I couldn’t get enough
of the PATH train yesterday, so I took it all the way out to Newark this morning. I realize there are certainly more direct
ways to get to the Newark Airport, from Brooklyn, but I was interested to give
it try. F Train, to the A Train, to the
Path Train, till the last stop: Newark. The whole trip was less than forty
minutes and then I’d get an Uber to the airport, itself.
Post-industrial, pre reclamation northern New Jersey is sobering. A cloudy day sharpens the sobriety. Large iron bridges, all seemingly overbuilt,
ill cared for transport my train through a broken landscape. You want there to
be more than the cliché of northern New Jersey: the rump of Gotham. Yet every rusting bridge, dilapidated store
front and swamp-like vista merely reinforces what you thought you knew. To paraphrase Portifio Diaz: “Poor northern New Jersey; so far from God,
so close to Manhattan.”
“Newark Station, last stop.”
I’ve never been in this city before.
My plan is to grab an Uber, but I see a sign for an airport train. I follow it till there are no more signs and
I must make a choice. The shopkeeper has
no idea where to go. “Ask information.” The large transit cop with the big smile and
the big machine gun is very friendly and shows me the board that suggests the
next train will come in twenty minutes.
“Where’s the taxis?” “Right over there.”
A good old fashioned taxi, which like its host city has seen
better days. Deep bucket seats with lots
of duct tape. The cabbie immediately gets in a verbal altercation with a Hispanic
kid trying to cross the street. I can’t
help but ask and soon we’re discussing Kumasi, where my driver hails from. “I’ve been here twenty years now man.” “I hear you.
Sounds like me in China.”
Checking in I dropped my bag on the counter and could not
find my passport. I gave the United lady
at check-in my driver’s license, which you can do, flying domestically and then
began to look in earnest for the magic blue book. Among my many imperfections is not a
whimsical disregard for my passport. I
always know where it is. Where the fuck
is it? The young man puts my bag on the
conveyor belt. It wouldn’t be in
there.
Four phone calls, a nervous flight over the United States
and a skittish dash to the baggage claim, noting en route the emails that said
“Hey, we couldn’t find it here”, considering the process of not only getting a
new passport but also a new China visa, I opened my bag and saw the passport
right up top, in the zip pocket. Now I
can return to all the other things I was worrying about. Flying I’d told myself I’d just finish my
novel, to keep my mind off having to explain to my wife that I wasn’t going to
be home for three weeks. “A Brief
History of Seven Killings” served this purpose well, as the landscape turned
from hills, to snowy plains to rough moon scape and then mountains and more
mountains until things got green again and we were dropping down above the bay.
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