The worst part, though, was that I started to believe I knew what I was doing. I would stride confidently out of my hotel room, and it would be several long blocks before I realized that I didn’t know where I was going. Also, I’d already forgotten the name of my hotel. Terrified, I’d usually run back the way I’d come and wait until Rand was free so we could hang out together.
This sort of terrified codependency is not ideal when one is trying to become a travel writer. And it would soon change—thanks to my husband and his illogical career advice.
In the fall of 2009, we’d been married for a year, and I’d been writing the blog for six months. That October, we went back to New York. I like the city. It’s full of impatient people and wonderful food and when I’m there, I feel like my finger is on the pulse of everything. Also, I once saw a well-dressed and utterly unassuming young man in Chelsea squat down on the sidewalk, poop, and then pull up his pants and continue walking. I have always found this inexplicably comforting. New York has the capacity to make you feel incredibly normal and well-adjusted.
As comfortable as I was in the city, I still relied heavily on Rand to figure out where the hell I was going, but I suppose that’s true of everything and not simply travel.
It was our last morning in town—Rand had spent the last few days engrossed with his conference, and I swore that I’d go out and explore Manhattan on my own, but I inevitably ended up cloistered in our hotel room, looking up nearby bakeries.
I was terrified of losing my way. Of the vulnerability that accompanies stepping off a subway or out of a cab and realizing you have utterly no idea where you are. My mother, despite all her charming recklessness, imbued in me a deep, debilitating fear of everything. I try not to judge her too harshly for this act. She was new to America, and I was the first girl born in my generation of the family, after seven boys. Apparently everyone got together, saw my tiny vagina, and collectively freaked the fuck out. They decided that the only way to keep it (and me) safe was to make sure I firmly believed that the world was out to kill me. I try to be forgiving of the sheer terror they instilled in me. They simply wanted me to live a long, safe, petrified life.
The problem was, their tactic worked far too well. If anxiety were a component of a long life (it is not), I and my neuroses would never die. The thing I would later learn is that the world isn’t dangerous. I mean, parts of it are, but unless you step directly into a volcano or cover yourself in raw meat and traipse across the Serengeti, you should be okay. Some people are dangerous, sure, but they are few and far between and often not found in modern-day Midtown Manhattan. If you let your fear of them control your life, you are utterly fucked.
But I hadn’t realized that yet and was still scared of everything surrounding me. My coping mechanism was to try to control every single variable that I could. And to never, ever, get lost. It didn’t matter that I could ask any number of passersby for help, or that my deepest fear—that I would somehow become so utterly disoriented that I’d never see the people I loved ever again—made zero sense. Fear doesn’t need logic to thrive. Often it does perfectly well without a hint of it. Some of the most illogical people I know are perpetually terrified.
So I became intimately acquainted with the interior of the Midtown Sheraton, venturing out only when my reserves of cupcakes were running low or I just desperately needed a whiff of the mixture of stale urine and grilled meat and car exhaust that imbues every inch of Manhattan, with the exception of the Meatpacking District (which mostly just smells like sex—and also grilled meat). I’d reduced the greatest city in the world to a comfortable radius of a few square blocks.
But on that last day we’d already checked out of our hotel room and Rand had work obligations, so I found myself marooned on a couch in the lobby, alone and somewhat panicked. I’d already exploited all of Midtown: I’d spent hours at MoMA; I’d walked up and down Fifth Avenue; I’d visited the guy selling candied peanuts so many times that I was beginning to dream up disguises I’d use the next time. Because this was in the dark years before smart phones, and I was without a laptop or an Internet connection, I had no idea what to do next. The only thing in my possession was a small laminated map I’d picked up at the museum.
I unfolded it, staring at the grid of streets, hoping they’d make sense to me. My inability to find my way doesn’t simply extend to the physical world—it means I can barely decipher topographical representations of places I know well. Rand can look at a map and often name the city in question. I see it as a random array of interesting geometric shapes, no more able to inform me of where I am than a painting by Mondrian or Klee. I hate dystopian stories, and this is a big reason why: I have no skills whatsoever, with the exception of a vast knowledge of European cubists. Unless the rulers of some future postapocalyptic society are art history majors, I’m utterly screwed. The second society crumbles, I’m certain I’ll be eaten.
Anyway, the map was utter nonsense. Maps always are.
The island of Manhattan is, for the poetically minded, shaped like the nib of a quill, long and thin, angled sharply at one end. The Bronx buttresses up against it on the north side; Staten Island is just down to the south and west, closer to New Jersey than to Manhattan itself. Just to the east is Queens, with Brooklyn below it, separated from Manhattan by a thin channel of the East River.
I say all this as though I understand it—believe me when I tell you, I do not. Put enough monkeys in front of typewriters, and they will eventually write a novel, albeit one in which the pages are smeared with feces. Alas, I should not judge. Writing a book is difficult.
And there, in that thin sliver of blue water between the boroughs, I saw a tiny strip of land—easily overlooked on my small laminated map—that read “Roosevelt Island.” And on it, three rather incredible words: “Smallpox Hospital (Ruins).”
