Early Morning On The Island

If you are looking to transcend the place and time in which you live, you can move out and away from them.  Or you can go inside them.

This morning, I did the latter, without even trying.  

Randall's Island sits in the East River, between Manhattan and Queens.  If you know that, but you've never been there, you might expect it to have a skyline like Manhattan's, if on a smaller scale--or, perhaps, dense residential neighborhoods, as you would find in much of Queens.

Instead, you would find fields--some of them open, others designated for baseball and other sports--as well as wetlands, clumps of woods and gardens ringed by a rocky shoreline.  The relatively bucolic landscape is shadowed only by the Hell Gate Viaduct, used by the Metro North commuter rail line and Amtrak, and the overpasses for the RFK Memorial Bridge. (The conjoined Wards Island, once separated by a channel that was filled in about 100 years ago, contains a water treatment plant, mental hospital and state police barracks in addition to ballfields and picnic grounds.)  Even when you look toward the tall buildings of Manhattan, the houses and apartment buildings of Queens and the factories and warehouses in the Bronx, it's easy not to feel as if you are in New York City.

Especially if you're cycling the island early in the morning:

The smokestacks you see in the background are on Rikers Island.  Even they don't look so menacing just after dawn.  (Still, I'm in no hurry to go there!)   Behind the trees to the right, and a few kilometers back, is LaGuardia Airport.  I'd much rather go there.  But riding on Randalls Island this morning was just fine!

On Dawn And Mother-Daughter Realationships

Another dawn ride in the Sunshine State.  Really, given the heat and humidity, it really is the best time to pedal.  Plus, my parents live just far enough from the ocean that I can start just before sunrise and, within a few minutes, be treated to scenes like this:

That, from a place called Hammock.  And this from, appropriately, Painter's Hill:

At that time of morning, one finds more surfers or fishers than swimmers.  (Leave it to me to be, as always, a minority--both as a swimmer and cyclist!)  When you're up before most other people and throw yourself at a great expanse that seems like infinity, it's hard not to wonder about the meaning of it all:

As it turns out, the woman in the second photo was watching her daughter:

As my mother is not, and never has been, a cyclist, surfer, swimmer or fisher, we have a different mother-daughter relationship.  It was still more than welcome at the end of today's ride, in which I managed to beat the midday heat and afternoon rain.