Side Trip to the Big Apple

7/3

• Distance Travelled on AT: 3 whopping miles
• Mad Hatter took Cyborg, Hardcore, and myself to a nearby train station, where we boarded an iron horse to the island of Manhattan.
• When I emerged out of Penn Station, tears immediately started streaming down my face. I wasn't completely crying, because I was quiet and still, however, the tears rolled anyway. They didn’t stop for 15 minutes. To have had mountains, trees, rocks, water, animals, only sun, moon, and stars for illumination, and all the sounds of nature being my environment for more than a month, there was absolutely no other place that could have been more shocking than NYC. My new environment was full of flashing lights, artificial colors, concrete, glass, straight-edged, manufactured towers, wurstel stands, and advertisements, with honking, shouting, accents I'd never heard before, and people, people, people! Everywhere! Another thing, which was super exciting to me, was the surreal fact that I was in the middle of the community that is and has been for the past century the most prominent in the world for the visual arts. I have never, never been more overwhelmed in my entire life.
• The rest of the day, we met our hosts, Hardcore's brother and one of her friends, who granted us much needed showers in their little apartments. We found a laundromat, ate deli sandwiches in a little park in Hell's Kitchen, found our way to Central Park, and then found our way to Magnolia bakery, where I ate the best cupcake I've ever had. We did dinner at a place in little Italy, and then stupidly tried to go to a bar when all I could manage to do was fall asleep. Somehow my body ended up in its sleeping bag at the apartment. I was super tired.

7/4 – 7/5 NYC… (“zero days” in which I still walked many miles, just not on the AT)

• Happy Independence Day!
• Not having researched the city beforehand, I had no plan for how to see it. We kind of just wandered around. It wasn’t perfect. There was some confusion on the subway, a lot of long walks, making it to various museums on the wrong days or at too late of hours to be admitted, but that’s ok. It was wonderful to be spontaneous and to simply enjoy being there.
• The highlight of the trip, for me, was the art. I loved MoMA. I feel like I could go back there everyday. We also glanced at some art in some galleries, and I was surprised by the quality of work. That is, I guess I was surprised that it (the quality of the contemporary paintings, specifically) wasn’t any better. Not that it was bad, exactly. I’m sure I just missed the best galleries, but it was kind of encouraging to me to think that the artists whose work I was studying could actually survive here.
• Besides that, we ate lots of food and celebrated 4th of July. The city had one of the largest fireworks shows in the country, but we were only able to see a tiny bit of it, thanks to our being blocked from getting close to the Hudson River, where the show was. Though I feel unspirited complaining, I’ll say I was also let down by the fact that we’d been informed that the fireworks had been synced to music. Did I hear music? No. I did, however, hear a woman next to me express her contempt at me for standing next to her, because she almost burnt me with her cigarette and I should have given her more space (never mind there was nowhere to move, as the streets were packed with spectators shoulder to shoulder.) By the way, the only other folks I heard talking were not speaking English. They also weren’t wearing red, white, or blue. While I’m on a rant, I’ll add that Mad Hatter and I attended a service the following morning at Trinity Episcopal and there was not a single national hymn. I’ve been to a lot of different churches, and this is the first one that has ignored the national hymns on the Sunday closest to Independence Day. I was really disheartened by that, but oh well. I hope you can forgive me for being a whiner.