Checking
the conditions…
Much like the stunning substantiation won
by watching a measuring tape stretch deep into the thirties at the fork of a
pinched caudal, so was his face. His
eyebrows rose to beam a sense of surprised relief in having heard the assurance
of confidence that was my answer reaching from the kitchen, overcoming the chatter
of some cable station’s fodder spewing from a flat-panel in the living room. Yea! No problem!
Uh huh, I’ll drive ya up. Let me
know when you’re ready.
Weighing
the odds before heading out…
I didn’t plan on concealing the rings of
cigarette burns bored through this polyester seat with the wrinkled hems and
stitches woven in an airy weave of linen fabric. More so, the sultry, donated cover of my shorts. This apparent, driver’s-side derivative born
from an instantaneous decision I made with the same swiftness of the New York minute that he used to stuff a
change of overnight clothes into a travel bag.
A decision that reinforces in reminding me of the shiny pin of privilege
that comes with wearing a word as simple in comprehension and commonplace in everyday
expression as friendship. A word far too easy in the daily rush of life
to bruise and abuse, or mutilate with “likes”
from a detached, fleshless electronic mirror of reality with the click of a
mouse or a fingertip’s swiping tap of an app, or trample and twist between myriad
variations of echoing, eggshell-thin utterances of pride. A word with not only the most innate of
understood meaning, but also the hardest of definitions to enact faithfully.
One that we may hammer with a ringing truth and know that its
reverberation will sound in a harmonic union of no synonymic substitute. It is a churning work of creation that we
hope will never break in form, like a standing wave moving against the tide,
rising from the sea’s surface, a saline salience admired in recognition from
afar. Unique. And as this, we can only
hope to remain fluid if the tides of friendship ever come to slacken, knowing
that with patience and the recurrent acceptance of inevitable change, they may again
turn to flood one’s memory with new experiences, having fully-ebbed of what is
of less importance only to reveal the
winding contour of a sweeping past hidden beneath the surface of a deeper
understanding. The antonym of I’m much more comfortable lying here on the
couch. A selfless spontaneity. Or, an
outright overlooked onus of obligation that in this onset of twilight has led
me into steering 5100 lbs. of rolling steel and compelling me to stare straight
ahead through prescription eyeglasses. Action, for a just purpose.
The
release…
One hauling drive of a cast has crossed
into the distant waters of a neighboring state and another made so far that its
soaring altitude has descended from the bellies of clouds. His first hook-up is made only minutes after
arriving at the chosen churning-action confluence of 326 W. 40th. The
Hotel Four Points by Sheraton. He
makes a clean entry out from the cradling height of the passenger-side door
into the vastness of possibility he may find swimming under his feet. A college roommate he hasn’t seen shimmer in
smile for seven years nears closer at his retrieval. Sidewalk handshakes, shirt-clinching back-slaps,
high-rising hoots, and giving’s of gratitude.
Keepers, in one another’s
eyes. Their enthusiasm hints at a
favorable night ahead. A blitz of laughs
and tales to be entered in their respective log books.
Reeling-in
allure, snagged of an urban overload…
Eight thirsty, pumping pistons fire from
the honed depths of a 5.7L Dodge Hemi power plant, roaring, gurgling, and
purring the product of cranking, combusting compression from their rotating and
shrieking rubber-to-asphalt torque at the press of my sandal two-thousand shy
of red-line-reaching rpms, belching these
throaty sounds within the thinning spill of sunlight disappearing into a swelling
sponge of twilight from the trumpet of a cavernous tailpipe, coming to be immediately
muffled of any chest-beating masculinity amongst the immutable might that is
this cacophonous city’s myriad miles of unclean concrete, her sky-kissing
stories of steel, avenues of glimmering glass and spasmodic sea of neon and LED
animations looming, winding, flowing, blinking, her multitudes of millions mingling,
crosswalks crowding with casts of creeping footsteps, racing dashes, brushing
weaves of shoulder, clopping high-heels, long-legged summer-strutting sex
appeals, digging headlong honks, my side-view mirror’s half-inch shave, a giving
graze of grace, the passing driver’s unconcerned face, Con Ed’s rising streams
of steam, sidewalk squalor, the taxicab’s holler, traffic signals allergic to
green, returning red, unbuttoned collars and retired ties, the service economy
worker’s commencing commute, his computer tomorrow to reboot, flaunting
fashionistas flowing on their feet, the epicurean conceiting of a Condé Nast Traveler retreat, jay walkers and street talkers, rumbles of conspire far
below the many skyscraper’s spire, gridiron, gridlock, Dutch-laid cobblestone
block, a vendor’s sourdough sprinkled salt, a drunk’s breath of ash, rot, and sour-mashed
malt, foreign tongues, naïveté, native walkers on the stray, capturing cameras
aiming, flashing, uploading, tagging, millions of pixels of a personal pretension,
reflective fluorescent-yellow vests, attachés, orange construction nets,
hydraulic hammering, pneumatic noise, a bottleneck of sneaking taillight ploys. A chorus of streets and avenues that could never
exist as silence. A metropolis, missing
of melatonin, impossible to coax with sleep.
