Here's what makes a November sky different from its October counterpart--or, for that matter, what we think of as a "fall" or "autumn" sky, or what stretches above and in front of us at any other time of year. The clouds are exactly that--clouds. Even as they shift across the sky and reveal patches of blue backlit by the sun, like a skylight in a Romanesque cathedral, they fill the sky in layers, to the point that they seem to become the sky itself, and to define not only the light, but the wind and chill that come from it.
However, there is absolutely no threat of rain, or any other kind of precipitation. One can feel just as confident of cycling under this sky as among Shakespeare's "darling buds of May" and not having one's skin moistened by anything that wasn't within his or her own body. (Whether or how much one sweats depends, of course, on one's conditioning and the strenuousness of the ride. Mine today wasn't very. ) The best thing about cycling under these conditions, at least to me, is that the light is nothing more or less than that: it's not the glaring sunlight that taxes light eyes and fair skins (like mine) and it's not diffuse or "painterly," as much as I appreciate and even enjoy that sort of illumination.
This is the sort of light that makes the things--like foliage--that were described with "fall" as prefixes attached to them in October become autumnal in the truest sense of that word.
This may seem odd to some of you, but I find none of this depressing. In fact, I quite enjoy it. Now I'm going to sound like exactly the Europhile (or, more specifically, Francophile) snob some of the people with whom I grew up suspected me of being, or having become. I think that autumnality or autumnalness (OK, if Sarah Palin can compare herself to Shakespeare, surely you can indulge me in this!) is not much respected, much less valued or celebrated, in American culture. I suppose it has to do with the notion that this country is supposed to be a place where one can start over and re-invent one's self, and its attendant value of youthfulness and novelty. The mature sexuality of French or Italian women or the ironic sense of the English--or, for that matter, the ability to accept life on its own terms while questioning one's self that seems to be part of a Germanic way of seeing--is not valued in the same way in America as that of youthful effusiveness and ebullience.
The quality of autumnalness I'm describing is what you might see in western New England if you get off Route 7, or if you take the back roads of the Adirondacks or the routes departmentales of the Vosges. I have done all of those things, on my bicycle; perhaps having done them in my youth shaped, in some way, my attitudes about cycling and much else in my life.
Will it lead me to be like this couple?:
They say that in the spring a young man's fancy turns to love. As if I would know about such things! But at this time of year, an older man's and, ahem, woman's fancies turn to...wait, do they have fancies? And if they do, will they be realized under this sky?:
I suspect that some of mine will be. However, I am sure that I will continue to encounter them, as I did today, from my trusty steed for all seasons:
Sometimes I ride down to the Canarsie Pier, as I did today. It's on the South Shore of Brooklyn, along the Greenway that connects Howard Beach to Sheepshead Bay and parallels the Belt Parkway as it winds along the beaches and coves of the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay.
At just about any time of year, in any kind of weather, at pretty much any hour of the day or night, people--usually older men--fish off the pier:
In my time, I've seen plenty of guys fishing off piers and bridges. The ones I see on the piers seem to have a mutual non-acknowledgment pact with cyclists. The ones on bridges, on the other hand, are often resentful or simply hostile toward cyclists. That may have something to do with the fact that on bridges, we tend to pass closer to them than we do on piers, as the walkways on most bridges (where cyclists usually ride and fisherman cast their lines) are only a few feet, if that, wide.
It seems that the worlds of cycling and fishing, at least in urban or suburban settings, exclude each other, whether or not by design. Sometimes I see men riding bicycles to their fishing spots. But they aren't riding to take the ride; the bike is strictly is a means of transportation and portage. As often as not, their fishing poles are strapped or even taped to the top tubes of their bicycles.
Perhaps some of those fisherman resent or envy those of us who are cycling for its own sake, or for training. After all, even if we have to put down payments on our bikes and pay them in installments before we pedal them, we have lifestyles--and, with it, access to the means, or whatever will get us the means, to buy a nice bike. Most of the fishermen (Most are male.) are poor and/or working class; many have families they are supporting in full or in part. And most of them, at least in this area, are members of racial and ethnic minorities. At the Canarsie Pier, as in other fishing spots in this city, they are usually Caribbean or Latino. On the other hand, most cyclists, including yours truly, are white. Even those who are Caribbean, Latino or from other minority group tend to be a bit better off, financially as well as socially, than those who are fishing.
