Headed Up The East Coast
I spent yesterday afternoon driving. The semester starts on Tuesday; emails are flying: classroom assignments, set up for class blogs (yay!); scheduling conflicts, deadlines (Deadlines?).
I love mid-winter light, especially with the sun at my back. For three hundred miles, there were no clouds or wind; a pink rim to the horizon; pale branches and brown earth through New Jersey and Rockland County, then into Connecticut, snow in the woods on the north sides of mountains. I’ve driven many of these interstates for years—ugh, the Thruway!—yet if traffic were diverted so I had to take local roads, I’d essentially be lost without a map.
When I crossed the Tappan Zee around 2:30, the Hudson was as still as early morning.
It was warm enough that I didn’t need my scarf or parka in the car. I’m like a three-year old with a new stuffed animal or doll with my Christmas scarf; can’t bear to be parted from it, more than a little certain I’m going to lose it or spill something on it.
Most of the way, I didn’t listen to the news; a few minutes of Ann Curry reporting from Haiti—“that airstrip is really going to be essential”—Wednesday night had been enough to make me wait to read about developments. Commercial news organizations have the most amazing ability to find platitudes and make the unspeakable mundane and expected. Oh, yes, the airstrip; of course. The Times did well on background about environmental problems; not so well on the looting angle. Awful how in the few hours I was out of touch the situation and the narrative changed. I do <3 my generation—when I got home Choire and Tom’s piece was the most-forwarded and blogged-about thing I saw.
Somewhere north of Hartford, I turned on All Things Considered. The radio had been left tuned to AM (by me) and an announcer was braying out headlines with that unmistakable AM brassiness: “the temperature in the city…” “traffic leaving the city…” “some wet snow Sunday night in the city…” Yes, but what city? Surely Hartford isn’t big enough to be spoken of, even in hometown radio boosterism, as if there could be no other city?
Finally a station ID: WCBS New York. But I was passing out of the range in which its news would be useful.
