Farther Away: Essays (26 page)

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
And did anything ever come of that? You and her?

JF:
I crashed for a night on her sofa four years later. Again the Upper East Side. In some anonymous Co-Op City–like tower. Martha had just finished college at Cornell. She was sharing a two-bedroom with two other girls. I was in the city with my brother Tom. We'd had dinner down in Chinatown with the in-laws of my other brother, who'd married his own Manhattan girl a couple of years earlier. Tom went to stay with one of his art-school girlfriends and I went uptown to Martha's. I remember in the morning, the first thing she did was put Robert Palmer's “Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley” on the living room stereo and crank up the volume. We took an unbelievably crowded 6 train down to SoHo, where she had a job selling ad space for the
SoHo News
. And I thought: Boy, this is the life!

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Again without irony, presumably.

JF:
Totally without irony.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
“New York is where I'd rather stay! / I get allergic smelling hay!”

JF:
What can I tell you? There's a particular connection between the Midwest and New York. Not just that New York created the market for the goods that made the Midwest what it is. And not just that the Midwest, in supplying those goods, made New York what it is. New York's like the beady eye of yang at the center of the Midwest's unentitled, self-effacing plains of yin. And the Midwest is like the dewy, romantic, hopeful eye of yin at the center of New York's brutal, grasping yang. A certain kind of Midwesterner comes east to be completed. Just as a certain kind of New York native goes to the Midwest to be renewed.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Huh. Pretty deep stuff there. And, you know, what's genuinely interesting, though, is that there's a connection at the level of geology as well. I mean, think about it: New York is the only state on the East Coast that is also a Great Lakes state. You think it's any accident that the Erie Canal got dug where it did? You ever driven the Thruway west along the Mohawk? Way, way off in the distance on the southern side, miles and miles away, you can see these enormous, sharp river bluffs. Well, you know what? Those bluffs used to be the edge of the river. Back when it was a miles-wide cataclysmic flood of glacial meltwater bursting out of mid-continent and draining down toward the ocean. That's what created your easy route to the Midwest: the last Ice Age.

JF:
Which I understand was pretty recent, geologically speaking.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Yesterday afternoon, geologically speaking. It's only ten thousand years since you had mastodons and woolly mammoths wandering around Bear Mountain and West Point. All sorts of crazy shit—California condors out Syracuse way, walruses and beluga whales up near the Canadian border. And all recently. Yesterday afternoon, more or less. Twenty thousand years ago, the entire state was under a sheet of ice. As the ice began to recede, all across North America, you got these huge lakes of meltwater with nowhere to go. And it would build up and build up until it found a catastrophic way out. Sometimes it flowed out on the western side, down the Mississippi, but sometimes there were monumental ice dams over there and the water had to find a way out to the east. And when a dam finally broke, it really broke. It was bigger than biblical. It was awe-inspiring. And that's what happened in central New York. There came a time when the way out for all that water was right past present-day Schenectady. It carved the bluffs to the south of the Mohawk, it carved the Hudson Valley, it even carved a canyon in the continental shelf that goes two hundred miles out to sea. Then the ice pulled back farther and farther north until another new exit opened up: over the top of the Adirondacks and around the east side of them and down through what eventually became Lake George and Lake Champlain to the Hudson. So what you see in the Hudson today is in fact a close cousin of the Mississippi. Those two rivers were the two principal southern drainages for a continent's worth of melted ice.

JF:
The mind reels.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
New York City's cosmopolitanism runs pretty deep, too, geologically speaking. We've been entertaining foreign visitors for better than half a billion years. Most notably the continent of Africa, which came over about three hundred million years ago, crashed into America, stuck around long enough to build the Alleghenies, and then headed back east. If you look at a geological map of New York, it looks a lot like a state map of ethnicity. The bedrock geology upstate is fairly white-bread uniform—big deposits of limestone from the time when New York was a shallow subtropical sea. But when you get down toward the lower Hudson and the Manhattan spur, the rock becomes incredibly heterogeneous and folded and fragmented. You've got remnants of every kind of crap that's come crashing into the continent tectonically, plus other crap from various magmatic upwellings due to rifting, plus further crap that got pushed down by the glaciers. Downstate looks like a melting pot that needs a good stir. And why? Because New York truly always was very central. It sits at the far southeastern corner of the original North American shield, and at the very top of the Appalachian fold belt, and on the western margin of all the gnarly New England volcanic-island crappy-crap that got appended to the continent, and in a northwest corner of our ever-widening Atlantic Ocean. The fact that it's a conjunction of all these things helps explain why it ended up as the most open and inviting state in the whole seaboard, with its easy routes up to Canada and over to the Midwest. Because, literally, for hundreds of millions of years, New York is where the action's been.

JF:
What's funny, listening to you, is how much less ancient this all seems than my own early twenties. Three hundred million years is nothing compared to how long it's been since I was a senior in college. And even college seems relatively recent compared to the years right after. The years when I was married. If you want to talk about a tortured, deep geology.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
I don't suppose you married your vivacious cousin?

JF:
No, no, no. But definitely a New York girl. Just like I'd always dreamed of. Her people on her dad's side had been living in Orange County since the 1600s. And her mom's name was Harriet. And she had two very petite younger sisters who were a lot like the girls in the backseat of Martha's Town Car. And she was deliciously unhappy.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Unhappy was never my idea of delicious.

