Saturday, September 2, 2017
August 28, 2017 Issue
This week’s New Yorker
is loaded with good things to read and think about. First and foremost – Ian
Frazier’s terrific “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on the pleasure he
gets from driving in New York City. “For me,” he says, “the dreamy part of
metro-driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s
congestion map glows green.” But often the traffic isn’t light. He reports that
he was recently involved in a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway. His
detailed account of that experience is one of the highlights of the piece. My
favorite part is his description of an early-morning drive he takes from his
New Jersey home, across the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The
slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving
slowly on their deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue
Bridge, into Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the
hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”),
across the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its
cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams
of light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto
the Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to
Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto
the Staten Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New
Jersey Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,
Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing
patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in
fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch,
I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike
is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the
earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances
everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music
on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock
song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience
this cool convergence once in a while.
After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State
Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street,
and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and
back in time for breakfast.”
Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.
Labels:
Ian Frazier,
James Wood,
Louis Menand,
Nick Paumgarten,
The New Yorker
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