flood-tide below me!

Now that it’s warm, I’ve started to walk home from work sometimes. It’s an interesting walk; start out in Tribeca, walk south past City Hall, over the Brooklyn Bridge, through Cadman Plaza, past Borough Hall, all the way down Fulton Street to DeKalb Avenue, and then you’re in my neighborhood. It takes about an hour and fifteen minutes, if you don’t a) get run over by a bicycle on the bridge or b) get distracted by all the strange stores on Fulton Street.

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge is, of course, my favorite part, even though it’s thronged with tourists who insist on blocking my path to take pictures. About mid-way across the bridge, the Statue of Liberty comes into view, but by then the crowds have thinned out, because very few tourists want to take the Brooklyn Bridge all the way into, you know, Brooklyn. By the end, it’s just the locals and the intrepid (and, if you’re feeling romantic, the ghost of Whitman) who trot down the steps and into Cadman Plaza.

Living in New York can be mole-like. You shuffle down into the subway, and half an hour later you emerge in the next borough, and on the other side of a river. The time it takes to get places often has little to do with the distance traveled; going from 14th Street to Atlantic Avenue takes two stops on the N train, or 10 stops on the 2 train. In these transportation equations actual locations are reduced to subway routes, and physical distance becomes almost irrelevant. Things are as close or as far as the subway makes them.

I know, because I did it during the massive blackout five years ago, that walking from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn Heights takes about 4 hours. New York is smaller than you think. I could walk to Boston! It would only take me like...a month. I could do the whole thing in moccasins. It would be awesome.