This crazy old lady at Flushing Avenue was saying, “I’m a member of the medical profession.” She had no teeth, and plastic bags were taped around her feet. I glanced at her and made sure she kept her distance. The previous day, a crazy old lady just like her came at me and shrieked, “Ahm goon cut you up!” This was at Pelham Parkway, on the IRT-2 line in the Bronx. I left the car at the next stop, Bronx Park East, where the zoo is, though who could be blamed for thinking that, in New York City, the zoo is everywhere?
Then a Muslim unflapped his prayer mat — while we were at Flushing Avenue, talking about Rules — and spread it on the platform and knelt on it, just like that, and was soon on all fours, beseeching Allah and praising the Prophet Mohammed. This is not remarkable. You see people praying, or reading the Bible, or selling religion on the subway all the time. “Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,” the man with the leaflets says on the BMT-RR line at Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn. “I love Jesus! I used to be a wino!” And Muslims beg and push their green plastic cups at passengers, and try to sell them copies of something called Arabic Religious Classics. It is December and Brooklyn, and the men are dressed for the Great Nafud Desert, or Jiddah or Medina — skullcap, gallabieh, sandals.
“And don’t sit next to the door,” the second police officer said. We were still talking about Rules. “A lot of these snatchers like to play the doors.”
The first officer said, “It’s a good idea to keep near the conductor. He’s got a telephone. So does the man in the token booth. At night, stick around the token booth until the train comes in.”
“Although, token booths …” the second officer said. “A few years ago, some kids filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline and pumped it into a token booth at Broad Channel. There were two ladies inside, but before they could get out the kids set the gas on fire. The booth just exploded like a bomb, and the ladies died. It was a revenge thing. One of the kids had gotten a summons for Theft of Service — not paying his fare.”
Just below us, at Flushing Avenue, there was a stream running between the tracks. It gurgled and glugged down the whole length of the long platform. It gave the station the atmosphere of a sewer — dampness and a powerful smell. The water was flowing toward Myrtle and Willoughby. And there was a rat. It was only my third rat in a week of riding the subway, but this one was twice the size of rats I’ve seen elsewhere. I thought: Rats as big as cats.
“Stay with the crowds. Keep away from quiet stairways. The stairways at Forty-first and Forty-third are usually quiet, but Forty-second is always busy — that’s the one to use.”
So many rules! It’s not like taking a subway at all; it’s like walking through the woods — through dangerous jungle, rather: Do this, Don’t do that …
“It reminds me,” the first officer said. “The burning of that token booth at Broad Channel. Last May, six guys attempted to murder someone at Forest Parkway, on the J line. It was a whole gang against this one guy. Then they tried to burn the station down with Molotov cocktails. We stopped that, too.”
The man who said this was six feet four, 281 pounds. He carried a.38 in a shoulder holster and wore a bulletproof vest. He had a radio, a can of Mace, and a blackjack. He was a plainclothesman.
The funny thing is that, one day, a boy — five feet six, 135 pounds — tried to mug him. The boy slapped him across the face while the plainclothesman was seated on a train. The boy said, “Give me your money,” and then threatened the man in a vulgar way. The boy still punched at the man when the man stood up; he still said, “Give me all your money!” The plainclothesman then took out his badge and his pistol and said, “I’m a police officer and you’re under arrest.” “I was just kidding!” the boy said, but it was too late.
I laughed at the thought of someone trying to mug this well-armed giant.
“Rule one for the subway,” he said. “Want to know what it is?” He looked up and down the Flushing Avenue platform, at the old lady and the Muslim and the running water and the vandalized signs. “Rule one is — don’t ride the subway if you don’t have to.”
Rowing Around the Cape
THE BOAT SLID DOWN THE BANK AND WITHOUT A SPLASH into the creek, which was gray this summer morning. The air was woolly with mist. The tide had turned, but just a moment ago, so there was still no motion on the water — no current, not a ripple. The marsh grass was a deeper green for there being no sun. It was as if — this early and this dark — the day had not yet begun to breathe.
I straightened the boat and took my first stroke: the gurgle of the spoon blades and the sigh of the twisting oarlock were the only sounds. I set off, moving like a water bug through the marsh and down the bendy creek to the sea. When my strokes were regular and I was rowing at a good clip, my mind started to work, and I thought: I’m not coming back tonight. And so the day seemed long enough and full of possibilities. I had no plans except to keep on harbor-hopping around the Cape, and it was easy now going out with the tide.
This was Scorton Creek, in East Sandwich, and our hill — one of the few on the low, lumpy terminal moraine of the Cape — was once an Indian fort. Wampanoags. The local farmers plowed this hill until recently, when the houses went up, and their plow blades always struck flints and ax heads and beads. I splashed past a boathouse the size of a garage. When they dug the foundation for that boathouse less than twenty years ago, they unearthed a large male Wampanoag who had been buried in a sitting position, his skin turned to leather and his bones sticking through. They slung him out and put the boathouse there.
Three more bends in the creek and I could see the current stirring more strongly around me. A quarter of a mile away in the marsh was a Great Blue Heron — five feet high and moving in a slow prayerful way, like a narrow-shouldered priest in gray vestments. The boat slipped along, carrying itself between strokes. Up ahead on the beach was a person with a dog — one of those energetic early risers who boasts, “I only need four hours’ sleep!” and is probably hell to live with. Nothing else around — only the terns screeching over their eggs, and a few boats motionless at their moorings, and a rather crummy clutter of beach houses and NO TRESPASSING signs, and the ghosts of dead Indians. The current was so swift in the creek I couldn’t have gone back if I tried, and as I approached the shore it shot me into the sea. And now light was dazzling in the mist, as on the magnificent Turner Sunrise with Seamonsters.
AFTER AN HOUR I WAS AT SANDY NECK PUBLIC BEACH — about four miles. This bay side of the upper Cape has a low duney shore and notoriously shallow water in places. The half a dozen harbors are spread over seventy miles and most have dangerous bars. It is not a coast for easy cruising and in many areas there is hardly enough water for windsurfing. There are sand bars in the oddest places. Most sailboats can’t approach any of the harbors unless the tide is high. So the little boats stay near shore and watch the tides, and the deep draft boats stay miles offshore. I was in between and I was alone. In two months of this I never saw another rowboat more than fifty yards from the shore. Indeed, I seldom saw anyone rowing at all.
Sandy Neck proper, an eight-mile peninsula of Arabian-style dunes, was today a panorama of empty beach; the only life stirring was the gulls and more distantly the hovering marsh hawks. A breeze had come up; it had freshened; it was now a light wind. I got stuck on a sand bar, then hopped out and dragged the boat into deeper water. I was trying to get around Beach Point to have my lunch in Barnstable Harbor — my forward locker contained provisions. I was frustrated by the shoals. But I should have known — there were seagulls all over the ocean here and they were not swimming but standing. I grew to recognize low water from the posture of seagulls.