Maybe I’m a tree hugger after all

Contrary to my disgust for hippies and jam music, I do actually love trees. In fact, I’m not at all sure about how these things became mutually affiliated. In my mind, trees are natural, powerful, inspiring, strong, clean, fresh and beautiful whereas hippies are exactly the opposite on at least one count.

You sometimes don’t realize how much you appreciate trees until they don’t make a regular appearance in your daily and weekly routine.

There are approximately five trees on the entire block surrounding my apartment building. And one of them is now just a stump because it fell on my girlfriend’s car during Hurricane Sandy (dumb luck … I know). As trees go, this sort of dearth doesn’t really do much for a person in terms of yielding any ameliorative benefit. 

So, my love for and withdrawal from trees is probably at least half the reason I make a point to run in Astoria Park or bike in Central Park a few times a week. (The other half is because I’m getting fat. No amount of sea level jogging, yoga or pedaling makes up for the calories burned by hauling oneself up a mountain six days a week).

I biked to Central Park yesterday and the presence of greenery put my mind (well, the 2 percent of it that wasn’t toaster-in-the-bath sizzling from weaving through traffic in Manhattan to get there) at ease. Although it is mobbed with horse carriages and gapers on the weekends, the shared bike road through Central Park (no bikes allowed on smaller paths or trails) is gloriously open in some sections on weekday afternoons. I think about a full second elapsed at one point yesterday in which I didn’t see anyone else on the street. And Central Park’s assortment of trees and rock formations jutting out of the jade-green grass even bare a convincing resemblance to real nature.

It’s just too bad that it’s such a daunting journey across the East River and the eastern part of Manhattan to get there and back.

Although I think the stereotype of New Yorkers being loud, uncaring assholes is generally not accurate (except for the loud part … that’s 100-percent true), I do believe that certain New Yorkers are just salivating for confrontation. They honestly can’t wait to berate you for something.

Riding along a side street and turning onto 3^rd Ave where there were construction barriers and wall-to-wall, blaring horns and traffic, I hopped onto the sidewalk for a few pedals to avoid getting wedged between a taxi and the barrier. You can get away with riding on the sidewalk in Queens – delivery guys do it all the time – but in Manhattan, it doesn’t fly. Within a split second of jumping onto the sidewalk (which was relatively empty, by the way), there were two older men holding little squirrel dogs on leashes, all ready to get up in my grill. The first one yelled “hey! What the fuck?!” as I rode by and the second one – as I slowly, carefully and in no way dangerously pedaled by him, screamed “IDIOT!” right into my face.

The serenity that the trees instilled in me was by now long gone as I pedaled home over the bridge listening to the amplified acoustics of dozens of drivers laying on their horns in stopped traffic. But I had to remind myself that I’ve yelled “idiot” at a lot of people in this city, both out loud and in the privacy of my crowd-addled head.

If you can imagine that in life, about one out of every eight or so human beings is a true idiot, then calculate that there are 8 million people in NYC … you’re dealing with a lot of idiots.

I’d rather be surrounded by trees any day. 

Even liberal NYC not immune to hate crimes

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Every morning a large, bespectacled, older man wearing a neon yellow safety vest hands out the daily NY Metro newspaper to people swarming up the stairs to the subway. He knows me by now and we smile at each other as I take a paper. The exchange is one of the small weekly instances of feeling some vague connection to this crazy city.

The Metro is nice because it offers brief snippets of big national stories, the occasional exclusive feature, previews of NYC entertainment and a high concentration of local news. There are also inexplicably graphic ads for things like varicose veins and open sores. These same image-heavy advertisements also appear on posters on the subway and on local commercials. I don’t really get the marketing value. They make me nauseous.

Sometimes the paper has amusing stories about thwarted attempts to jump off the Empire State Building (one guy poised himself on the sight-seeing ledge and then, when he knew everyone was watching, hurled himself off  but - Wile E. Coyote style - only fell one story to the wider platform below). But today it was really, really depressing.

First there was the story about a 14-year-old girl riding on a bus in Jamaica, N.Y. killed by mysterious stray bullets, another about a cyclist killed by a taxi in Brooklyn, another about someone who fell between the train tracks and then the worst – a man shot in the face in the WestVillage for being gay.

As most of you are well aware, I’m not thrilled about living in a concrete jungle with 8 million people – a glowing target for terrorist attacks, derelicts, spit on the street and a gazillion other possible dangers and revulsions not typically found in the pristine mountains of Colorado. But I am thrilled to live in a place that not only allows but celebrates same sex marriage, diversity and equal rights. 

