Transportation in New York

9/3/06
So far, New York has been about the train, about transportation. Seems that tomorrow will be as well. The train can be a wonderful experience; it can be a pass through scenery and through forgotten towns. It can be a time and place to collect your thoughts. But so far, in New York, it has been neither. Tonight, I write on the train between Poughkeepsie and the city, but it is night, so there is no scenery. On the reverse trip earlier in the day, the scenery along the Hudson may have been magnificent and interesting, but the windows were so coated in film that the scenes were only marginally decipherable. The trains in the city of course are underground and hardly stimulate meditation.
Again today, we experienced contrasts. We walked from our hotel on 80th street west, down Broadway to 42nd street and to Grand Central station where we caught the train. The further south we went on Broadway, the more "New York" the street felt. We passed crowds waiting in line for tickets to Oprah's "Color Purple." We passed tour busses and streets filled only with limousines and taxi cabs. But from there, we spent the day with a friend in the rural town of New Paltz. Outside the modern city, we saw the first settlement houses of the Huguenots. Outside the noise and neon of the downtown, we had cheese sandwiches around an intimate dining room table. Outside our ultra-compact hotel room, we visited in a ranch home with basement and a generous yard.
So, again, we're moving. Perhaps that is the authentic experience of New York, of moving through places, of transportation among other people despite the moving scenery. Of not having opportunity to sit down. But, I'm still hoping for the experience of a tourist, of taking it all in while the locals bustle.