Getting Home Through The Gate Of Hell

Yesterday I took a late-day ride through central Queens and up to the North Shore.   From Flushing, it's west (actually, west-southwest) to my place.  That allows me to revel in a spectacle or two if I time my ride the way I did yesterday:

Here is the bay at the World's Fair Marina, just east of the airport everybody hates, i.e., LaGuardia.  Yes, that is the midtown and uptown Manhattan skyline in the distance.

From there, I followed the bay and the East River to Astoria Park, which is only a couple of miles from my apartment.  If you've ever taken the train between New York and Boston, you rumbled over this park, which lies underneath one end of the bridge.

That span is known as the Hell Gate Bridge, named for the stretch of waterway under it.  In other posts, I've recounted the origins of the name.  Last night, the visibly strong current helped that stretch of the East River (which is really a tidal estuary) live up to its name.

And I rode under that bridge--through the gate, if you will--to go home.  If riding through Hell is so beautiful, I'm in no hurry to get to Heaven!

Playing Chicken With The Sunset

In earlier posts, I've written about "playing chicken with the rain".   On days when precipitation the clouds look ready to drop buckets, I might for a ride, all the while daring the sky to deal me a deluge.  I feel I've "won" the "game", if you will, when I arrive home (or wherever I'm going) just as the first drops plop against my skin.

Today there was absolutely no risk of rain.  It was one of those perfect fall days, with the kind of sunlight that feels as if it's trickling through leaves even though the sky is blue.  And the wind and the waves echo a softly crackling flame.  At least, they seem as if they should.

The waves...Yes, I took an afternoon ride to the Rockaways.  Although the water is still warm enough (at least for someone like me) to swim, the air was cool enough that nobody tried.  In fact, the only people in the water were a few surfers.

But I was playing chicken.   You see, I started in the middle of the afternoon and lingered on the boardwalk (actually, it's concrete now) at Rockaway Park.  A month or two ago, I could have lingered--or ridden--even longer than I did.  Well, actually, I could have done that today, too.  But I was also thinking about the time of day--or, more precisely, the time at which the day would end.

After lingering, I rode some more along the boardwalk and, after crossing the Veterans Memorial Bridge into Beach Channel and Howard Beach, took a circuitous route through streets of wood-frame houses--some with boats in their driveways--away from the ocean and bay and up the gradual climb to Forest Park, right in the middle of Queens.  From Forest, I rode streets I've ridden dozens, if not hundreds of times before as the sun began its descent just beyond the railroad tracks and the East River.

Yes, I got back to my apartment just as the twilight began to deepen into evening and the street lamps were lighting.  I had lights with me--  I always keep them in my under-seat bag--but I didn't have to use them.

In other words, I played chicken with the sunset.  And "won"!

They Were Going Their Way. So Were We.

They were crossing and walking in the bike lane.  In families, all of them:  very young girls and boys with curls cascading from their heads, their mothers' hair pulled back or covered, the men crowned with fur hats.  Sometimes they had to stop to take their kids' hands and guide them across the path; others stopped to talk, to behold the evening descending upon them, upon us.

Right in the middle of the bike lane.  All up and down the bike lane.  

And I didn't get upset with them.  None of the other cyclists seemed to, either.  We couldn't, really.  There were hundreds of those families, walking to or from the river or their houses.  There just wasn't any place else for them to walk.

We--for a moment, we became a community, even though none of us knew each others' names, and we may never meet again--all turned right on Ross Street and three blocks later, took a left on Hipster Fifth Avenue, a.k.a. Bedford Avenue, which parallels Kent Avenue and its bike lane.

We, all of whom were riding north on the lane, knew that whatever we thought of riding on Bedford Avenue, it was better than weaving through men and women and dodging children.  It was also, frankly, the most civilized thing any of us could have done.  

Alexsander Gierymski, Hasidic Jews Performing Tashlikh on Rosh Hashanah, 1884

We all knew enough to do that.  I wonder whether we all knew better than to ride through the Hasidic enclave of South Williamsburg at sundown on Rosh Hashanah.  I knew that the holiday began at sundown yesterday and will continue until sundown tomorrow.  But I just instinctively followed the streets to the Kent Avenue bike lane, which I normally take when I'm riding home from Coney Island, as I was today, or anyplace else in southern or western Brooklyn.

And those Hasidic families were, no doubt, walking their normal routes between schul, the river--where they cast pieces of bread into the metallic water for their tashlikh-- and their homes.  We couldn't begrudge them that, even if they were in "our" bike lane!