It was a gray, chilly, rain-soaked day. I was driving our Saturn wagon from our home on Staten Island to Manhattan with my son strapped in his car seat in the back because it was a Dr. Gordon day. We had always visited Dr. Gordon on Thursdays, but because my son was starting pre-K tomorrow, we had changed this week's appointment to today. My son enjoyed playing with Dr. Gordon, and he seemed to be doing well enough to start in a mainstream pre-K class. Tomorrow would be a big day.
I was making good time on the BQE for such a rainy day. The usual bottleneck right before the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance was sparse, and I made it into the right lane in just a couple of minutes. The hiss of rainwater drowned out the staccato voices of 1010 WINS News Radio as we drove through the trenches, which is the nickname for an area of the highway that dips below street level and shoots between high walls on either side for more than a mile. It's a notorious place for traffic jams and a miserable place to breathe, with the stench of exhaust fumes choking the interior of the car even with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner or heater blasting. But traffic was light today, and we barely slowed down.
My favorite part of the drive was the section of highway running under the Brooklyn Promenade. After the oppression of the trenches, the voluptuous curve leading to the Promenade hanging over the top of the near lane lent a sense of protected exposure. The payoff was suddenly rounding the curve to find yourself eye-to-eye with the southern tip of Manhattan. The Financial District unrolled beside the highway like a steel carpet, with all the landmarks of my career of the past eleven years shouldering each other for space on the ultimate world stage: Maiden Lane, Wall Street, Park Row, City Hall, the Woolworth Building, and, looming over all, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The view commanded attention, and even while swooping in and out of lanes, I never failed to take a look. The glory of mountains, the endless spread of deserts, the incomprehensible depth of valleys all have their place in our reverence for the environment. But the city, this city, every inch of which had been touched by human hands in its creation, always seemed to me the most miraculous place I had ever seen. How could these buildings rise, stand, endure? How could human life thrive so freely within such seemingly suffocating constraints? How could so much steel and concrete and brick and glass rival nature in its beauty and ferocity? All too soon, the highway took us past our tableau and we were swallowed up by that which we had witnessed.
We wiggled our way onto the Manhattan Bridge and were spit out in the Bowery, where the rain no longer draped the skyline with a romantic silvery curtain, but coated the streets and the sidewalks and the people with an oily sheen. I turned right onto Fourth Avenue for the last leg of our trip, trying not to splash pedestrians as they ran across the street or stood resignedly in the gutters. Today we would play with Dr. Gordon, and tomorrow would be my son's first day of pre-K. Maybe it would be a nicer day than this.