Hmm...Could it be that this city's class structure can be delineated according to whether someone fishes or rides a bicycle?
Today I rode into Manhattan for a couple of errands and to have lunch with Bruce. Even though I rode my "beater" (the Le Tour), I decided take a bit of a ramble around the city.
Somewhere along the way, it seems, a hipster couldn't bear giving up his bike when he got married and had a kid:
This Peugeot "Nice" was parked across the street from where the World Trade Center once stood. I've seen bikes like it--which may also have been Nices--in France and Montreal. But this is the first time I've seen one here in New York.
To be fair to hipsters, that paint job is pure '80's.
Aside: I didn't go anywhere near the WTC for a couple of years after 11 September. Although I didn't lose anyone I knew, I simply couldn't bear to be around it.
I continued down Broadway to the ferry terminals. I missed the day's last ferry to Governor's Island and I decided I didn't really want to take the ferry ride to Staten Island, as much as I enjoy it.
Another aside: Staten Island is at its closest to the rest of New York at the Verrazano Narrows, where the eponymous bridge crosses it. At that point, SI is about 4300 feet from New York. However, the island is only 600 feet away from New Jersey. After the English took New York and New Jersey from the Dutch (who took it from the Lenape Indians), they supposedly settled the dispute over whether Staten Island belonged to New York or New Jersey with a boat race:
Was anyone accused of doping? Maybe they can use the Tour de France to decide whether France or Spain gets Andorra.
Anyway, I rode up the Greenway that skirts the Hudson. Lots of the cyclists I saw today probably moved to New York in the last few years. They don't remember the city without the Greenway. They also probably think the Christopher Street Pier always looked something like this:
I remember when it looked nothing like that. My earliest memories were more like what you see in this photo Ross Lewis took in 1993:
Believe it or not, I actually ventured out onto the pier when it was something like that. My first adventure there was during my high school years, in the mid-1970's. I don't remember much about it because, well, I did something teenagers sometimes do when they're someplace they're not supposed to be. I don't think I would've gone onto that pier if I weren't intoxicated. In fact, I probably wouldn't have crossed under the elevated West Side Highway. A truck crashed through it in the early 1970's; although it was closed immediately, it wouldn't be demolished for another 15 years. In the meantime, only those who were intoxicated, adventurous or simply had noplace else to go would cross under that highway to get to piers that were, in some cases, literally falling into the water.
For a long time, those derelict quais were among the few places to which the public had access on New York City's hundreds of miles of shoreline. New York is different, in that sense, from other seaport towns like Boston, San Francisco and Istanbul: Until recently, there was really no individual or civic pride in the waterfront. It seemed as if one's social status was directly proportional to how far one was from the water. That might be the reason why addresses along Fifth Avenue, which is further from the waterfront than any other New York City Avenue, became the most prestigious in the city.
I have long said that New York could be, by far, the most beautiful city in the world if its waterfront were cleaned up. I'm glad to see that's happening, finally. Still, it's almost surreal to see the shorelines become places of recreation.
One of my uncles worked on the Brooklyn docks; as a teenager, my mother worked in a factory just steps away from those docks. When I was a child, my father worked in a factory that was less than a block from the 57th Street pier, which is only about half a mile from the Intrepid. Those workplaces, not to mention those jobs, are long gone. In fact, the old Maritime Union headquarters in Brooklyn, which took up an entire square block, is now Al-Noor, said to be the largest Muslim elementary school in the United States.
I continued up the Greenway past the Boat Basin, Harlem toward the George Washington Bridge
On my way back, I saw this charmingly theatrical facade:
This building was the old Audubon Ballroom. Many jazz performers played there; in addition, the Audubon was a movie theatre and a meeting-place for labor activists. However, it seemed not to recover from having been the site of Malcolm X's assassination until Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center turned it into a research laboratory during the 1990's.
How much else will change by the time I take another ride like the one I took today?