An island of bedrock, whose arteries of asphalt forever flow, whose capillaries
of concrete find the footways to doorsteps distant, whose chiseled shoulders of
schist resist against a natal river’s turning of the tide churning at her side.
Underpass…
It’s now 10:49pm on a Tuesday night in
June. The sinking slice of crescent has
long crossed over the finish line of the western sky’s horizon leaving me in
its moon dust. I’m forty-miles away from
the comforts of routine. A man, who at
this hour, would normally be entangled in a sparing thread-count of cotton,
striving to stay awake at the attentive trance of TV’s “reality” coaxing for
five-minutes-more of my somniferous stare, curled amongst pillows and a muddled
mash of sheets, twisting, slipping-away, passing, sleeping, stalled from
movement until the first eye-opening ring of alarm set on my phone awaits to
sound within a scant six hours’ time, all before the sun will again sneak
skyward to engild the soaring edges and angles of this city’s glass grid, these
twinkling towers teeming, glinting of a shining golden-orange shower.
The city’s crosstown congestion, avenues of
intersections plagued by the many over-hanging synchronizations of ill-timed illuminated
instruction, yellow yielding to red, direct me at a stop-and-go dash of
dashboard-instrument discordance, dials rising and falling, accelerating and
braking, revving and idling, last-second crossings over the solid-striped lines
of adjacent lanes and standing plastic stanchions between impetuous passageways
on W 41st and 8th, those feeding the tiled-tubes of 495
W. My steed of steel is jostled by the
countless canyons carved of rim-punishing asphalt. Assaults, as if to the hull of a ship by stormy
sea, mark the street-winding exodus along an unsightly visage of New York neglect.
I’ve silenced the truck’s FM radio in favor
of the road’s focus. For my mind’s drifting
indulgence at racing ahead, homeward, riding the pushing head wave of the pulling
engine’s purrs. Her sounds. The bottlenecked traffic
building, AC belts squeeking, brake pads shrieking, revving engines roaring and
hollow sounding thumps of rubber tires striking. The muggy nighttime air’s clenching scent,
its distinct urban weight, it’s deafening
resonance of its cross-breeze percussion gushing through the lowered windows of
the cabin is that which is definitively and impurely Mannahatta at her grandest. It’s
late. My eyelids have grown heavy. I’ve
seen enough. I’ve avoided even more. I belong, elsewhere. I’m braking, then revving, braking and
revving, avoiding the drawing squeeze of flanking quarter panels and rubber-necking
distance of tail lights exploding in the hesitancy of red, inching ever so
slowly like a viscous flow of lava as I eventually secure impassable presence
in my lane. Then suddenly, I roll in, passing beneath the support of a cobbled
archway.
I’m swallowed into a one-way descent of
echoing engine noise and the dull drone of rolling traffic to a creeping
echelon of pulsing brake-lights. A wide
river’s culvert for the endless underpass of carbon-dioxide and sulfur-emitting
combustion. Nearest mid-point,
three-quarters of a mile in, I’m some ninety-seven feet underwater. Under the tidal Hudson above, below the
reflecting glow of a city’s iconic skyline diffusing in the saw-toothed riffles of a river
rich in colonial American heritage. Under
the dingy curve of soot-covered tile set at the working hands of daring
laborers in the mid-nineteen-thirties, a trinity of tunnels whose mouths now
connect separate states, but that four centuries earlier, was pristine
forest of the native Lenni-Lenape tribe who inhabited both banks of this river I’m now
speeding underneath on a westward course at 45mph. They named her the Muhheakantuck
(pronounced muh-he-kun-ne-tuk) or, “the
river that flows two ways,” as was appropriately
noticed, having observed how she empties into the welcoming Atlantic’s rising
and falling turns of tide.
A
retrieval of thoughts, churning…
It is that slippery habit of our mind to defect
from the present and unfurl a distinct memory from the twisting vortices of
time. For that recollection of something
distant, from here, away, from now.
That which is nothing more than the former breaths of our very
existence, exchanges of purpose, isolated in moments. That desire, to unpeel the layer of the present
and relive succulent tastes of memory garnered from piths of the past. To expose the roots of our sunken seeds whose
germination has led to an irreversible advancement of growth that can only be touched in the now. Driving alone in silence has afforded me such
a defense. Junctures in our mind where
we strive to tunnel through the
impenetrable bedrock of the past, somewhere beneath these flowing passages of time
remembered, to return to where we came from someday distant. A prior
rising of the sun, a smile at the sight of a landed fish, a lover’s warm touch and
silky invitation waiting at home. At
the innumerable and inestimable. Those heartbeats that are paid with breath
and spirit as the cost of admittance to travel further across and through to
where you rest now. To emerge somewhere
new. To experience the rawness of life
in all her grandeur and live amongst its unblinking frankness staring you down
with piercing hindsight, if only to recount in our mind’s catacombs of thought,
as now.