JF:
Well, for some reason, it was mine. Three hundred million years ago. The first thing we did when we got out of school was sublet an apartment on West 110th Street. By the end of that summer, I was so in love with the city, it was almost an afterthought to propose that she and I get married. Which we did, a year later, on a hillside up in Orange County, near the terminus of the Palisades Parkway. Late in the day, we drove off in our Chevy Nova and crossed the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge, heading back toward Boston. I told the toll-taker that we'd just got married, and he waved us on through. It's hardly an exaggeration to say that we were happy then and happy for the next five years, happy being in Boston, happy visiting New York, happy longing for it from a distance. It was only when we decided to actually live here that our troubles started.

NEW YORK STATE'S PUBLICIST:
(
Distantly
) Hal? Hello? Hal?

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
Oops—excuse me. Janelle! Wrong way! Over here! Janelle! She can never find me . . . Janelle!

NEW YORK STATE'S PUBLICIST:
Oh, this is terrible, terrible! Jon, she's been ready for you for
five minutes
already, and here I'm wandering around and around and around in this
warren
. I know I promised you a half hour, but I'm afraid you may have to content yourself with fifteen minutes. And, I'm sorry, but,
hiding
back here with Hal, you do bear a certain amount of responsibility yourself. Honestly, Hal, you need to install
escape-path lighting
or something.

THE NEW YORK STATE GEOLOGIST:
I feel lucky to be funded at all.

JF:
It's been nice talking to you.

NEW YORK STATE'S PUBLICIST:
Let's
go,
let's
go
. Run with me! I should have sprinkled some bread crumbs behind me . . . A person could lie down and die here, and the world might never know it . . . She hates to be kept waiting even five seconds! And you know who she'll blame, don't you?

JF:
Me?

NEW YORK STATE'S PUBLICIST:
No! Me! Me! Oh, here we are, here we are, we're coming coming coming coming, here, just go on in, she's waiting for you—go on—and don't forget to ask about the pictures—

JF:
Hello!

NEW YORK STATE:
Hello. Come in.

JF:
I'm really sorry I kept you waiting.

NEW YORK STATE:
I'm sorry, too. It cuts into our already very limited time together.

JF:
I've been here since eight-thirty this morning, and then, in the last half hour—

NEW YORK STATE:
Mm.

JF:
Anyway, it's great to see you. You look terrific. Very, ah, put-together.

NEW YORK STATE:
Thank you.

JF:
It's been so long since we were alone, I don't know where to begin.

NEW YORK STATE:
We were alone once?

JF:
You don't remember?

NEW YORK STATE:
Maybe. Maybe you can remind me. Or not. Some men are more memorable than others. The cheap dates I tend to forget. Would this have been a cheap date?

JF:
They were
nice
dates.

NEW YORK STATE:
Oh! “Dates,” plural. More than one.

JF:
I mean, I know I'm not Mort Zuckerman, or Mike Bloomberg, or Donald Trump—

NEW YORK STATE:
The Donald! He is cute. (
Giggles
) I think he's cute!

JF:
Oh my God.

NEW YORK STATE:
Oh, come on, admit it. He really is pretty cute, don't you think? . . . What? You truly don't think so?

JF:
I'm sorry, I'm . . . just taking it all in. This whole morning. I mean, I knew things were never going to be the same with us. But, my God. It really is all about money and money only now, isn't it?

NEW YORK STATE:
It was always about money. You were just too young to notice.

JF:
So you remember me?

NEW YORK STATE:
Possibly. Or possibly I'm making an educated guess. The romantic young men never notice. My mother even came to find the Redcoats rather handsome, back in the war years. What else was she supposed to do? Let them burn everything?

JF:
I guess it runs in your family, then!

NEW YORK STATE:
Oh, please. Grow up. Is this really how you want us to spend our ten minutes?

JF:
You know, I was back there last month. The hillside where I got married—her grandparents' house. I was driving up through Orange County and I went back to try to find it. I remembered a green lawn spilling down to a rail fence, and a big overgrown pasture with woods all around it.

NEW YORK STATE:
Yes, Orange County. A lovely feature of mine. I hope you took some time to savor the many tracts of spectacular parkland around Bear Mountain and to reflect on what an extraordinary percentage of my total land area is guaranteed public and “forever wild.” Of course, a great deal of that land came to me as gifts from very rich men. Perhaps you'd like me to be pure and virtuous and give it all back to them for development?

JF:
I wasn't sure I ever actually found it, the land was so altered. It was all hideous sprawl, traffic, Home Depot, Best Buy, Target. Next door to the town's old brick high school there was this brand-new pink aircraft-carrier-size building with signs at the entrance that said
please drive slowly, we love our children
.

NEW YORK STATE:
Our precious freedoms do include the freedom to be tacky and annoying.

JF:
The best I could do was narrow it to two hillsides. The same thing was happening on both of them. Building-size pieces of earth-moving equipment were scraping it all bare. Reshaping the very contours of the land—creating these cute little fake dells and fake knolls for hideous houses to be sold to sentimentalists so enraged with the world they had to inform it, in writing, on a road sign, that they love their children. Clouds of diesel exhaust, broken full-grown oak trees piled up like little sticks, birds whizzing around in a panic. I could see the whole gray and lukewarm future. No urban. No rural. The entire country just a wasteland of shittily built neither-nor.

NEW YORK STATE:
And yet, in spite of it all, I am still rather beautiful. Isn't it unfair? What money can buy? And trees do have a way of growing back. You think there were oak trees on your hillside in the nineteenth century? There probably weren't a thousand oak trees left standing in the entire county. So let's not talk about the past.