The Night I Traveled Through Time

Roommate Julie had to go back to France last week because her visa only allows her to be here for three months at a time. The L wasn't running, but fortunately, Dan Trumble (college friend) came up to visit for the weekend from D.C. in his chariot of a vehicle, a 1996 Chevrolet Cavalier white convertible. I was designated driver for the evening and around 11 it fell upon Christina and I to take Julie to the airport.

We had Dan's phone for GPS but it became quickly apparent that it was more interested in the shortest route spatially as opposed to temporally. After our 40th or so turn down another seemingly random small neighborhood street in Brooklyn, I vowed that technology be damned; we would return home via the BQE.

This, as we shall see, was a fateful choice.

We arrived at JFK punctually. We helped Julie unload her bags and said our goodbyes. Though I've only known her for a month, I'm really going to miss Julie. She was often upset and unhappy in the early days (for some pretty understandable reasons) but as the month continued she continued to get happier and happier until she positively glowed by the end. We lingered saying goodbye until it couldn't be justified by "just one more cigarette" any longer and the attendant was getting antsy.

As Christina and I got into the car for the return journey, though, our situation became compromised immediately. The Cavalier was almost completely out of gas. It was supposed to be an errand sort of trip, so I only had three dollar bills and a driver's license in my pocket. Christina, German that she is, had nothing but Euros. I decided to try to get home on whatever we had left. I followed the signs for Brooklyn/Manhattan and hoped for the best.

Right at the transfer ramp from the Grand Central Parkway to the Long Island Expressway, though, the accelerator stopped being an accelerator. For those who haven't had the experience of running out of gas, it's pretty terrifying. THe car makes weird noises, the power steering locks up, and the pedal does nothing. It's even more terrifying in the middle of an expressway in our nation's largest city. I managed to coast the car halfway up the ramp and off to the side, fighting with the locked-up steering wheel; I put the hazards on and turned to Christina and we just started laughing.

Unfortunately, reality set in quickly. We only had three dollars, there wasn't a gas station in sight, and we were in a fairly dangerous spot, considering that we were on a blind turn and not entirely off the road. I called home to get our AAA number, but we found out shortly thereafter that AAA is legally prohibited from going on the LIE for some reason or another. The customer service rep apologized, there was a long, awkward pause, and then she hung up.

I called Dan to let him know what was going on, and he mentioned that there was an empty gas container in the back of the car. This turned out to be a lifesaver. After a quick strategy session, we decided that Christina would watch the car and draw in her sketchbook while I went to forage for gasoline, three dollars and a gas can in hand.

I jogged down the embankment and hacked my way through a bramble to find myself in the midst of a large, creepy park. A footbridge over the highway to my left looked promising, so I took it up over the 8-odd lanes of traffic and saw that the park continued as far as I could see on the other side of the bridge as well—this place was huge. Creepy, 15-story towers rose from the trees of the park, looking like some kind of science-fiction sentry towers. As I walked deeper in the park, I came across the eerie ruins of something that was somewhere between the framework of a circus tent and a massive turbine engine. Sketchy looking teenage ruffians darted through the darkness on BMX bikes and the humid darkness vibrated with the progressively dwindling sound of traffic. What the hell was this place, anyway?

And then, I turned a corner, and there it was before me: A giant stainless steel ten-story globe. I realized in an instant flashback to History of Design junior year exactly where I was: the ruins of the 1939/1964 World's Fair.

***

A brief digression: I am obsessed with the World's Fair, particularly the 1939 World's Fair. I love the innocence of 1939's assumptions about our future. In the end, what they thought that we would be like tells us far more about them than it does about us. There's also something noble about the celebration of human achievement that the World Fair seeks to achieve. It is an era trying to depict itself at its best. The more television-friendly Olympics have largely replaces the fairs as our global events, which I think is a shame due to the Olympics' narrow focus on one dimension of our experience. The World's Fair is impossible to think of as anything but faintly quaint, a time of deeper pride and optimism that is a distant memory to the current zeitgeist.

I really can't think of anywhere I would have rather stumbled on in so happenstance a manner. Especially filtered through the melancholy of abandonment, the old grounds had a poetry tinged with sadness that I haven't felt since I stood before the Parthenon. As I walked through the empty reflection pool, past the foundations of buildings that once showed "What the Future Would Be Like," I felt that same sense I felt on the roof of our building: existing as part of a place and time that is much, much bigger than you, floating on a sort of colossal tide. There's something about seeing garbage everywhere and people peeing on trees in the darkness of a place that once was lit in celebration of everything we can achieve. It's not really sadness or anger so much as an experience of our own mortality; greatness and hope passing away and taking new form in other places and other times.

***

Sure enough, there was a gas station on the other side of the old grounds. I bought exactly three dollars of gasoline, which filled the canister to the brim and made the long walk back to the car. Christina was in good spirits and handled the whole thing in noble fashion. I poured the gas into the tank and the car started. Instantly, the ordeal transformed from annoyance to hilarity tinged with the barest bit of epic. Christina and I looked at each other and laughed for a full two minutes.

Dan's car, chariot that it is, has a finicky trunk, forcing us to resort to duct-taping it shut. We got everything together and took off. We stopped at the nearest gas station to fill the car up as much as we could with whatever change we could find in the car, which wound up being about another $2.50.

After our long ordeal, Christina and I saw fit to take a joyride down the BQE in the beautiful night with the top down and exposed to the stars. The radio cooperated—Moondance, In the Air Tonight, Riders on the Storm, People are Strange, and finally, the dramatic climax of Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and then turned around to come home. It was the night before the 4th of July and Brooklyn had already begun to celebrate. As we wound through the highrises and brownstones on the BQE the sky lit up with the reds and greens of fireworks celebrating our triumph over what really should have been a pretty miserable evening.

***

Of course, it wouldn't be me telling the story if I didn't wring some kind of lesson from it, so here goes.

It's exactly for this sort of night that I came to New York. If I had been in Chicago, I probably would have known exactly where I was and would have had four people to call within a half an hour of where I was. I am comfortable there, and crisis resolution is easy because there's really no such thing as a crisis.

This entire episode illustrated to me that there are some adventures that can really only happen when you're in unfamiliar territory. It's somehow reassuring to me to know that even in a world of Google maps and iPhones you can still wind up off the grid, forced to make your own way. Here, in New York, at the margins of my own experience, in the ruins of the hopes of a forgotten past, adventure lives on.