Gotham Diary:
On the Road
16 August 2013
It was an excellent distraction. I had just said goodbye to Megan — this time for real, finally; I won’t see her again until Thanksgiving — and I was having trouble speaking. Then we got to the top of Avenue C. I was in a taxi with Ray Soleil, having just overseen the removal of some items from Megan’s apartment; now we were on our way to deposit them in the downtown storage unit on Sixty-Second Street. As we pulled under the drive (it’s still Avenue C along the river), I saw this gigantic plume of very black smoke pouring quite unmistakably from one of the levels of the Queensborough Bridge. Some sort of fire was raging in the span over the East Channel of the East River, between Roosevelt Island and Queens. In the picture above, it might seem that something on Roosevelt was burning, but from the top of Avenue C, the smoke rose from a point over the river. Hours later, there still isn’t much news about it, but a truck seems to have exploded. We did see orange flames through the smoke.
Later, after lunch, we found that we had to walk home. Traffic on First and Second Avenues was at close to a standstill. There were few taxis, none of them empty. A dramatic afternoon, in its way. I was very grateful for the superficial disruption, although it must have brought massive inconvenience to many and rather worse, I imagine, to those in the vicinity of the truck.
As I carried Will to the car in which his other grandparents would drive him across New Jersey to a house in Pennsylvania where, tomorrow, Ryan’s mother’s family will celebrate its annual reunion — Megan and Ryan will join them after they’ve cleared out their flat — he told me that I had to come out to California soon, “because I don’t want to be out there all by myself.” I managed to keep on walking.
Early Sunday morning, the young O’Neills will begin their drive out West. They’re looking forward to a day at Glacier National Park, en route. Otherwise, they’ll try to make good time. We can’t wait to hear that they’ve reached San Francisco.
I’m feeling rather crumpled, as one does after tears not quite completely suppressed. I’m happy to be in the middle of Necessary Errors, which is as big a book as The Corrections, or at least as deeply plumbed a one. The novel also reminds me of What Maisie Knew — the indirection stemming, in this case, from the protagonist’s ignorance of just what is going on around him, and his finding out, slowly, where to look. It is astonishing that an attentive and highly-educated young man can be so innocent, but I remember being so myself.