West 34th street was like a chasm spilling from god's towering steel and glass heart west into the low, gray hills of Weehawken and Hackensack, beyond which lay the stale, fallow swamps of the meadowlands, industrial ambiguity amidst all this triumph and American superiority. Manhattan, midtown at least, really is an apparition of the grandest, most obscene scale, the cold, driving rain outside the flagship Macy's store like heavy curtains drawn perpendicular against the sheer gray canyon walls, that fading light of the distant suburbs barely lighting 34th St. as it met the Hudson. It reminded me of an early Depression-era photo I'd seen in one of those cheap Coffee table "New York!" books of the Empire State Building, taken from some flat, almost uninhabitable New Jersey suburb like Carteret or Perth Amboy, the shiny chrome needle and gaudy art-deco steel slivers rising so obscenely above the low tenement rooftops in the foreground. Progress, eh? If you say so, I thought, blasted by warm climate-control and the vague odor of fresh cotton as I stepped through the giant revolving Macy's doors. Really, I just wanted to get out of the rain for a moment, but I also needed the excuse to see what kind of modern menswear Macy's stocked these days, in a completely non-narcissistic and educational way, of course. I loved that I managed to camouflage to the extent that Asian tourists and pink, fleshy Midwesterner's asked me for direction to Times Square and Canal Street, myself simultaneously taking mental notes on how to 1.) culturally down [or was it up?]-shift to the inevitable Idaho return, and avoid these places in my ongoing Manhattan wandering. In the type of deposits we are looking for on my exploration project in northern Idaho, the gold-bearing veins almost always occur at the contact between hard and soft rock. "Competency contrast", I had been rather dryly referring to it as. The thing was, faults, or places where rock is displaced, occurred right at these contacts, exploiting the contrast and in turn allowing gold-rich fluids to move upwards, heat and liquid wealth percolating upwards through the eons, reaching our greedy little machines and dreaming minds where we could turn it into that one irresistibly sexy form of currency. I suppose in a roundabout way I'm trying to translate the overriding dichotomy of my life into something universal and meaningful, while really, it is just that, a ridiculous comparison of circumstances, 'competency', and contrast. But, I love this, love the strangeness, the unpredictable tangents life takes when you take great care never to plan too far in advance.
Last night I watched a few quarters of the Kellogg High School homecoming football team, which is the sort of term that doesn't even need the embellishment of being situated in quintessential small-town America to sound romantic. In rural western America, the rights and passage of adolescence are strict and unforgiving, rewarding to those who 'play by the rules', and merciless to those who don't. I'd like to think that we are becoming a more wholesome and accepting culture, but as I watched the sad, self-conscious frown on the handsome, smartly dressed solitary young man a few rows in front of me, visions of my own personal hell in high school played in my head. I thought of him in 5 or 10 years, his trim waterfront apartment in Seattle or Vancouver, well-paying job at a trendy agency, MFA from Stanford or Berkeley hanging on the wall, next to a photo of him on the Cote D'Azur, smart-looking boyfriend in tow. I then thought of the prom king and queen smiling bright, wide, white-teethed smiles on the field below, daddy's new corvette cruising down the sidelines to screaming, applauding classmates. Her, struggling to hold down the waitress job at Perkin's while raising baby # 2, and have time for bible study group, the babysitting job, and little Kaylee's kindergarden classes. Him, laughing nervously to hide the fear as the shift foreman led him up a steep, narrow ladderway to stope D4-47, 6 feet wide and 10 feet high, jackleg drill shaking like a caged bull under his skinny, 23 year old legs, 4000' down in the Galena Mine.
Things might play out the opposite, though, I thought shamefully, who was I to project and judge? I thought of them, there in the stands, what they made of me, my lustrous, square black rayban frames glinting in the artificial floodlight sun, hands in the warm pockets of my expensive new puffy jacket, who was I to even be here, amongst something I both wanted and hated to admit to? I saw their hard work, their simple, honest resolve, their disillusion at government and liberals and educated folks, lumping them together like livestock in a pen.
To be Cont'd......
