#52 Butch goes to New York!

I’m the first to admit that I’m a small-town guy. Raised in a town of 16,000, I have not traveled extensively, and I’m not what some would call “worldly”. I’m not highly experienced with big cities, culturally sophisticated, or especially knowledgeable about the broader world and its intricacies. Five or six cars at a light counts for “traffic” where I grew up (and live) and the tallest buildings I saw until I was an adult were grain elevators. The world I grew up in was comfortably flat, predictably calm, and mostly quiet.

So when we stepped off the bus in the heart of Manhattan, the sensory overload was staggering—it was a cacophony of traffic both vehicular and human, the neon glare of insanely large billboards, a melodious but indecipherable blend of multiple languages spoken all around me, the blur of people moving with an urgency compelled by who knows what, and the staggering sight of One World Trade Center and the twin pools, named “Reflecting Absence”, where the Towers once stood. Looking into them was not unlike how looking into a black hole must feel. I’ve seen NYC in so many movies and so many times on the news that it had the surreal quality of being a place I knew was real, but I had never felt the gravitational immensity of it until now. Now here it was in front of me, solid as a brick, hot, smelly, raucous. The canyons of sky-darkening impossible skyscrapers were spellbinding, like monuments to a world I didn’t understand. I freaking loved it.

Seeing all this reminded me of blind mole rats. Let me explain! Watching the New York crowds surging so self-importantly to their respective cubicles, you get a glimpse of the ultimate evolutionary destination of mankind: the naked mole rat lifestyle. Scientists tell us that naked mole rats are “eusocial,” which is a fancy biological term meaning they live in massive, underground colony hives where millions of pasty, wrinkled individuals spend their lives blindly scurrying through dark, subterranean tunnels, breathing stale air, and aggressively bumping into each other in a frantic quest for edible roots. New Yorkers, of course, do the exact same thing, except instead of edible roots, they are looking for a $14 artisanal cold brew or a New York bagel. Both populations operate under a strict, hive-like division of labor where a teeming army of stressed-out workers does all the actual digging, while a tiny, pampered elite—the “queens,” or in New York terms, people who own apartments with actual washing machines—sit at the top of the mound, or in this case, skyscraper, completely insulated from the chaos below. It is a terrifyingly efficient system, proving that if you pack enough humans into a tight, colorful, distracting and loud space, they will eventually stop acting like individual sentient beings and start acting like a single, giant, caffeinated super-organism that smells faintly of damp concrete and hot garbage. New York City!

I don’t even know where to start with the pictures, so here goes:

One World Trade Center.

Of course I had to visit the Bull, and the Empire State Building, and Times Square.

A New York bagel was one of our first stops, along with a ride on an open-top tour bus.

The NY Stock Exchange, and the arch where John Lennon was shot.

That skyline!

And just in case you haven’t seen this one, we’re pretty proud of it. It’s been a long adventure getting here; as I’ve said before this blog only captures about two percent of what’s actually going on.

So today we are on the Erie Canal, tied up at a neat little park in a small NY town, bound for Canada. More on that next time!

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know too many things that aren’t so.” M Twain