised I'd see the high and low end of the community before I left.

--

I took a Greyhound bus up there. I was promised a three hour ride; it was over four. Whether it was weather,or traffic, I'm not sure. Traffic coming out of New York City wasn't so bad, but there was some serious rain further out, before we got to Scranton. We took a short rest stop before turning north, and an hour and half later, we were in Binghamton, where BW picked me up. It was a short drive from there back to Whitny Point.

There, we stopped at Aiello's, an Italian restaurant that's been in the family for two generations. BW knows the owners, and they're asked him to do some work for him, but he won't. He's in a position to be picky about his customers, and likes having a place he can come to without mixing business with leisure.

"This is the high end," he said. The food was OK. Surprisingly, the pasta was the weak spot, but the fried cod was good. 

By the time we got back to his house, it was late, so we pretty much washed up and crashed out. The next morning, we got up, had breakfast, and I got a tour of the house. He's got a nice property, back up against a creek, with views out to woodlands, and hills a bit beyond, glowing in fall foliage that's come down from its peak. We made our plans, gathered our guns, and set out for his other property : ten acres of land where he'd built a small shed to store a tractor, otherwise populated only by a camper and small cabin situated by two ponds.

We stopped and feed his koi - one of the ponds is for koi only. He keeps a bottle of fish food in a bush near by. As he scattered the food out, the koi came to the top and nibbled it away. Apparently their biggest threat is heron, which will spear and swallow a fish. BW pointed out a couple of his favorites and went in a bit on the life cycle and value of koi.

We went for a walk on the grounds, hiking up a hill that ran through the trees, and then back along the property line against some pasture. He pointed out places where he'd cleared away brush to maintain a trail, and pointed out the different kinds of trees he had - cherry, oak, ash, beech. The beech trees are actually an infestation, with dozens of new beech clustered in areas where an old beech died or was felled.

By then, it was getting close to lunch time. A couple of phone calls confirmed our earlier plans. We went home, packed a cooler, grabbed some guns, and set out for some skeet shooting.

--

All in, I fired at least six different weapons that day: a 20-gauge shotgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .17 bolt-action rifle with a scope, a .22 pump action rifle, a .27 high-power rifle with a scope, and a .22 revolver.

The shotguns were what we used for skeet. BW's friends, a straight couple I'll call M&M, had a skeet thrower. We brought along almost two hundred biodegradable clay pigeons and used almost all of them. 

Predictably, I did better with the 20-gauge shotgun than the 12-gauge. It was easier to swing into aim, and the recoil was manageable. The recoil on the 12-gauge wasn't terrible, but more noticeable, and I only fired it a couple of times.

The .17 was fun to shoot, if only because it looked cool, a black bolt-action rifle with a magazine clip, looking like a miniature "real" sniper rifle. The sights needed adjusting, but once that was done, it was like playing sniper. This is harder than it looks. Finding the target, then lining it up, and then not wobbling all over the target, is difficult.

The .22 was nice and easy to shoot, though a little more difficult to aim with iron sights. I got to try two versions of the same rifle: one with a wood stock, the other aluminum, which was considerably lighter. Both were fun and easy to shoot - just getting used to shooting. I'm not sure what I'd use them for other than target practice, but for getting the rhythm down of load, aim, fire, they were perfect.

The .27 had the most recoil of any gun I fired that day. It felt like a gun. I sighted in on the target and compensated for my weaknesses - high and to the left, I aimed down and to the right of my target, and I hit it dead on. I felt it though, thudding into my shoulder, then spitting out a brass cartridge over two inches long.

The revolver, I'm sad to say, was pretty useless. First, it was hard to punch spent casings out - we had a narrow screw to push them out. Second, it was crazily inaccurate.None of us landed a round more than twelve feet out, and even then, only once. "It's alright, if you put it in someone's belly you'd have even odds on hitting them," I said.

--

Skeet shooting was awesome. We'd fired at some stationary targets, but skeet move. They fly across the sky, and after I'd gotten comfortable, Ma (Mi's husband) would switch up the flight patter with each toss. At one point he threw two that went in opposite directions. I didn't get either of them.

I did nail quite a few more though. I didn't keep count but I'd say 1 in 5 was about right. "Pull!!" Then out flies the disk, aim, track, fire. I found I did much better if I waited a moment to fire after sighting the target in.

--

That night we participated in a scavenge hunt put on by a local bar. BW and I were part of a team with two friends of his, a mother and daughter (N and P). We met up at the local bar and killed some time after registering.

One of the ways locals kill time is flinging a dollar at the ceiling. I noticed this first when I looked at the ceiling and saw a bunch of dollar bills stuck to the city, in various stages of unfolding. Basically, you take a tack and poke it through the middle of the dollar, back it with a quarter, an the fold the dollar back around the quarter. The result is a dart, weighted up front. A quick hand-flick sends it to the ceiling. It took a while, but I finally got it.

At 7, we lined up and dashed out with a sheet of 28 objectives. Altogether, we accomplished 20 of them, most requiring local knowledge that my team provided (as a visitor, I provided mostly enthusiasm). However, two items stand out in recollection.

