Gangs Of New York

This biker gang came swarming up alongside us at a stop light at 87th and 5th Avenue in New York. We were running down fifth toward the Port Authority bus depot at Times Square. I don't know who they were, I think they had name tags on their jackets and it got me thinking about how I was only notionally in New York and what it means to actually be someplace. Sure, geographically at that moment I was in New York but we didn't stop, not above ground anyway. That afternoon I got on another bus and we went through the tunnel to New Jersey and down the pike to Washington DC. 

I once flew from Medford Oregon to Portland via Seattle, which sounds incredibly stupid but it is the same phenomenon. I wanted to stay in Ashland until the last possible moment that Sunday, and the departure time for the flight I booked was 7:30 pm, which gave me an extra 4 hours, and I didn't notice that the flight was nonstop to Seattle. Then a half hour layover, then to Portland. Stupid, but a lot like my bus trip. It was close to 9 pm when we flew over Portland at about 30,000 feet. From that height you didn't see a big city at all, what you saw were a few scattered  lights as if from a small desert town. It really made me think about the nature of the experience of being in a place is really more about how you interact with it. I was no more "in" New York this day on the bus than I had been "in" Portland that night at 30,000 feet.