A horde of people who will forever remain anonymous to me and to each other
I always feel as if I’ve crash landed onto another planet whenever I re-enter big cities from a self-imposed exile to the wilderness and countryside. And there is hardly a place more unnatural and more alien to whatever it is I’ve become than New York City is - a place which, in one of life’s humorous plot twists, was some form or other of “home” for me for a few years. In fact, I recall that I once swore that there was no other place I’d ever want to be. But that obsession, among others of a life once lived, I recall now as if it were an airy echo of a dream that the mountains, fresh air, peace and quiet, and kind - very kind - people have awoken me from… though, to be fair, there might be a bit more to it than that.
“Sorry, the rules don’t allow bikes with tires larger than 2.1 inches to be rolled onboard” - I hadn’t expected that boarding the Amtrak from Rochester to NYC would turn out to be one of the more annoying parts of the trip. Freewheeling through the mountains day in, day out does not really require a whole lot of ‘rules.’ In fact, I never seem to have much use for rigidity in rules or plans because the mountains are fiercely rigider. So it is always shocking, whenever I return to civilization, how inflexible people can be about things that (to me anyway) don’t seem to matter all that much.
So, having missed the first train because I had been asked to disassemble my bike and shove it and my gear into two boxes - though the front wheel, unable to fit in the box with the rest of the bike, had to hilariously be taken as an article of carry-on luggage - ten hours and some change later I’d reassembled everything in Penn Station’s new and shiny Moynihan Train Hall, and wondered where I could dispose of or, preferably, recycle, the massive, cardboard, bike box and the smaller one that held my kit. “We don’t have anything to do with passengers’ garbage,” which was said as if it were my one, true desire in the first place to have come all that way with my bike in a box. “You can take the boxes to the dumpsters outside on the street. But if some one” - and the word the Amtrak baggage-claim attendant actually used was much less polite than “one” - “comes and takes your bike, I ain’t gonna stop em.” Strangely enough, I ended up leaving the boxes right then and there for him to deal with instead and rolled my bike away to go ride the streets of New York City.
Amtrak, so convenient!
Red Tree on the Highline
Sunset over Jersey City
A Singaporean food hall in Midtown
A sign of the times
A residential building along the Highline
A tree I'd never seen before in Battery Park
A building I've often enjoyed in SoHo
Penn Station escalator
First impressions: the air quality above ground was not as bad as I’d remembered, though down in the aromatic tunnels of the city’s subway system, I certainly felt as if I were being slowly asphyxiated–it’s claustrophobic, but in the air. The smell of food was inescapable and my belly, probably still in a caloric deficit from a month of cycling with very few rest days, was constantly rumbling. The city is never finished being built. So. Much. Noise. Unlike in the wild, one could not pee anywhere one pleased and I am not really used to that terribly unnatural feeling of holding it in anymore. Fortunately my mental map of the West Side’s public toilets remained intact. There were far too many people. It is dehumanizing. Most people are little more than background scenery, in part because they are almost all of them walking around, eyes glued to their smartphones, airpods in, completely oblivious to the world around them, which was also tremendously frustrating having just come from places where just about anybody would chat my ear off and we’d share life stories and, heck, even drivers would wave at me from behind the wheel and I’d wave back. Time also works differently in the city (time is money), and people never seem to have enough of it (time or money). I had to schedule, a few days in advance, hour-long slots with friends I haven’t seen in years, when on my way up, people I’ve never met in towns I’ve never been in were more than happy to spend their whole evening chewing the fat with me. Talk about culture shock!
Can you find all the Airpods in this photo?
Columbia, once loved, then hated, now a memory
Golden-hour over the Brooklyn Bridge
Sunlit sumac over the Hudson
Stained glass at night
Alexey (not me)
Jake
Jack
Blue-hour over the sailboats I once sailed upon in the Hudson
But I was in New York City because I knew I wouldn’t be lonely. It happens to be the one place in the world with the largest concentration of my friends, close or not-as-close, and it was time for a reunion. With much thanks to my very dear friend Adam (some are fortunate enough to meet their soulmates rather early in life) and his family, I was able to retreat from the city every other day and explore Long Island’s surprisingly plentiful state parks boasting some very tame, but much appreciated mountain bike trails. It was really something special to reconnect with all my friends (and make new ones!). Being closer to them would be the only thing that could possibly tempt me to ever consider moving back to that city, but I figure most of them are so busy, we probably wouldn’t meet with significantly greater frequency anyways… Not enough time!
