Each morning, I commute 23 miles from my home in Maplewood, NJ to my job in midtown Manhattan, one block north of Radio City, and back again in the evening. A New Jersey transit train carries me for 21.3 miles; I walk the remaining 1.7 miles. I have done some version of this NJ-NY commute for 34 years, astonishingly, first from Jersey City, then from more-suburban Maplewood after we moved there in 1996. It’s a rare day that I get a ride to or from the station in Maplewood, and even rarer that I succumb to the dubious temptations of the NY city subway. (I’m convinced it often takes longer.) I have walked in all weathers, from frigid cold and blizzard conditions, in torrential rain and beastly heat. I have walked when hungover, heavily pregnant, and when plagued by plantar fasciitis, cracked heels, sciatica and morning sickness. But most days I feel fine, thankfully, and the weather is usually unremarkable or, occasionally, splendid, and I enjoy my daily excursion and all the sights and sounds I experience along the way.
My morning itinerary begins with a .5 mile walk from my house, on a suburban street in our leafy Essex County suburb, population about 24,000, to the train station. It’s downhill most of the way in the morning – I wish it were backwards, since I sometimes dread the uphill trek at the end of a tiring day or in the worst heat of a summer afternoon. The downhill walk can be treacherous in winter weather; ice collects on our sloping, shaded driveway, melting daily and refreezing smooth as glass overnight. In years of negotiating this minefield, I’ve fallen only once, though as I grow older, I don’t know whether to question my sanity for venturing forth in risky conditions or to squelch my misgivings as a biddy’s jitters.
In deepest winter, day is scarcely dawning when I leave the house, and the sun has long set when I return. I remind myself to consciously enjoy the pearly morning skies and the blazing sunsets, and to listen to the rhythmic, throaty hoots of mourning doves, the monosyllabic conversations of coupled cardinals, and the rattling flight calls of robins. (A few robins overwinter in our area, though there are many, many more in the warmer months. I always watch for their return in the early spring.) We don’t have many deer in our neighborhood, thankfully, since I’m a gardener, but we do have other forms of suburban wildlife. Fairly often, the pungent odor of skunk hangs in the morning air, and I have seen raccoons scurrying back to their beds in the trees after a night carousing in Maplewood’s garbage cans. Little brown rabbits graze the lawns, freezing motionless as I pass by, and I know why, since predators abound. Hawks often float overhead, and coyotes and foxes are sometimes seen skulking along. I’m impressed with how ably these predators have adapted to urban life.
Three blocks along suburban residential streets (where I know every house and front garden by heart, observing new paint jobs and plantings with interest) brings me to Memorial Park, 25 acres of grass, ball fields and playgrounds laid out in the 1920s by the Olmsted Brothers (of Central Park fame). I walk past the adorable Civic House, built in 1929 in the Arts and Crafts style, with leaded-glass windows and a slate roof; in days of yore, I would stop at the Civic House each evening to pick up our children, who as kindergartners spent their after-school hours here in a town childcare program. My route also takes me along the East Branch of the Rahway River, spanned by several quaint bridges. The Rahway is usually tame, a chuckling little brook at the bottom of a six-foot deep stone-walled canal, but a heavy rain can bring it to full gushing life, flowing swiftly and bearing along substantial tree limbs and other debris. It has been known to crest its walls after unusually heavy downpours.
A great egret takes up residence in the canal nearly every summer, and I greet him each day as he stands motionless, fishing near a little weir. I’ve also seen the occasional blue heron, and once, surprisingly, an American bittern.
Flowering cherry trees line the canal-side walk, bursting into luxuriant clouds of pink and white bloom in early spring, virginal as Victorian brides. It is breathtaking to walk beneath them; I always feel I should salute them like sacred beings. Sadly, this past winter’s late snowstorms felled several of the largest specimens. As I greet the flowering trees in April, so do I the lilacs as well the following month, pausing morning and evening during their brief bloom time to savor their sweetly heady perfume.
Across the path from the canal is a low-lying playing field used in season by the sports teams of nearby Columbia High School. When our children were small, it was flooded in winter to create an ice-skating area, but that seems to have been discontinued, although the little frame Skate House still stands in the field. Old-time residents describe great town-wide winter gatherings at the pond and Skate House, which sound to me like a scene from IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.
The flooded field used to attract ducks and geese, who would forage in the waters when the ice would melt. I always enjoy seeing ducks tipped over, tails upright, as they feed underwater. I was also tickled to see a duck slip and fall on the ice one morning, its big flat feet sliding out from under him as he sat down hard on his feathered bottom. Barn swallows enjoy this field as well, darting over it like stunt pilots, often daringly low, in their ceaseless quest for insects. The birds raise their young beneath one of the park bridges in a colony of cup-shaped mud nests. When the bridge needed repair recently, Maplewood bird-lovers successfully petitioned to have the work postponed until the nestlings had fledged.
I negotiate the long but gentle slope up to the train station, past the large field where the music festival Maplewoodstock is held each July. This is also a favorite sledding hill. One recent summer, a mockingbird always stationed himself at the top of a lamp-post here, singing his heart out every morning. He must have moved south as winter approached (though many of these birds remain in the area year-round), or some worse fate befell him, as one morning, he had vanished. I still find myself looking and listening for him as I pass his lamp-post!
There is no need to waste words on the travesty which is New Jersey Transit, the agency responsible for the next stage of my commute, the 21.3-mile ride through the Oranges and Newark, across the Meadowlands and beneath the Hudson River to Penn Station. It used to be a fairly model rapid transit system, but increasingly starved of funds and bereft of leaders and advocates, it now provides commuters with decidedly substandard service, inadequate equipment and frequent delays and cancellations. Despite all this, I read my books, chat with my neighbors, and enjoy bits of trackside scenery, such as the wall of brilliant graffiti near Newark Broad Street station, and the ospreys which perch on power poles in the Meadowlands. (A signal indicator of an ecosystem’s health, the birds had declined precipitously due to pollution and rampant development, but have returned as the area has been gradually restored.)
But this essay is about my walk, so let’s pick up again outside Penn Station, a bland architectural crime perpetrated in the 1960s on the 1910 masterpiece of McKim, Mead and White. I emerge from the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere onto the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan with 650,000 other passengers who pass through the station each day, and begin my 1.2 mile walk uptown. I have taken several routes north and south through the years, depending on construction and traffic patterns, and occasionally to accommodate shopping or other errands on my way. My current uptown itinerary takes me first north for a number of blocks, along Seventh Avenue to Times Square. (I take a different route back to Penn at the end of the day.)
After years of walking these blocks, I’m intimately familiar with the sights and sounds along the way, and I look and listen for them each day, just as I greet my mockingbird and my cherry trees. For instance, at the intersection of Seventh and 34th Street, across from Macy’s (‘the largest store in the world’), I always prick up my ears for the East Indian newspaper vendor who chants ‘good morning, New York Times, Post, Daily News’ in a pleasant, murmuring monotone. One of the last of a dying breed, he is there every morning, having collected his papers at the crack of dawn, and staked out his usual spot at this corner.
This account is not a travel document, so I won’t focus on the monuments and attractions along the way, although there are several sights which interest me. For instance, there’s the plaque on the Macy’s building which proclaims ‘here the motion picture began.’ Really?? The plaque goes on to say that on April 23, 1896, Thomas Edison first projected a moving picture in Koster & Bail’s Music Hall, formerly on the site. The Motion Picture Industry, the vague entity which affixed the plaque, is apparently incorrect, however, as there were considerably earlier projections.
TO BE CONTINUED!
Linnetontheleaf 
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