were signaled forward at every cross street by the purposeful white-glowing pedestrian whose missionary stride was plainly conceived as an example to all (and whom I cannot help contrasting with his London counterpart, a green gentleman undoubtedly rambling with an unseen golden retriever).
I followed Chuck into an open-air lot. He drove a 1996 Cadillac, a patriotic automobile aflutter and aglitter with banners and stickers of the Stars and Stripes and yellow ribbons in support of the troops. Papers, candy wrappers, and coffee cups were strewn over the front passenger seat. Chuck scrabbled all of it into his arms and dropped it into the junk-filled rear passenger area, where a pair of field glasses, a laptop, brochures, and brown banana peels rested on sheets of old newsprint.
We pulled up across the street from the Chelsea Hotel. I was opening my door when Chuck said, “Do you have some time? There’s something I want to show you. But it’s in Brooklyn.”
I hesitated. The truth was, I was done for the day, the Cadillac was warm, and I had a dread of returning to my apartment. Also, as Rachel would be the first to say, I’m easily dragged around.
“We still have an hour of daylight,” Chuck said. “Come on. You’ll find it interesting, I promise.”
“What the hell,” I said, slamming the door shut.
Chuck cackled as he drove off. “I knew it. You’re a fun guy underneath it all.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
This was acceptable. When was the last time I’d been promised a surprise?
On the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of Houston, the car paused in traffic. Chuck, looking out of the window, leaned forward and exclaimed, “My God! Look at that. Do you see that, Hans? The ice?”
I did see. Ice was spread out over the breadth of the Hudson like a plot of cloud. The whitest and largest fragments were flat polygons, and surrounding these was a mass of slushy, messy ice, as if the remains of a zillion cocktails had been dumped there. By the bank, where the rotting stumps of an old pier projected like a species of mangrove, the ice was shoddy, papery rubble, and immobile; farther out, floes moved quickly towards the bay.
Indeed much of what I was looking at, Chuck informed me as we inched along, was brash ice, the fragments of disintegrating floes that had traveled down from upper parts of the Hudson. Such drifting fields of screeching and groaning ice, as Chuck dramatically put it, were great places to bird bald eagles, which came downriver in search of open water and collected fewer than fifty miles north in order to eat fish. Chuck’s fascination with this phenomenon—his interest in naturalism, birds especially, went back to his youth in Trinidad—was, I later came to understand, heightened by the knowledge gained from his enthusiastic and successful studies for the U.S. citizenship exams. He told me that in 1782, after years of argument and indecision, Congress concluded that the bald eagle would make an appropriate symbol of national power and authority, and so it was decided that the bird, depicted with its wings outspread, its talons grasping an olive branch, etcetera, should be adopted as the emblem for the great seal of the United States. Chuck dug into his pocket and tossed me a quarter to remind me what the eagle looked like. Not everybody agreed with the decision, Chuck reported. He took back the coin. Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey a better choice and considered the bald eagle—a plunderer and a scavenger of dead fish rather than a hunter, and timid if mobbed by much smaller birds—an animal of bad moral character and in fact a coward. “I love the national bird,” Chuck clarified. “The noble bald eagle represents the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.”
I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.
As he talked, my
I followed Chuck into an open-air lot. He drove a 1996 Cadillac, a patriotic automobile aflutter and aglitter with banners and stickers of the Stars and Stripes and yellow ribbons in support of the troops. Papers, candy wrappers, and coffee cups were strewn over the front passenger seat. Chuck scrabbled all of it into his arms and dropped it into the junk-filled rear passenger area, where a pair of field glasses, a laptop, brochures, and brown banana peels rested on sheets of old newsprint.
We pulled up across the street from the Chelsea Hotel. I was opening my door when Chuck said, “Do you have some time? There’s something I want to show you. But it’s in Brooklyn.”
I hesitated. The truth was, I was done for the day, the Cadillac was warm, and I had a dread of returning to my apartment. Also, as Rachel would be the first to say, I’m easily dragged around.
“We still have an hour of daylight,” Chuck said. “Come on. You’ll find it interesting, I promise.”
“What the hell,” I said, slamming the door shut.
Chuck cackled as he drove off. “I knew it. You’re a fun guy underneath it all.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll find out. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
This was acceptable. When was the last time I’d been promised a surprise?
On the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of Houston, the car paused in traffic. Chuck, looking out of the window, leaned forward and exclaimed, “My God! Look at that. Do you see that, Hans? The ice?”
I did see. Ice was spread out over the breadth of the Hudson like a plot of cloud. The whitest and largest fragments were flat polygons, and surrounding these was a mass of slushy, messy ice, as if the remains of a zillion cocktails had been dumped there. By the bank, where the rotting stumps of an old pier projected like a species of mangrove, the ice was shoddy, papery rubble, and immobile; farther out, floes moved quickly towards the bay.
Indeed much of what I was looking at, Chuck informed me as we inched along, was brash ice, the fragments of disintegrating floes that had traveled down from upper parts of the Hudson. Such drifting fields of screeching and groaning ice, as Chuck dramatically put it, were great places to bird bald eagles, which came downriver in search of open water and collected fewer than fifty miles north in order to eat fish. Chuck’s fascination with this phenomenon—his interest in naturalism, birds especially, went back to his youth in Trinidad—was, I later came to understand, heightened by the knowledge gained from his enthusiastic and successful studies for the U.S. citizenship exams. He told me that in 1782, after years of argument and indecision, Congress concluded that the bald eagle would make an appropriate symbol of national power and authority, and so it was decided that the bird, depicted with its wings outspread, its talons grasping an olive branch, etcetera, should be adopted as the emblem for the great seal of the United States. Chuck dug into his pocket and tossed me a quarter to remind me what the eagle looked like. Not everybody agreed with the decision, Chuck reported. He took back the coin. Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey a better choice and considered the bald eagle—a plunderer and a scavenger of dead fish rather than a hunter, and timid if mobbed by much smaller birds—an animal of bad moral character and in fact a coward. “I love the national bird,” Chuck clarified. “The noble bald eagle represents the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.”
I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.
As he talked, my
Similar Books
