The Rocks Are Black

Wake up to the sound of the F Train, roaring out of Smith and Ninth St. up on the bridge to the Fourth Avenue Station.  I’m on the second floor and the train must be three or four stories above. I used to have the J, M, Z trains riding along, out my window along the Williamsburg Bridge.  Subway sounds, rough, rumbling like an intermittent river. 

Upwards I’m traveling, beneath the Buttermilk Channel in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in a single lane of traffic that still flows quickly.  We learn that there is work being done as we approach the Battery side. Trucks are lined up, lights are spinning and men with hard hats are standing though it doesn’t appear that anyone is actually working.  It’s scenes like this that prompted the governor to scream out at no one and everyone the other day on his Second Avenue Subway project.

Once we’re out our Uber driver, who I assume is Russian has us racing upstream on the FDR Drive.  I’m enjoying a conversation with my sister whom I haven’t seen for a while, but my right eye is taking in the bridges as we pass beneath the Brooklyn, the Manhattan and race up towards the Williamsburg.  Curving back in from the Lower East Side protrusion there is a heliport.  One of the copters’ blades is spinning idly, slowing.  It is impossibly close to a nearby copter and a nearby wall. Landing there can’t be more than two meters for error.

In Grand Central, I’m confused.  I have time, and get my ticket from a machine.  But then, when I emerge and look at the big board for which track I need I can’t find what I’m looking for.  I’m riding to Bedford Hills on the Harlem Line.  The board lists only the end-of-the-line station names above.  That could be Brewster, or that could be Dover Plains as I recall, but all I see is White Plains, too early, or “Southeast.”  The gent in the information booth beneath the four- faced clock confirms my assumption about Southeast.

I’ve my big bag standing in the place designed for wheel chairs, I presume. I sit across from a young woman with lots of shopping bags.  I tell myself I’ll just do a few emails before I turn to my book but then a call comes.  I’ve heard there is snow at my final destination for the day.  I know because my daughter has lost her iPhone in it. But there isn’t much snow in this part of Westchester.  It would be easy enough to find a phone out there.

A few hours later, reunited with my kids and my father we drive swiftly past the Old Quaker Meeting house, along the Croton Reservoir, up into Yorkville Heights, which seems bigger than I recall and over to Peekskill where we catch Route Nine.  Now there is snow.  Outside the trees are bare and the rocks are black where they assert themselves out from under the white covering.  In Cold Spring where the hills are high we pause to drop things off at my sister’s new home. My father is frustrated, as the driveway has been plowed without care and gravel lies atop all the snow piles.

But we don’t stay long as we need to rendezvous in Fishkill, where we switch cars and parents and continue on the upward progression against the river’s flow to the house where we’ll be for Christmas.  No more movement for a while now, at least not any more movement up-river.