Every time my friends visit me in New York City, we go on long walks. We usually start in the mid-afternoon and walk until late. Last March we walked the length of the island of Manhattan, from Battery Park to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. In December we walked from the South Bronx across the R.F.K. Bridge, through Astoria into Maspeth. Deep into the night, we passed endless silent cemeteries and an expanse of warehouses half-hidden in fog and found ourselves at the intersection of Fifty-ninth Street, Fifty-ninth Place, Fifty-ninth Drive, and Fifty-ninth Lane. This was the netherworld of Queens of which I had often heard tell.
One time, while the bars in New York were still under curfew, we even went to New Jersey for a night on the town. The bars in Hoboken stayed open until three in the morning. When they closed, we walked up the cliffs to Union City and looked out across the Hudson. It must be nice to live in New Jersey, I remember saying, because then you can look across the water and think, wouldn’t it be nice to live over there? Another walk was seventeen miles, from north Brooklyn to Prospect Park and then a straight line down to the ocean at Brighton Beach. We did it on a twenty-degree day
in February.
We started doing these walks during the lock- downs because there wasn’t so much else to do and because we like walking. But the real reason is that we are Westerners. And since we’re Westerners, we like walking, just not the way that real New Yorkers like walking.
New Yorkers think Westerners don’t walk places. They drive. But actually, Westerners do walk, sometimes: we drive our cars to trailheads and go hiking. The New Yorker doesn’t understand hiking. New Yorkers walk, but they’re always walking somewhere, from point A to point B. Hiking is what you have to do when you become so dependent on the car that you have to drive out to the middle of nowhere just to walk around. As for “reconnecting with nature,” well, whatever nature is, people in New York aren’t interested.
We—my friends and I—are interested in the sublime, if I’m still allowed to use a word like that. We wander around to see if we can get a peek somehow. Before I moved to New York we would walk up ridges in the Olympic Peninsula or drift through rows of silent Craftsmans near the edge of the Seattle city limits, late at night in the summer, and eat apples and blackberries where we could find them on trees and bushes in front yards. Now we go on urban hikes in New York City.
It’s not a very New York thing to do. It has all the earnestness, the lack of pragmatism, the sense of contrivance that New Yorkers hate most about Westerners. But it suits us. I get to know more about New York and see neighborhoods that people who live here for decades never see. It also provides me a different way of being in New York City. For one day, instead of being bounced from one engagement to another, I just drift.
Westerners have always seemed to have problems with New York City. Nick Carraway sums up The Great Gatsby as a story about people who are “subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” But I’ve found the land here is gentle. Although its people are hard—and so is what they built—you will find the
wild if you go looking. It takes a while to realize that New York City is nature, too, after a fashion. When we talk about things being man-made we usually think we mean that people, individuals, can control them. But a city like this is beyond human control, the nature of its forces not too different from a geological process. Individuals can only submit.
That’s why on the first of these walks, with snow blowing into our faces, a friend pointed back at Manhattan from the end of the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the urban sublime, he said, different from what we find in the Western backcountry, but not inferior. It just needs to be approached on its own terms.
