The other day, I was riding the ferry through New York Harbor. It was early and I was tired. I was going to work and not feeling too great about a few things. I was on the top deck, scowling at the tugboats, barges and seagulls.
It wasn’t cold, but the top deck was deserted except for another guy, who was playing music from a wireless speaker. Usually, this aggravates me. But through my crusty and cranky senses came something unexpected and familiar. It was Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Faintly, over the white noise of the diesel engines, the wind and my own angst, it found me, at a time when my spirit was in uncomfortable abeyance.
I’m a middle-aged man who never cared for mornings, going to do something I’d rather not do for all the reasons middle-aged men do things. It’s chilly, but warm compared to the early part of April. It’s early, the ferry leaves Sunset Park at 7:58 and pulls into Wall Street Pier 11 at about 8:10.
Geographically, the commuter ferry moves from south to north, up into the harbor, away from the open ocean, eventually adhering to the lining of Manhattan. It doesn’t track the exact route that Verrazzano charted 501 years ago - he travelled the western path between New Jersey and Governor’s Island.
My boat leaves from the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a monumental and gorgeous poured-concrete apparatus begun during World War One to get ready for who knows how many more World Wars. Connecting trucks, trains and ships, it was instrumental in supplying the efforts in the second one. Trains could pass through one of the buildings, fed by gantry trains. Regional sections, like INDIA and AZORES are still marked on the columns inside.
Following the World War II, the mortal remains of more than 120,000 American servicemen passed through the terminal on the way home. These days, its huge pier is a parking lot, cleared occasionally for food and music festivals about which I never seem to hear much.
Neither dead nor going to war, I depart from the decommissioned Army Terminal.
The boat turns around, starts westward, then veers north into the Upper Bay, toward Manhattan. Looking ahead, the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty briefly vanishes within the big shoulders of some new high-rises in Journal Square.
The song that brings me to life is Idiot Wind. In the Bob Dylan songbook, it falls well into the too-much category, alongside Masters of War, Positively 4th Street and The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar. By too much, I mean that Bob so angry that I’m given pause about how much of his outrage I really want to share in.
I had a CD of Blood on the Tracks when I was in high school, though I favored the songs Twist of Fate and Shelter from the Storm at the time. And it starts up as we approach Red Hook.
Someone's got it in for me They're planting stories in the press Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quick But when they will I can only guess
Loose and colloquial, like a pal complaining - the enormity of the charge is like a pistol smuggled in a birthday cake.
The boat passes the rip-rap barrier of the Erie Basin, where an enterprising dock once owner charged European ship captains to offload the stones they used as ballast, and used them to construct a protected harbor within the harbor. It was a dry-dock for ships through World War II, now mostly an auto pound. The roofs of cars reflect the low morning sun.
The song goes on about betrayal, about losing loved ones in the drift of time.
Beyond the Erie Basin is the IKEA that all the terrible people got excited about, inexpensive housewares for apartments that seemed like homes, but weren’t. Roommates flaked, relationships failed, rents rose, and the chintzy furniture couldn’t be moved without collapsing. Put it on the curb, the mason jars and utensils in cardboard boxes in case anyone besides Sanitation wants them.
I couldn't believe after all these years You didn't know me better than that Sweet lady
Beside it, the pale-blue truck ramp of the Amazon warehouse, a concrete nonentity in brand colors. Was it a consolation prize from the failed attempt to woo the company’s HQ a few years back? Or, like the new self-storage block, was it just the best deal they could get after Hurricane Sandy rendered the whole neighborhood borderline uninsurable?
The ferry slows down, careful not to lay too much wake for the barges. One time, I caught the pilot slowing down for ducks, seriously. Good for him. Van Brunt, then Conover Street unfolds in parallax view, so I can just about make out the bulbous plastic red letters on small yellow spelling out BAR. The bar is Sunny’s.
There's a lone soldier on the cross Smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done In the final end he won the wars After losin' every battle
Sunny’s is an old place, an enigmatic place. People call it a spiritual home, and treat it as such. I held my 30th birthday there, far from the trains, in the rain, when few of my friends had regular cab fare to spend. In the early 2000s, lacking a liquor license, it operated informally, with patrons simply leaving what they thought they owed in a jar on the way out.