I was reminiscing back to Friday night when my girlfriend and I passed through the West Village on the subway on the way home from a concert in Brooklyn, her asleep on my shoulder. I was thinking about how, had we gotten out at one of the West Village stops with the mob of people who typically flock to this young, cool, high-energy epicenter of diversity and acceptance that we would have probably been in very close proximity to where Elliot Morales followed Mark Carson and his friend down a busy street and without skirmish, shot Carson in the face because he was gay.

I realize that one takes a risk any time one leaves the house. Shit, even in your house, who knows when an airplane could suddenly fly into it or an anvil could land on your head the minute you lean out the window. Still, there is clearly a higher risk when you live in a place with such a high density of people. You never know when you can board some form of public transportation with a wall of people and fall victim to a gangster’s stray bullet or a terrorist’s carefully placed explosive. And there comes an even higher risk when you choose to ride a bicycle on the NYC streets (more terrifying, as I have mentioned before, then any steep, loose, rock-filled mountain bike ride I have ever been on. I do believe some of the taxi drivers actually TRY to hit you. Remind me to write about the time I got lost in a really shitty area of the Bronx and resorted to riding with one trembling hand on the handlebars and the other clutching my pepper spray).

But I never want to think that I’m taking a risk by allowing my girlfriend to fall asleep on my shoulder on the subway or by holding her hand as we walk down the street. I thought we had moved passed all that. Especially in New York. But I have to admit this story makes me very sad. And scared.

A part of me wants to march in the streets with all the gay people I know wearing rainbows, daring all the haters to come get up in my grill. The other wants to hunker down at home … taking my chances with falling anvils.

St. Paddy's Parade and other noise

Did anyone ever tell this lady that you shouldn’t bring infants to quiet coffee shops where people are trying to work? I realize there is a significant amount of restlessness that comes with being cooped up at home with a baby all day. And yes, I know on a day like this – grey and freezing in spite of being mid-March when the weather is balmy in Denver and in many other places – it’s tough to go to a park for the getting-the-fuck-out-of-your-house break that new moms need. But the nonstop, one-sided commentary between this woman and her 2-month-old (who just puked up on the counter) is a little distracting.

“Oh, your diaper is dirty, isn’t it?”

“OK we’re leaving now. No screaming in the restaurant. We’re going to leave.” (this was stated about 10 times – clearly just to assuage those of us nearby)

“We need to find a new place to live, don’t we?”

Now that I type that, it suddenly occurs to me that this woman might legitimately be in a very bad way. I mean, she doesn’t look homeless. But. Maybe I’m just an asshole.

Every time I find myself getting irritable with strangers (about 283 times a day), I undergo a sort of guilty flurry of afterthought wondering if I have a cruel heart and am unnecessarily intolerant. What if one of these targets of my irritation is some sort of genius with a painful, abusive home life? What if the guy on the subway who keeps clearing the mucus in his throat like he’s the champion of hacking up lungers has esophagus cancer and can’t help himself?

When the baby let loose a particularly piercing scream, I winced a little and the woman noticed and once again told the kid, “OK. We’re leaving now.”

She then went to change the dirty diaper (I know cuz she told the kid everything) but before she left she glanced my way and said, “Sorry if he was bothering you.”  

I went to the St. Patrick’s Parade in Manhattan on Saturday and I was bracing myself for irritating people but had no idea of the scope of it. We emerged from the Metro at 9:30 a.m. and there was already a sea of 21-year-olds wearing green capes and drinking 40s. Yelling like frat boys. We went to an Irish bar where the staff was really Irish (thus deterring us from ordering Car Bombs … out of respect) and already annoyed as hell with everything. The parade went on from 11 to 5. In the rain. And sleet. All the leprechauns got water-logged. Four-leafed clovers were squashed to mush. We all got soggy. But the parade went all day. I do love bagpipes. 

This morning the sound of helicopter propellers woke me up at 6 a.m. When I walked to the subway at 7:15 there were four helicopters hovering high above. Obviously, I wondered if there was a killer on the loose. I stared at them for a good three minutes while everyone around me went about their business. When I got off the subway there were fire engines roaring down the street with their sirens at 3 trillion decibels. It made me think the world was ending. But when I looked around me, nobody else seemed to think anything was amiss.  

Subway Characters

Yes, I may have lived in the mountains of Colorado for the last 10 years, but even the coldest day I ever experienced there doesn’t compare to the bone-chilling winter in New York City. I’m pretty sure this goes for anywhere in the northeastern United States. And Prague. And Moscow … all of those cloudy, grey, thick-air winter places. I may be a mountain girl but the humid Arctic wind around here is almost too much for me.