“Yep,” I said to myself. “That’s it.” It’s fascinating, the things that move us out of our comfort zones.
Twenty minutes later, after several wrong turns, I was in an aerial tramway that was carrying me away from Manhattan, high over the East River, toward Roosevelt Island. I kept repeating the words that Rand always told me whenever I became frightened of getting irretrievably lost: “You are always just a cab ride away from me.”
The first time he said this, I stared at him skeptically.
“What if—”
He knew where I was going. He always does, even if I don’t.
“Sometimes it’s a very expensive cab ride,” he said, delicately cutting me off. “Preceded by a long flight. But I’m still only a cab ride away.”
I often whispered this like a mantra, even when I was only wandering a few blocks. And while it was not exactly applicable to Roosevelt Island (it’s nearly impossible to find a cab there) the tram ran every fifteen minutes. If it was awful, I could turn around and go back.
The tram swayed. I was thankful that heights were not on my list of many, many fears (moths, pleated front pants, communal showers). I was level with the tops of buildings, watching the interlacing metal of the Queensborough Bridge go by, so close I thought the carriage would scrape it. It was the sort of day that made you feel that the heavens were trying to make amends for some previous meteorological crime. It was 65 degrees and sunny, and the slight wind seemed to carry with it an apology: “I am sorry for the time you sweated through your white dress in the unfettered fury of the sun for twelve full hours on your wedding day. Here’s a nice breeze that smells like lemonade.”
The tram arrived at the station, and as I took the stairs down and stepped out onto the street, I was hit with that brief moment of panic that I knew so well, the one that accompanies getting lost. Crap. I don’t know where I am, and now I will be eaten. I always feel that I need to head somewhere with purpose—as though someone is watching and will pounce on me and steal my kidneys when they realize I’m utterly clueless. But there was no one. I’d been in my tram car alone, and there wasn’t a soul at the station. There was a bus stop nea
rby, but the posted fare was only a quarter, and this immediately made me suspicious that it was going to take me straight to Roosevelt Island’s premiere human organ–harvesting facility. In reality, it goes to the site of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum, where one of my childhood heroes—investigative journalist Elizabeth Cochran, a.k.a. Nellie Bly—posed as a patient, despite being of completely sound mind. Her exposé on the conditions of asylums and her recommendations for reform would radically change how the mentally ill were treated. True to the New York ethos, the asylum is now a luxury apartment building.
I pulled out my map, and for perhaps the first and only time in my life, found that it was easy to tell where I was, thanks to being across the water from the largest city in America. There was a walkway along the river, and if I followed it far enough, I’d hit the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital.
There is, I realize, no greater example of how maniacal and terrifying the inner workings of my own brain can be than this: having a destination, even if it was the abandoned ruins of an ancient, obviously haunted hospital, was less frightening than not knowing where I was going. At least in this instance, I knew what I was going to encounter: rocks, some bugs, and possibly the disquieted souls of dead children. Better than getting on the wrong train.
I started walking. The path was well maintained at first—clean smooth stone as I headed south and was treated to an unobstructed view of Manhattan’s east side. I could still hear the sound of traffic from the island, but it was fainter now—the sound of car horns slightly more muffled, the never-ending hum of thousands of automobile engines fading into white noise. The city was prettier than I’d ever known it to be. Sometimes, in order to see something clearly, you have to step back from it.
I passed some modern buildings, encountered two people sitting on a bench eating their lunch and enjoying the view, and felt entirely at ease. Until I came to the fence.
It extended from the water’s edge at my right, across the road and path on which I walked, and disappeared into the growing cluster of thick bramble and trees at my left. Tall, rusted, and menacing, topped with a swirling loop of barbed wire and adorned with a few very clear signs that read “No Trespassing” and “No Loitering.” There was a gate that opened where the road was, but it was looped with what appeared to be a slightly thinner iteration of my mother’s keychain and padlocked. Just to the right of the gate and directly ahead of me, the fence was further interrupted by a small chain-link door.
It was open.
Funny thing about being constantly scared of getting lost—when you finally know where you’re going, you become sort of invincible. Embracing my mother’s philosophy of pretty much doing whatever the hell I wanted, I walked through.
I was scared. I was nervous. I was delighted.
I was in the middle of a construction site.
There were huge piles of rock—masonry stones from the original Elmhurst Hospital, which is now in Queens but had once stood here on Roosevelt Island. It had largely served as an overflow facility for Bellevue hospital—and housed asylum, poorhouse, and prisoner patients. The site was quiet.
I kept walking.
The path became narrower as the plants and wildlife began to encroach on it. The smell of pollen and sap and earth grew thicker. I walked down toward the southern tip of the island, and there, just parallel with the Chrysler building across the river, stood the ruins of the Smallpox Hospital.
It’s strange where your brain goes when it is fueled by anxiety. Sometimes I feel I’m going to turn into electricity—that I will fizzle and burst and then dissipate into nothing and that will sort of be nice, because then I won’t have to worry if I paid the gas bill or not. And sometimes I think about the zombie apocalypse. Obviously.