As if to separate from meaning the essence of tide from the flow of seawater. Onward,
elsewhere, always, there exists the former.
The passing of another season has placed
two-hundred and twelve days distance since the last moonless night I held the stripes
of a Striper outright in my hand. One admired
and then resuscitated with shakes of tail within the placidity of ink-black,
frigid mid-November surf. Away, swam the
culmination of an entire season of scales and thousands of casts, at last, those
released before stowing away my gear for the dormant duration of yet another
long, winter hibernation. Before
accepting the pact of packing, the
inevitable trade-off that are stains of salt exchanged for blankets of
dust. Now however, the tide of time has
finally changed course.
Since the piercing of this night’s field of
starlight above, it has been approximately fifty-days that the
genetically-distinct fish of the Hudson River tribe began their annual
migration upstream, those tens of thousands of tails instinctively swaying within
the harbor-water flowing around the Statue of Liberty’s base to the headwaters
of their freshwater breeding grounds near Albany and the Berkshires, one-hundred
sixty-something miles from the restless tide’s eddying rip spilling around the
sweeping tip of Sandy Hook. Our
celestial orbit has spurred the auspicious beginning of another summer. One
fostering the continuation of a species’ brood. M. Saxatilis
has again spawned, and thus, we await for her nocturnal redemption.
From the Empire State’s capital city of
Albany she will swim downstream, seaward, from whence she came in late-April
and early May, and before that her over-wintering grounds off the coast of
North Carolina, journeying for over one-hundred miles to pass under the
Castleton-Hudson, Rip Van Winkle, Newburgh-Beacon, Tappan Zee, and George
Washington, down the Hudson and offshoot of Harlem and East Rivers, past Randall’s
and Rikers, below LaGuardia’s runways on the Flushing, Roosevelt Island, foraging
the bays of Little Neck, Manhasset, Hempstead, the Long Island Sound, under the
shadows and footings of the Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Verrazano, Governor’s
Island, the container ships of New York Bay and the pilot boats of the Narrows,
Raritan Bay, Rockaway, Flynns Knoll, some swimming south the one-hundred-twenty
miles of sandy Jersey coastline to the reaches of Cape May, even crossing Delaware’s
bay, while most sling their caudals past Jones Beach, Great South Bay,
Shinnecock’s inlet, Fishers and Shelter Island, Gardiners Bay, the mecca of Montauk,
Point Judith’s Light, Block Island Sound, Watch Hill, Rhode Island Sound, Cuttyhunk,
Nashawena, Pasque, Naushon, Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds, the flats of Monomy,
Chatham, The Great Marsh and The Cape’s great breakers bowing to the towering dunes
lining the National Seashore, before finally taking summer residence around the
outermost isolation of Cedar Point. All
points, everywhere.
Light,
at the end of the tunnel…
Tonight, perhaps at this particular moment of contemplative thought, she may be crossing above the concrete
conduit I am now travelling within, being guided seaward by those eons of
inherited instinct and related physical senses of which I could never relate. Those that encourage her passage through the relative
blindness of what I would otherwise consider a pitch-black world, this ancient channel
of obsidian-colored darkness whirling above entombed tiled-tubes that invite her
to flow forever, elsewhere. Towards the many tidal undertaking of new beginnings
flooding the old and familiar. Of her
epic seasonal migration, that underwater marathon in which she is simply one
tail existing apart of the vast unknown.
As the consequence of one man’s fancy from within these buried depths of
mud and silt I speed through, there is the promise of a striped-fish in her
lean and ravenous, post-spawn form passing atop. A life-force enduring pilgrimage over the
rich memory of a riverbed that prescribes a Striper-superhighway, furthering herself
from the metropolitan reaches of Manhattan to venture seaward in a current
charmed by the open-ocean. One that will
someday solicit for the fulfillment of her future progeny now resting unhatched
as the countless billions of egg-sacks laid upstream. Her
promise of plentitude. One that with
varying degrees of fate and luck and skill and timing, comingled with the lure
and wobble of wooden and plastic presentation drawn shorebound, may manifest one
night to ordain that our paths cross once again, that they may crash in a splashing
connection. That with each passing
minute I may be ever closer to feeling the surge of her tugging pull. That the darkness of a coming sunset may
deliver the silver scales and black stripes of her body, those rising to the
surface and emerging from unseen depths to fall anew upon my sight once
more. For the reeling renewal of this
surfcaster’s crossing-over towards a season favored by her furtive presence.
And so tonight,
we both pass without confrontation. Our
journeys approaching ever closer to an end that will promise the pursuit of new
beginnings.