Apparently, it’s too much for the bums, too.

Riding the subway continues to be both the most fascinating and revolting part of my week. The other day when the high temperature was around 24 degrees (comparable, I’d say, to maybe 2 degrees in drier climates), I got on the subway from Queens to Manhattan and there was an enormous garbage bag in the middle of the floor with a passed out, dirty man slumped onto the seat behind it. Like most homeless people who ride the subway, there was a thick odor emanating from the guy like a palpable, Pigpen-like cloud. I found a seat a couple benches away, but kept glancing over at him. His head rolled slightly every time the train slowed. When it pitched to the right at a particularly abrupt stop I saw a noose-type cord around his neck and actually jumped up to get a better look, thinking he had been strangled. The cord was wrapped around the top of his garbage bag, presumably so nobody would steal it. After I stared long enough (while the surrounding passengers glanced a little at my peculiar behavior but essentially – as they do – ignored me) to decide he wasn’t actually dead, I sat down.

 I took the subway twice more that day and saw another couple of derelicts passed out. When it’s this cold, they pony up for a subway ticket and just ride the trains around the city all day.

 My GF told me that a homeless guy sat next to her on the subway the other day (reeking to high hell) and she noticed he wasn’t wearing socks. She now travels with an extra pair in her bag in case she sees him again … or someone else who needs them.

The first time I ever took the NY subway from Jamaica Station to Manhattan a black guy with no legs opened the door between train cars and crawled along the floor between the crowd asking for money. In Queens, there are some guys on some sort of probation program selling packages of Oreos and fruit snacks, kicking off with an announcement about how they’re just trying to make some honest money and work toward a better life. They follow up with the same speech in Spanish.

The other day we were headed into Manhattan on a relatively empty train and the doors between cars loudly puffed open. Who should come striding through but a dude wearing an impeccable Batman uniform. Like, he could have really been Batman. He even had a camouflaged box of supplies (Bat-shaped Chinese stars? Tranquilizer darts?) built into the costume at his chest. At first, my blood ran cold and every muscle in my body clenched up. My Catastrophic Imagination pitched forth an image of the guy whipping out fistfuls of explosives and blowing up the train. As he strutted down the aisle closer to where we were sitting, it turned out he was wearing jeans. Otherwise the outfit was spot-on. As my girlfriend shot me a look and hissed, “what the fuck are you doing?”  I managed to take this blurry photo (left) before he got off the train.

At the Queensboro Plaza subway station today the crowd on the platform quickly doubled and then quadrupled. With the razor-like wind blowing and everyone trying to turtle their heads further into their jackets, the train was horribly delayed but finally, after about 10 minutes, it rolled in as the loudspeakers announced that a water main had burst and the tracks were jeopardized. The voice apologized for the inconvenience. A guy wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat and jersey was shrieking at the front of the train as it pulled in.

“What the fuck. This is bullshit. It’s too cold for this shit. These trains are shit. The MTA is shit. This fucking shit doesn’t happen in Chicago and Detroit.”

As everyone boarded, so did he and his rant continued.

“Look at this fucking garbage everywhere. This fucking train isn’t even clean. I hate this train. I fucking can’t stand this shit.”

At least he was expressing his anger by ranting and not shooting the place up.

Also today, before the hordes piled into the train, a Hispanic man sat next to me as I was glancing through my email on my phone. His eyes kept darting in my direction and again, my inner guard dog leapt to attention. “Dude wants to steal your iPhone,” the guard dog said. A while after I put my phone back into my pocket and started flipping through a book, the guy stood up to get off the train but first handed me a single, card-shaped flyer. He didn’t have a whole stack. He didn’t give anything to anybody else. I tried to reject it. He left it on my knee and got off the train.

“Jesus will save us all,” the card said. “God is waiting.”

But the subways aren’t all bad.

The Union Station stop is awesome. There are always people busking there – either right on the platforms playing the cello or violin or harp or on the floors between platforms. Most of them are amazingly talented. There is a hip-hop group that has a boombox (straight out of 1986) blasting while they take turns break dancing while the others strike flawlessly choreographed collective poses. Also, there are hiphop dancers that bring their speakers onto the trains and do rhythmic acrobatics on the ceiling bars, slow-motion running in the air and dangling by the tops of their Converse.

It’s a circus of reality around here.  

