Turn left on Rockaway Boulevard. A busier thoroughfare, with heavier traffic, this street was devoted almost totally to the automobile, being flanked by gas stations, used car lots, body repair shops and the like. Again I was the only pedestrian, and the strangeness of it made me realize that I was the alien and this was normal life. Of course I was used to automobiles in Manhattan, which is usually clenched into one huge traffic snarl, but Manhattan is full of pedestrians as well. People still walk on that narrow island, as they just don’t do anywhere else. Here, in South Ozone Park in Queens, was the edge of the real world; people who either drove their automobiles or stayed home.
Now, here was a question about Travel to be considered. Our attention in the monastery had been devoted almost exclusively to the sacred uses of Travel, but might there not be distinctions as well between various forms of Mundane Travel? If a person limits himself to Travel by car or no Travel at all, can there be any virtue in his staying home? If enslavement to the automobile is a simple habit, a tic, isn’t the choice of lifestyle — living where it is necessary to drive to work, or to school, or to the supermarket — a part of that habit as well? A person who chooses a place to live which makes it necessary for him constantly to Travel by automobile might be said to be undergoing Travel even when inside his own house. His existence then is Transitory, consisting of Latent Travel (at home) and Kinetic Travel (on the road again). If Travel is too profound to be undertaken lightly — as we firmly believe it is — such a person could be said to be a Travel Junkie, as unquestioningly tied to his habit as any drug addict, and surely feeling many of the same debilitating effects.
The physical first: the man who alternates sitting at home with sitting at the wheel of his car is destroying himself as surely, and possibly as messily, as if he took heroin. Emotionaclass="underline" buffeted by the tensions of piloting his vehicle day after day, his emotions must become either rubbed raw or anesthetized, either of which must make him less than he might be. Culturaclass="underline" the Transitory existence, alternating Latent and Kinetic Travel, is the existence of the nomad, and must eventually render its victim rootless and without a viable sense of community, without a tribal or cultural heritage to be called upon in the hour of need. And finally, the moral aspect: a physically disabled man with anesthetized emotions and no strong sense of community is an unlikely candidate for a strong moral awareness.
I was becoming excited; I could hardly wait to get back home and present this to the others, get their feelings on the subject. Did I have further indications leading to the conclusions I seemed to be drawing? Well, there was the growing trend among these people, when they reached retirement age, to buy a mobile home and spend their declining years rolling from one trailer court to the next; the ultimate Transitoriness, combining Latent and Kinetic Travel, forcing one’s home to Travel with one!
And then there was Los Angeles.
And here there was 131st Street. Was that right? Under a streetlight I consulted Brother Eli’s perfectly formed miniature lettering, and saw I’d overshot by a block. Turn right at 130th Street. Caught up in my meditations, I’d lost my bearings for a minute.
So I retraced my steps to 130th Street. Turn right. Well, coming from the other direction I should turn left. After facing in various directions, pointing this way and that, rechecking Brother Eli’s directions, and attracting the (Transitory) attention of several passing drivers, I decided which way I was to go on 130th Street, and set off once more.
I was back in a residential section now, the houses being slightly newer, slightly smaller, and set just a bit farther apart. But I was also getting closer to the airport; a monster jet plane suddenly came coasting down an invisible wire in the sky, passing over my head no farther away than the top of an eight-story building, and I couldn’t believe the painful intensity of its noise. It shrieked, it screamed, it sounded like a fingernail on a blackboard amplified a thousand times. And the thing moved so slowly! How could it move that slowly and not just fall to the ground like a television set dropped out a window? I cringed my head down into my neck, I pulled my cowl up around my ears, but the screaming went on and on until the plane finished sailing by, receding diagonally downward beyond the houses on the far side of the street.
And no one appeared. These houses should have emptied, shirt-sleeved people should have run screaming out of every door, clutching their ears, staring around in terror and astonishment, yelling at one another, “What is it? Is it the end of the world?”
But no one came out. Lights were on in various windows, television sets were running, surely human beings were inside all these imitation-brick structures, but nobody at all came out.
I continued walking, all thoughts of Transitory Travel and enslavement by the automobile vanishing from my head, and meditated instead on the adaptability of Man. Twice more jet airplanes followed that same invisible roadway down the sky, shrieking in the same blood-chilling manner, confirming the subject of my meditation, and then I walked over a smallish bridge over some major highway. Brother Eli had referred to it, in his directions; here it was: “Cross the Belt Parkway.”
Belt Parkway. Three lanes of rushing automobiles coming this way, three lanes of rushing automobiles going that way. There was a momentary prettiness to it by night, the ribbon of white headlights next to the ribbon of red taillights, but the rush-rush-rush sound of the cars disappearing under the bridge distracted from the view and I didn’t pause, but walked on.
Turn left at 150th Avenue. There proved to be a Department of Sanitation garage here, plus an open area filled with white-painted garbage trucks that looked like giant cockroaches dressed as ski troopers. There was no longer any traffic, there were still no pedestrians, there were few streetlights, and after the Department of Sanitation building there was no sidewalk. More highways were somewhere ahead of me, fitfully seen in the darkness. I passed a car rental agency, and the street I was on curved away to the right through an underpass beneath some other road. Buildings ahead, some sort of under-illuminated confusion. I approached, saw a sign reading “All Traffic” with an arrow pointing to my left, and looked that way to see a highway a little distance off, surmounted by great huge green signs. One of them said something about the airport, so I walked in that direction.
Yes, that was the main road into the airport, the one taken by all the cars and taxicabs. “JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT” the biggest sign said, and just beneath that, “MAIN PASSENGER TERMINALS 2 MILES.”
Two miles? This was the entrance, and the terminals were two miles away? Shaking my head, telling myself it was a good thing I’d left myself plenty of time to get here, shifting my bag to the other hand, I went on walking.
There was a grassy patch between me and the highway. I crossed that, then turned in the direction of the terminals, and walked on the verge, with the traffic just to my left. It was going very very fast, creating its own wind, and I kept as far from the concrete as I could, though up ahead I saw an under-pass that looked a little narrow for a pedestrian like me.
I never got that far, at least not on foot. A vehicle, just past me, bumped its tires up onto the grass and slowed to a stop quite some distance away. It was, I saw, a police car, and I wasn’t surprised when a pair of white lights showed at the rear and the car backed up to me. I stood to one side, permitting the car to come between me and the roadway, and waited.