And now? The last time I was there, the jam session was going full force. But the people had come from farther away - a lot of coats and bags jamming up the place for a mild night. A lot of wild-eyed lonely souls talking too soft or too loud, bumping into people or flinching from casual contact in tight spaces. The neighborhood had changed after Sandy, with the poorer eccentrics selling out to the ones with cash for quirky gut-remodels of the old houses near the water.
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
At the tip of the headland - the point of Red Hook’s hook - is the Food Bazaar, housed inside a borderline gorgeous four-story pier building. From the ferry, a streetcar from the Green Line of Boston’s MBTA is visible, a relic from a failed effort by the residents to remedy the dearth of transportation options in their otherwise picturesque neighborhood, twenty-five years ago.
I woke up on the roadside Daydreamin' 'bout the way things sometimes are
The Food Bazaar is fine as far as supermarkets go, but it was once something far finer, called Fairway, a giant market where you could stock up on rare camembert, salmon roe as well as Cheetos and Kix, and then enjoy a reasonable lobster roll and a beer on the patio, while watching the sun drop over Lady Liberty. For a time, Fairway was the best supermarket in the city. It easily survived the near-complete physical ruin inflicted by Hurricane Sandy, and set about expanding. But within a few short years, the private equity firms who financed that expansion had gutted Fairway utterly. Let Bob run with it.
You hurt the ones that I love best And cover up the truth with lies One day you'll be in the ditch Flies buzzin' around your eyes
Moving on, to the right is a new but rapidly dilapidating cruise terminal - a parking lot and glass box best hurried through on the way to breakfast-lunch-dinner buffets served by friendly young folks making the minimum wage of another nation, and musicians damned triply, by history, technology and finance into playing the hits day and night. These ships are enormous, like city blocks broken off from the iceberg of Manhattan.
Idiot wind Blowing every time you move your teeth You're an idiot, babe It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe It was gravity which pulled us down And destiny which broke us apart
The ferry’s passing through Buttermilk Channel, between Governor’s Island and Brooklyn. The name has two possible origins. One is that the current here was once so choppy that it would turn the milk coming on boats from the farms of South Brooklyn to butter by the time it reached Manhattan. The other is that farmers from Brooklyn would cross at low tide to pasture on Governor’s Island. The boat makes easy progress now.
There’s an explanation that makes both explanations for the name plausible. Apparently, it had once been possible to walk cows across the channel. The aggressive filling in, and “wharfing out” of the marshes on the east side of Manhattan with garbage and docks accelerated the tidal of the East River to where the marsh connecting Governor’s Island and Brooklyn was eventually swept out to sea. The channel is now forty feet deep, and smooth sailing.
This aggressive tidal current, accelerated by the filling of the marshes of Brooklyn through the accentuation of the Gowanus Canal, deepened its shores, allowing for gargantuan Bush Terminal, for the docks, piers and anchorages of the foundational American dramas that would break out there, like On the Waterfront and A View from the Bridge and Last Exit to Brooklyn.
Now everything's a little upside down As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped What's good is bad, what's bad is good You'll find out when you reach the top You're on the bottom
All that gang warfare, labor struggle, logistical genius and human striving was driven off the waterfronts of New York in the 1960s. Nobody won any of those fights. Rather, it was the acceleration of a different current that resolved the murderous grudges and ideological differences.
Containerization - big ships with big boxes loaded into big trucks - picked up harbor traffic to New Jersey, which promised more parking and fewer mouths to feed.
I can't remember your face anymore Your mouth has changed Your eyes don't look into mine
On the right-hand side of the Buttermilk Channel the ferry passes beneath giant container cranes on the right, but only a few - six, eight maybe - with the berths often empty.
