Golfes d’ombre: E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frisson d’ombelles
So what did my Christmas Day ride have to do with Arthur Rimbaud’s poem about vowels—specifically, the lines about “E?”
Well, he likened the most-used vowel to the color white and used images of royalty and glaciers to convey the feeling of the sound and its character.
And, for a moment, I thought I was looking at a coastal glacier like the ones people see during cruises to Antarctica.
Of course, I was nowhere near the southern continent: I was on the South Shore of Long Island, and it wasn’t cold enough for even a white Christmas, let alone a glacier.
So I did another Point Lookout ride before spending Christmas evening with friends. Then on the holiday we don’t celebrate in the US—Boxing Day—I took a late-afternoon ride to Fort Totten. It’s just past the Throgs* Neck Bridge, which spans the meeting-point of the East River and Long Island Sound.
The convergence of those bodies of water, and the way Queens, Westchester and Nassau counties, curve around it, probably made it a strategic point and the reason the Fort was built. (The Army Reserve still uses a small part of it; the rest was decommissioned and became the park it is today.) The differences between the currents of those two bodies of water and the terrain that surrounds them may account for the interesting light that illuminates —and fogs that shroud—the area.
So, my Christmas rides treated me to different kinds of lights, including the ones people strung along their trees and homes.
*-The Throgs Neck Bridge connects Fort Totten, in the Queens neighborhood of Bayside, with tbe Bronx enclave of Throggs Neck (the locale of the New York Maritime Academy) I don’t know why the name of the bridge is spelled with one “g” while the Bronx neighborhood gets two.