One was to get a photo of a teammate in head-to-toe camouflage. After some discussion, BW called a friend to arrange a meetup, we had a fortuitous round of luck. At a Dollar General store, we spotted another team simply throwing fleece camouflage pajamas on over their street clothes. After they left, I did the same, completing my ensemble with a camouflaged duck-bill cap. Camera, photo, snap. Done.

The other one was to have a photo of a teammate drinking a shot of Wild Turkey with a total stranger at a specific bar. We went to the bar, and arranged a drink with the bartender (who had done the same once already, leading us to wonder how much longer she'd be working that night).

Here, we were fortunate for another goal: getting a fifty-cent piece. Our activities attracted the attention of a patron in the bar, who demanded to see our list. As it turned out, she had a fifty-cent piece. She gave it to us gratis, with no expectation of return. Fabulous.

We drove around collecting other items. Inspiration struck when we realized that one demand  - a photo of us holding a wooden carrot - referred to a local sign. Someone had hidden the sign, and then stayed around to tell us it wasn't wooden (it was). It was one of our last gains, and shortly after, we went back to the bar to put in for our prize.

We didn't win. but, we had fun, and in the partying afterwards, I met a bunch of interesting people.

Most were surprised I was from New York City. "Must be real different, huh!" they couldn't realize I grew up in a smaller city, and have lived in bucolic areas myself. Most hazarded that they couldn't imagine living in a place as large and overwhelming as New York City, unable to imagine that the city itself is just a series of small towns next to each other, that I commute from suburban Washington Heights, surrounded by park, and I'm not out on the pavement every day.

My redneck weekend was a lot of fun. I got to do something I've never done, spend time with a good friend, and see how a substantial part of America lives. I recommend everyone, redneck or not, take a "redneck weekend".

Memories of the Sweet Jane Hotel

Substitute "Oklahoma" for "Connecticut" and I might have written this. Culled from a Gawker comment.

When I was 17 I moved to manhattan and lived at the Jane West Hotel (parenthetically please add the tedious, as it was then called). It was a 10x8 room and shared showers. The clientele were either crazies or European kids on a tour (we didn't call them Eurotrash yet!). I was the only clueless refugee from the suburbs living there, so clueless that though a Dylan fan I had not yet heard of the Chelsea Hotel and therefore did not realize I was living out my youthful decadence and confusion on the wrong block. The movie Liquid Sky came out about then and the line, I was raised in Conecticut to come to NY and be alternative (or to that effect) summed up my adventure. I come from Connecticut and kill with my pussy is anatomically inappropriate for me.

I remember one guy who used to sit on the landing reading Heidegger. And the time I woke up late and ran to the roof to gauge what time it was and there was a cruiseship going down the Hudson and you couldn't even see NJ it was so big. The guy and the cruiseships are gone, I suppose. 

Dating

Remember when, I think to myself, I used to blog about dating, and going out, and all the fun adventures I had in the city?

It seems so sophomoric now. It was as if I would go do something just to write about it. It wasn't enough to experience life; I was accumulating material, as if I had nothing to say until I did something - a notion which, come to think of it, was probably accurate.

So, last night I had a nice date. we met in the Lower East Side. We had a dinner date. We talked - as seems to happen increasingly often with my dating - about religion and politics.

It was a reflection of old habits, trawling the LES, drinking and eating and kissing under halogen lights. I keep thinking I'm too old for this, or perhaps the thrill is gone, but in all it was a good date, and I hope we have another.

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Rollin' in the River

Another day on the river. I spent more time than I expected, but I needed it.

I went down to the boathouse to go out on a trip. I assisted with two other volunteers plus our leader. we had about twelve members of the public and headed across to the Jersey side. We went up, and intended to go farther, but the wind and current not aligned well and were whipsawing us all over the place. Half my effort went to just keeping my boat straight. We headed up to about 80th street (we started out at 56th) and crossed back, coming down with the current.

I learned a lot about managing my boat in less than ideal conditions. I'm also getting my face around the boathouse seniors. I did get a little talk about staying with the group. I got out to far ahead a few times. I need to check the rearview more often and make sure I'm still with the group.

When we got back, I took a break and hopped out of the Chennai. I love the Chennai, by the way, it's an awesome boat. It's speedy and it tracks well. I wanted to try some rolling, so after a snack I went out in a Baja, which I'm more familiar with. I only spent about half an hour rolling. I got pretty good, but flubbed at one point and did a wet exit. I did well climbing back in, but by the time my buddy and I were done pumping the boat out, we were ready for some other things, so we chatted with another volunteer about hand rolling, and I plied around the embayment for a bit.

There was a huge arriving event - some sort of group trip from Albany, mostly folks in their sixties and older, plus a few extras for the last leg. Some of them had very nice, very fancy boats. We helped them out and walked them back to the lawn in front of the boathouse, then noshed on sandwiched. At one point I rode up to my usual spot to see how things were going, and later two more volunteers came up, so I rode back down and changed into regular clothes to go home.

I love kayaking. I really enjoy this particular club as well, and it's fun to ride a bike up and down the trail the city's developed along the waterfront. I learned a bit more about how the trust and authority structures are organized for different parts of the waterfront. It's really fascinating. It's remarkable what the city has done, compared with what was along the waterfront before.

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