On the left is Governor’s Island, the back porches of officers’ houses gaze blankly on the channel, the homes empty now. The city isn’t touching those structures. In ever-growing confidence that they’ll never be able to do anything acceptable with them, nor build anything remotely as good. The city seems to be waiting for them to decay beyond hope of repair. It worked for Admiral’s Row in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The other day, I was on the island with my son, and the old Commander’s house had been left unlocked. Inside, the plaster was peeling off the walls in saucer-sized chunks. The south side of Governor’s Island, which we passed while transfixed on Red Hook, is supposed to get an environmental research center - no CERN, but a feel-good, do-nothing glass building, pending funding from the next mayor, the next governor and so forth.
The priest wore black on the seventh day And sat stone-faced while the building burned
Turning back to Brooklyn, I look past the cranes, to the neighborhood piled beyond it, the affluent real estate markets swelling up beyond memories of Bait & Tackle, Jalopy and Monteiro’s - memories maybe not of faces, but of the outsized hopes invested in getting drunk with them, of what was to be discovered. And from the little speaker clipped to my neighbor’s backpack came the words for the outrage I’d buried within my business-casual duds, my reasonable inner counterpoint, my cheerful semblance on the video conference call.
I waited for you on the running boards Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned Slowly into autumn
The running boards. I was waiting on the running boards. The truck was running. I wasn’t in the truck, but I wanted to be in the truck, but only if you were there, too. I was waiting on the running boards, waiting to go, with you. Where did you fuckers go? What happened to all that I had hoped from the city? From myself? From life?
Outrage, sure, but not the solitary kind. The words assured me I had come, despite seemingly everything, to the right moment that morning.
Almost past Governor’s Island now, the captain turns the boat. Given the medium of water and the width of the channel, it’s a stiff turn as he aims the boat straight at Manhattan. There’s New York State and there’s the five boroughs of New York City. But Manhattan is New York. Like the Project of the same name, it’s the explosion, the ground zero from which all follows. And there it is.
And there’s my buddy with his bluetooth speaker, blasting a fifty-year-old album into our shared solitude. The sound is thin. But it’s real. In a time when my own feelings have come to find less and less grip in the evidence of my senses, here’s a voice reaching out to me.
At the same time, though, the workday looms in the form of soon-to-be-demolished office buildings, only construction work-lights visible behind the faded black-glass windows.
I can't feel you anymore I can't even touch the books you've read Every time I crawl past your door I been wishin' I was somebody else instead
The goofy friends evicted to hometowns and the serious ones drinking themselves to death. The bankrupted bars and bookstores and coffee shops. The sorrowful failure of every human thing in the face of the new Chipotle, the new Crunch, the callous empty storefronts and the new high rises with multi-million-dollar buy-ins.
The ferry chugs its human cargo toward it all. And I’m getting up at six to make a ferry to get to an office where I have to walk ten blocks to find anything that might remind me why I’d come to this town to begin with, and not enough time in that small space to remind myself why I’d ever want to be born here.
The truth is I don’t really want to hear much from Bob Dylan that morning, or for hundreds of mornings before that. A year, though maybe two. No clear reasons - more like magnetic repulsion.
The truth is we all need help, and here’s Bob stepping up, just as we reach the octagonal air vent of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, now named after former Brooklyn politico Hugh Carey, who with his wife, raised fourteen kids in a three-story brick house while the city went bankrupt around them. Imagine the hope!
Down the highway, down the tracks Down the road to ecstasy I followed you beneath the stars Hounded by your memory And all your ragin' glory
The voice says it all. There’s light - glory even. And the glory is reason within the reasons. The glory is the sting within the betrayal. The glory is the light. The glory is the revelation.
Now the ferry enters New York Harbor proper. From the corner of my eye, I see the fortress the British built on Governor’s Island to blast gunboats entering the harbor to steal the city as they’d done from the Dutch, without a shot fired or a ledger disturbed.
Now South Brooklyn Heights is to the right, New Jersey to the left. We’ll dock soon. I feel an urge to check my work phone, frisky with emails from older time zones. But Bob is onto something. And fifty years later, something in his voice makes it feel as if it might be lost forever if I don’t pay close attention.