Silence Waking me Up

My internal alarm has been waking me up at 4 a.m. the last couple of nights with a sense that something is wrong. There is an eerie, eerie sound that has spurred me into consciousness. Wide awake all of a sudden, it takes just a second to realize that the strange, out-of-place sound is silence.

Wow. Silence.
Finally.

Glorious, unbelievable, oddly frightening silence.

But only for about 30 minutes. At around 4:30, the noise trickles back.

I live in Astoria, Queens, one of New York City's safest and probably quietest neighborhoods. Although I have yet to hear gunshots or blood-curdling screams in the night, rarely does a second go by that there isn't an incessant buzz of traffic hurdling by, sirens, people talking and/or yelling and the loud clanking of someone rifling through the trash in the alley four stories below looking for glass bottles.

Here there are piles of garbage bags, cardboard and miscellaneous waste heaped up on the ground between the buildings like something you'd see in a Third World country.

Twice a week the bags are piled right onto the sidewalks for trash pickup - not just in our neighborhood but all around NYC - even in the middle of swanky Manhattan. I have yet to find an official explanation for this so I can only assume it happens this way because there is simply no room for dumpsters. And if there were, dumpsters could never contain the volume of shit that is thrown away in this city.

Yes, living in tight quarters with 10 million people doesn't come easily for me. It has been a bit of a rough transition so far. I have been here for just over a month, having moved just before Christmas because I had to be out of my apartment in Vail, Colorado for the winter. Besides, it felt like time to do something new. Also, flying out to NYC every other weekend to see my girlfriend was getting really expensive.

So, with most of my worldly possessions stacked in my brother's basement in Denver, and with a stream of freelance projects I'm hoping continues to pay my bills (GULP), I took a couple of suitcases and bought my first one-way ticket. I did this with the comfort in mind that I could still keep one foot in Colorado and go back every few weeks to work on mountain-related stories and to ski. And to fill my lungs with air that doesn't smell like rotting McDonald's. and to actually have four feet of personal space.

Personal space is my biggest issue here. People accustomed to this lifestyle have a much different sense of it than I do. For example, while clothes shopping in a reasonably spacious department store, if someone was in the middle of the aisle looking at something, I'd say excuse me and skirt gingerly around them but most people here just bump up against you until you nudge over.

The immediate impression is that it's rude. but that's not it. It's just habit.

It is a huge misconception, btw, that New Yorkers are rude. I actually find them to collectively be the most helpful and engaging population I've ever lived among.  This reality has been most evident on subways.

The first time I ever set foot in NYC - about 12 years ago - I was taking a subway into Manhattan and must have looked a bit nervous. My head was probably on a rapid swivel every time the train stopped, staring from the sign with the list of stops on it to the platform, making sure I was on the right track.

I didn't realize that a man standing across from me - in the throng of other passengers who generally make an impressive display of minding their own business - even to the point of snoring, scratching their balls or dancing - was watching me.

"Where you trying to go?" he asked. abrupt but still helpful. He made sure I was on the right track.

The other day on the subway we were on our way back from a Nets game when another black guy sitting across from us struck up a conversation, talking about how he was born and raised in Brooklyn and NYC was the best place in the world. At first we wondered if he was crazy and didn't directly engage. My girlfriend's friend who was with us and happens to be a cop chivalrously stepped into the role of being the one to respond to the guy's banter.

"Where y'all from?" he asked us. Long Island, my girlfriend and her friend said. Colorado, I said.

"Colorado," the guy repeated. "Home of the psychos."

This sadly seems to be the lasting impression among some people who have never been to Colorado, now that its notoriety is being drawn around highly publicized school shootings and movie theater massacres. There is no real response to this kind of observation. I believe there are quite a few people in Colorado who are not psychos. I just sort of nodded.

Then, the guy launched into a monologue about the importance of, when walking and moving through the city, knowing your way around. or rather, APPEARING like you knew your way around.

"You gotta stay on top of the flow," he said. "Just keep moving your feet. Don't stop to look at nothing. Don't pause. You do that, stay with the flow, you look like you belong."

This is a sound piece of advice.

In the lexicon of ski area locals, someone who pauses and looks around too much is called a gaper. You see them on the mountain all the time. Getting in your way. Oblivious to the flow of traffic. I'm no gaper. When jostling down the streets of Manhattan, I've prided myself on blending with the masses, but walking on Lexington Ave the other day, I slowed from my usual, jetspeed pace to look down a cross street. immediately five people with flyers closed in and shoved papers in my face.

With just a slight loss in my momentum I had blown my cover as a non-New Yorker.