Travel Reference
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over, and if I was going to feel that way at the end of the day I might just as well have
stayed home.
Yeah, I'm a little grouchy for having spent the day in one of America's myriad pockets
of unmemorable ordinariness. By now a sense of anonymity hovers over many Americ-
an places—not the big cities or the small towns, necessarily, or even the older suburbs
that started with a slow exodus from an urban center, emerged individually, and cre-
ated histories of their own. I'm talking about the far outskirts of cities, where exurban
landscapes, with their housing developments filled with bland starter homes or frightful
McMansions and their shopping malls crowded with the familiar litany of retail names,
have evolved the close-to-sameness of siblings. Today that's where I was, and after so
many weeks of pedaling through singular places, it pissed me of to be somewhere that
didn't strike me as anything new to experience.
As I get older, as I pedal along on this trip, the desire that days be unique—or at least
different from one another—is growing more urgent in me, the belief growing stronger
that we ought to try and make our days different. It's a hard thing to do, of course, but
we ought to be resolute in our determination to live interestingly. Right?
The afternoon of 9/11 I went to the newsroom to help out as a reporter and was sent to
the warehouse-sized hangars along the Hudson River in the 50s that were being outfit-
ted as emergency hospital wards for the anticipated flood of casualties. As it turned out,
there weren't any. Serious injuries that day were few; nearly everyone who got hurt was
dead, and as that realization landed on us—me and the reporters and cameramen from a
couple of dozen other news agencies—we began drifting away, feeling our own useless-
ness on top of the overwhelming dread.
A few days later, most of us in New York felt our dread give way to anger and incred-
ible sadness—or maybe it was sadness and incredible anger—as it dawned on us that life
was never going to be quite the same. That's what made 9/11 a touchstone for all New
Yorkers, if not all Americans. The event was so unfathomable and so momentous that
it felt personal even for those of us who weren't touched personally. How, I remember
thinking, would I ever feel anything other than insignificant ever again?
This line of reasoning, of course, describes exactly what my father's had
been—perceiving a monumental tragedy in egocentric terms.
I actually recognized my self-pity at the time, though I didn't call it that.
“The reaction on our street could fairly be described as perplexity, which was, as I
look back, the seed of the punishing irrelevance that has been plaguing me since then,”
I wrote in an essay for the
Times
that was published five days after 9/11. “No one knew
