Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The sun is going down now. In the grainy gold light from my window on the fourteenth
floor I can see the row of apartment buildings that line the Palisades on the Jersey side of
the Hudson and, beyond them, the spire of the Empire State Building. The George Wash-
ington Bridge is not even three miles from here, though it's straight uphill. Tomorrow I'll
sleep late, have a hearty hotel breakfast, and climb through the familiar suburbs from
my childhood, Leonia and Fort Lee, to the bridge, where several friends and colleagues
are planning to meet me at noon.
Eighteen years ago on the same occasion, the welcoming committee was my parents.
I'm not sure how they got to the middle of the span, where they parked or how my father
managed to wheel my mother in her wheelchair onto the walkway—it's not so easy, es-
pecially from the Manhattan side—but there they were, above the Hudson at midriver,
where New Jersey and New York share a border and the catenary cables hanging from
the bridge towers on either side are at their lowest, so you can almost leap up and touch
them. My aunt Claire was there, too, and she took some memorable pictures. There's one
of me holding hands with my mother, me looking amused, she ecstatic. There's anoth-
er of me with my father; he looks impatient, like such a sourpuss! Jeez, looking back,
I loved the two of them monumentally then, being so emphatically who they were and
making it their business to be around for that moment of their son's triumph, even
though they thought I was a kook for making the trip in the first place. In the end, they
understood.