Bike trails in Caumsett State Park
Cliffs in Caumsett
Overgrown water towers in Caumsett
Oyster Bay sunset
Salty Adam at sunset
Your friendly, neighborhood Spaceframe
The manor at Caumsett
Back where we belong
I don’t mean to be unfair to the place, but something seems false about New York City. “City of Dreams” is spot on, I think. The place feels tinged with a mirage-like quality - it’s very real, but also perplexingly illusory. It is certainly artificial. And among all the glass, steel, and concrete is a myopically human-centric way of life, insulated from other life forms - save the cooing pigeons above, the screeching rats below, and the odd park-tree in-between - sheltered by its own pollution from the stars in the night sky, in which the meaning of a life is extraordinarily dependent on measurement against other people - status, and prestige and all the rest. This kind of anthropocentrism ("society," I think some call it) exists well beyond big cities, I'm sure, but it's so very visible within them with all the trendy shoes, hairstyles, cars, and all the other sigils of status. I mean, even I used to wear coats that never kept me warm, and shoes that were never all that comfortable to walk in - but apparently, they looked stylish. It’s all a big deception (like the Matrix, eh?). With one hand the city promises the actualization of individuality, but with the other it crushes people into conformity with trends, trendy ideologies, and streets upon streets upon streets of tiny, overpriced rentals entangling them in webs of systems that thrive off the absence of self-sufficiency. More insidiously, it is a world built by human hands and human culture where everything appears as if comprehensible, digestible, predictable - it makes sense in a peculiarly human way, and if you live there long enough, I think you start to really believe (I did at least) that the rest of the world must be equally as palatable to human tastes. There are ways in which we can make sense of the wild world in order to live in it, but one thing that that world seems to constantly beat into me is that it exists on timescales and physical scales more ancient and more vast than the very young and very small human brain. It seems to just be a biological quirk that there is much that will be forever nonsensical to me, and other things that might not be, but are probably not worth all the effort trying to make sense of anyways. And I don't mind it at all.
A slight edit
Green and blue and Liberty
Cooing Pigeon on a lamppost
The Hudson washes over concrete
A sunlit water fountain along the Hudson
Smartphones and earbuds
Ephraim
Alexey (me)
Corner of Church and Vesey
Ramon
They still let planes fly over the WTC??
One of the blessings of having left the City to go explore the world on a bicycle is that my life has learned to live on its own terms, it flowers in its own mysterious ways, and I sincerely and politely do not care what anyone else has to say about it. Admittedly, the inner pressure of some especially ambitious city-dwellers is palpable - it floats around in the air - and I can’t deny that I felt some of that pressure pushing me in directions I was not really inclined to go. I had begun to wonder, among the company of my traditionally “successful” friends, how much longer I would be able to freewheel a life through the wild world. The short answer is: until my body can’t take it anymore. The more complicated answer is that there are sacrifices that are made to live as I am that I am not too certain I will continue to want to make. What will that look like? I can’t say, but there’s a constantly shifting balance that must be met. Whatever the case, the mountains are fiercely rigider than whatever plans I might dream up.
Hungry robin(?) on a Bryant Park chair
New scenes in Hudson Yards
Isabelle
The Oculus and the One World Center
Man and his best friend and Liberty
Rocks and birds of Pier 56
Margo
Church near Union Square
Jamaica Station
Priyank brewing his famous Chai
Durres, Albania - Priyank and I first met in Shkodra, Albania
Clouds and glass mirrors
I’ll end this post, oddly enough, far away in time and space in the Accursed Mountains. At a certain point in my European travels, I was getting tired of having to explain that Georgia is the state just above Florida, so I stopped telling people I was from Atlanta and started saying I hailed from New York - everyone knows where New York is - which is not entirely false. In one of the earlier days of my stint in Plav and Gusinje on the Montenegrin side of the Accursed Mountains, a man replied to my “I’m from New York,” that he had himself lived in New York once. I was genuinely amazed. What were the chances of meeting someone from this tiny, mountain village in the corner of Montenegro who had also lived in New York City? Turns out they were very high. I was still amazed the second time that same scenario played out, but then amazement became amusement as it repeated and repeated many times thereafter. Apparently, it is somewhat of a tradition for the more ambitious youth of those villages to leave and start a new life in New York City - notably Astoria, Queens - where they can expect to make a living working for relatives or family friends or friends of family friends. Some make it big and some of their wealth winds up back home in some way or another. Most do not.
In Semir’s Restaurant Skala in Grebaje Valley, as I sipped tea and continued to be astounded by that then familiar window-view of the Karanfili reliefs on one side and Volusnica on the other - "Nothing special," Irhan often sought to remind me - a Gusinje-born New Yorker, upon hearing that I was “from New York,” decided he wanted to try and impress me with talk of all the properties he owned upstate and in the City (one with that most coveted view of Central Park, no less). I didn't know if he was aware, but the view just outside the window of the snow-blanketed Karanfili had to be one of the best views on the whole planet–and it was free.
Then I met Meldin days later. He’d done the whole New York thing, too, and did well for himself. “It’s all a lie,” he told me. “If people all over the world, like you, are coming to my home, then why should I be anywhere else?” Some in the village think he’s mad, but he moved back to Plav and never regretted it. I joked that, having now been to the Accursed Mountains, whenever I returned to New York I would meet someone from Plav or Gusinje. And it would turn out that the doorman of my friend Jiashi’s Chinatown apartment building was from Albania. I asked where. He, Ermin, told me the name of some village I’d never heard of, but it sounded mountainous. “Do you know the villages Plav and Gusinje?” I asked him. He laughed. “Yes, my father is from there.” What are the chances, in a city of eight million people, I’d run into someone (sort of) from a smattering of mountain villages in Montenegro? Turns out they were very high.
Ermin
Financial District
Jiashi
Me and my titanium friend
Me, my titanium friend, and my fleshy friend, Adam
