Before arriving in New York, I developed a romantic notion of the "midnight ride". I imagined embarking on a solitary late-night bike expedition through a dark and quiet urban landscape, appreciating a side of the city that few would (or might care to) experience. Last night I went for my first midnight ride, and despite my lofty preconceptions, it did not disappoint.
Leaving behind a bemused doorman ("Going for a ride now??"), I started a little after midnight in Battery Park, at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, where at the outset of my journey I stumbled upon a pack of rats. They were so startled by my appearance that when they scattered they ran alongside me for quite some time. I couldn't help but amusedly compare them to the dolphins that accompany ships as they leave a harbor.
The first part of my ride ran along the East River. Even in daylight, the FDR Drive overhead, the towering bridges, and the industrial sites and storage yards give the
East River bike path a frontier feeling.
In darkness, the experience is everything a would-be urban explorer could ask for. Amongst the decaying metal girders and mammoth bridge foundations, on a comfortably cool fall night the waterfront benches are occupied by the homeless, older couples sitting in silent contemplation, or in one instance a homeless and older Chinese couple whose circumstances were all the more heartbreaking to me because of the evident genial nature in their smiles and hand gestures as we tried to express to each other our appreciation for the nighttime views.
Up Delancey through the wasteland of the yet-to-be-gentrified deep Lower East Side that sits in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Into Chinatown, where my fancy road bike rendered me a foreigner among foreigners, the odd man out amongst the deliverymen and off-duty restaurant workers charging through the trash-strewn alleys on battered dirt bikes. Darting through Holand Tunnel traffic in an adrenaline haze, before arriving at the smooth oasis of the West Side bike path.
A few miles north on the path before the call of responsibility and bed turned me around. Then the uninterrupted and solitary straight shot home, south on the West Side bike path with the wind at my back, where I experienced that mental, physical, and arguably spiritual state where pedaling feels more natural than holding your legs still; indeed, you're not even conscious of the effort, just moving as if propelled by will alone, as if flying in a dream.
Finally, the bemused and now sarcastic doorman again ("Back so early?"), and home. Such as it is -- I was mistaken when I wrote on September 3 that I had found a place to live. Two weeks and two unexpected rental rejections later, I am still hunting for a home. But during the midnight ride it didn't matter, because the whole city was my home.