It’s hard to predict what my reaction to a place will be. I’ve been in utterly tranquil situations, surrounded by people I know and love, and been overcome with anxiety. And I’ve been in terrifying places—salt mines hundreds of feet underground, abandoned prisons, the state of Florida—and felt completely calm. The Smallpox Hospital should have been scary. But I kept thinking how beautiful it was.
The building itself was reduced to a shell. The façade and the exterior walls remained, but there was no roof and the interior had largely been reclaimed by the original inhabitants of the island—creatures that were small in size and large in number. I could hear them chirping and rustling in the leaves, as the light streamed through and caught the Brownian movement of thousands of particles suspended in the air.
The hospital had been built in the mid-1800s and in its heyday treated seven thousand patients a year. It would eventually become a nurse’s dormitory when the island became too populated to house those sick with the virus. It was a Gothic revival of gray stone and arched windows (the panes now long gone) designed by James Renwick, the architect behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Madison Avenue. Gorgeous, majestic, and by the 1950s, virtually abandoned.
I found it glorious, perhaps in part because of this small and rather incredible fact: it was exactly where I had intended it to be.
And as I sat there looking at it, I found myself doing something else rather out of character. I found myself looking for a gap in the fence so I could slink through. The power of knowing precisely where I was had pushed words like “structurally unstable” and “criminal trespass” and “obvious zombie breeding ground” out of my mind. To both my relief and my chagrin, I found no way to get through the fence. My paradoxical mother would have scolded me to no end for even thinking of it. And then she’d wonder why I didn’t try to climb over the damn top. I wonder that sometimes, too. I have few regrets in travel, but failing to break into the grounds of the Smallpox Hospital remains one of them.
I was near the southernmost tip of the island now and walked to the end of it—the entire island narrowing to a triangular point. The ground had already been cleared by machinery for the Roosevelt Memorial that would soon be built there. In a year, my little patch of undeveloped forest would be gone. But for now, I was all alone. There was only me and the birds and the entire city of New York.
I listened to the crickets and breathed in the air and then I turned around and headed toward the city. Somehow, on my way back, I ended up in Queens. And you know what? It was fine. The heavens did not rain fire and the rivers did not turn to blood and guys in confederate trucker hats didn’t suddenly take control of Congress. I simply turned around again and went back to Manhattan.
What that trip hammered home was something I already knew: I was not a travel expert. But I could still travel. I could not speak with authority about places, but I could speak with authority about my experiences. It turned out I was an expert at being me: broken, terrified, and lost. I started writing about what happened when I traveled. All the times I’d been led astray, or ripped off, or rendered a nervous, sobbing mess because I needed a snack and someone’s airplane-approved therapy pet looked at me weird. I wrote about visiting destinations that weren’t really destinations. About hole-in-the-wall restaurants and winding alleys and the poetry written in spray paint on the sides of buildings.
I wrote about Rand, who was always just one cab ride away. I wrote about how he made the world less terrifying simply by being in it. And I wrote about cake.
It was a travel blog, the way I would write it. Messy. Neurotic. And with a surprisingly large number of photos of Jeff Goldblum throughout.
Two years after I started the blog, on a sunny Sunday in Seattle during the summer of 2011, I sat in my pajamas, checking my site traffic as I occasionally do when I want to feel confused. I noticed it had spiked—I had nearly 100 times the visitors I usually did. Curious, I followed the link that was sending me all the traffic and stared blankly at my monitor for a while, trying to suss it all out.
It was a write-up about my blog. The masthead in the corner read TIME magazine.
It was their list of the top twenty-five blogs of the year. Rather immediately, I decided that it was some sort of hoax. But as I
clicked through the site, I found it looked more and more legitimate, and I grew more and more confused.
I showed it to Rand and asked him if it was real.
“Holy shit, yes. Baby, that’s real.”
There may have been a little bit of celebratory dancing in our pajamas. I think he picked me up. I think he kissed me. I think he told me I could do anything. I’m speculating here—I don’t actually remember, but he tends to do those things on most days.
Looking back, I’m not sure how it happened. I’m guessing the editorial team at TIME probably got drunk and thought it was a good idea to include my blog. By the time they sobered up and realized what had happened, it was too late.
They described my writing as “consistently clever,” so there’s a good chance peyote was involved, too.
The point is, sometimes you have no idea in what direction you’re headed, but you keep going anyway. Sometimes, miraculously, you end up in the right place. Sometimes it takes you fifteen years to get there, but you make it. And if you don’t? You hop in a cab. If you are lucky, you return with a good story.
I used to be petrified of getting lost. I thought it was a sign that I’d failed. I never realized it might be one of my greatest accomplishments.
5
LIFE LESSONS FROM A THREE-HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD DEAD GUY AND HIS BORING CLOCK
NOT EVERYONE FINDS THEIR MATCH, the variable that solves the equation of their life, the Polaris in the sky that leads them home when they are drunk and jobless and halfway across the globe. I get that. Some people have no interest in finding romantic love. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out. Sometimes a partner seems perfect and then you find out they think Titanic was a good movie. The connections we make on this earth are not always what we hope they’d be.
All Over the Place Page 6