I been double-crossed now For the very last time and now I'm finally free I kissed goodbye the howling beast On the borderline which separated you from me
He’s pretty much shouting, and I feel remiss in my slouch. The whole song has been about double crosses of different varieties. I’ve certainly been double-crossed, at least according to me. But the final one hasn’t happened, I feel pretty sure. I imagine a hospital, when after a hard conversation with an unyielding health-insurance doyenne, my family decides against a procedure. But we’ll see.
Bob’s not talking about that though. He’s talking about the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me. It sounds poetic. But I was out networking on behalf of a script I wrote the other night, and I can report that the beast on the borderline remains quite real. There’s only two ways to say goodbye to that beast on the borderline. One is to become intimate with someone, and the other is to forsake them entirely.
You'll never know the hurt I suffered Nor the pain I rise above And I'll never know the same about you Your holiness or your kind of love And it makes me feel so sorry
It’s one way to jump. And it’s as plain and clear of an expression of the tragedy of giving up on people as I can think of. Maybe you do have to jump, what with all the howling.
The howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me is something that howls at me in every waking office hour, every video call, every chat message. The howling persists, and so do I, mostly. The money is some of the reason. But also, can you give up on people just because they’ve given up on who you think you are? I guess we’ll see.
The Brooklyn Bridge is large above the water now - Hart Crane’s “harp and altar” over where Whitman crossed on another ferry. The bridge’s towers alternate with those of the Manhattan Bridge beyond it, but differently than before.
A chintzy, no-imagination cheese-grater building now dwarfs both august crossings, hundreds of feet taller than anything around it. The 840-foot building is a loveless condo piled on the site of the Lower-East-Side Pathmark where my childhood best friend had his mother wire him cash so we could go out drinking one more night on the second-to-last time I ever saw the guy. It blocks the view of the city with its glassy nothing when I take the train into Manhattan.
Idiot wind Blowing through the buttons of our coats Blowing through the letters that we wrote
The ferry now passes the old Beaux-Arts Battery Maritime terminal - too beautiful for commuters, but not for the customers of the Cipriani inside of it. Next door is the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, designed in a style best described as don’t-fucking-look-at-me. The boat passes the Battery, and banks wide for a peek up the skirt of Wall Street to the gothic spire of Trinity Church.
The morning trip through New York Harbor concludes below Manhattan’s 161 Maiden Lane, a 60-story luxury condo thrown up atop hastily “improved” landfill, in a construction frenzy that murdered at least one construction worker.
The building now leans a few inches off kilter - not enough to warrant an emergency demolition, but too much to make the structure worth finishing. Its dull reinforced concrete skeleton has sat quarter-clad in glass panels for the last five years, its towering malediction imposed upon those of us below.
Take it away, Bob.
Idiot wind Blowing through the dust upon our shelves We're idiots, babe It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves
Then the dock. Gather your belongings. Get ready for the day, like the last one, probably, unless today’s the layoffs.
Idiocy and picnics
The ancient Greek for idiot refers to someone removed from public life. And I’ve withdrawn in my own ways. I don’t take potshots or share memes. I don’t bring my whole self to many endeavors. And maybe privacy is a form of idiocy.
With these essays, I’ve tried to be honest, in public. Being honest is no picnic. New York is no picnic. Speaking in public is no picnic. The alternative is a kind of idiocy, though, a muteness enforced by the seeming solidity and order of the insanity of the world.
An earlier version of Idiot Wind has this relatable line about the difficulty of speaking honestly.
I figured I'd lost you anyway; why go on? What's the use? In order to get in a word with you I'd have had to come up with some kind of excuse. It just struck me kind of funny.
The idiocy that Bob Dylan seems to be singing about isn’t precisely the Greek one, nor the one indicated by the vernacular American insult. It’s the inability to reach one another, a failure to locate a shared frame of reference, a fundamental unwillingness to communicate and to even experience one another as human beings. As a force this idiocy can feel overpowering some days.
But it’s just the wind. Sometimes, songs carry on the wind. This one pierced my own idiocy, animated me - made me want to go up to the guy playing the song and introduce myself. It made me want to reach out to old friends.
Selected bibliography
Idiot Wind - album version - long live version - soft version
Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York
Another jeremiad about New York, with a Bob Dylan reference
Walt Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry