Watching for the City Limits

01.14.09 | 9:31 AM ET

The girl on the bus was young, maybe 14, and wore a green sweater and black flats. I hadn’t paid her much mind until she leaned over me, out the window, to see the boats laid out in the marina in Greenwich, Connecticut, enthralled.

“Where are we?” she asked.

I looked up at a green highway sign and told her. She twisted her head back around until the river disappeared behind the bus. She drank up the trees and the outlet malls as we drove south from Boston toward New York. A mild sun shone through the trees that thickened and thinned beside the highway, but inside it was cold. Perched on the edge of her felt seat, the teen tugged her sleeves down over her wrists, her forehead framed by her tight braids resting sideways against the back of the seat in front of her, swinging her legs.

When I first moved from Boston to New York, that last half hour or so driving back into Manhattan might have been my favorite part of living in the city. As the traffic got thicker pulling through the north suburbs along the commuter rail and the trees gave way to the bungalows and auto shops as we entered the north Bronx, I’d feel the anticipation start. As the bus would skim past the projects in the Bronx, and above the low roofs of Queens spreading out to the Manhattan skyline, I’d be glued to the window, watching it approach.

The city would unfold under me, coming down the expressway. I’d to be able to feel all at once how big it was, stretching out as far as I could see to every horizon. The city would seem endless, as if the view of Manhattan would arrest and suspend time all together. I’d lose sight of that size as soon as the view disappeared between the buildings downtown as the bus descended from the Manhattan Bridge. I’d be glued to the windows by the time the bus approached the skyline over the bridges and transfixed by the view as we rolled into Chinatown. I’d have Paul Simon’s “American Tune” running though my head as I watched the Statue of Liberty standing in the harbor until the buildings cut it from view.

It’s a sensation New Yorkers live for, that keeps us treading through the banalities of our daily lives making rent in Manhattan—anticipation of those moments of honest-to-goodness transcendence. When I first moved to New York, it was what I saw coming home. I could feel myself tiny in the middle of all that city at once. When I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, it was the minute and a half on the subway crossing the Manhattan Bridge, speeding back into the Manhattan skyline. It is the sensation we look for when we share music with friends, watching their faces for their reactions. It is the catch in your throat at something new and unexpected.

Unfortunately, nothing works so well as time and habit to dull you to anything. No matter how brilliant the virtuoso, after a certain number of repetitions of a recording, you pass a limit. You are not transported. The last few months, like this time, perhaps because I anticipate it so impatiently, the last part of the ride into the city has inevitably been disappointing, lacking the sheer power to overwhelm that it did when I first began riding the bus back home.

Which is why on the ride home that afternoon, I wanted to steal just a fraction of that lift back from the just-awakened-with-curiosity 14-year-old girl next to me. I was hoping to feel a taste of the sensation that I travel for—the reason I have to leave New York in the first place, and come home.

I looked at her looking out the window, wondering if excitement and wanderlust were coursing through her veins in the same way they did when I would regularly take this route. As we approached New York City, though, she lost interest. She began fishing around in her bag and pulled out a Sidekick. Typing away as the city began to unfold, she’d occasionally look up—heading over the Tappan Zee Bridge—and I thought maybe. But then her phone would blink and she’d duck her head back down, missing the vast Calvary Cemetery that scrolls itself down the hills in front of the Manhattan skyline along the Brooklyn-Queens expressway in an odd echo of the skyscrapers behind.

Sitting beside her, I rocked in my seat. I watched her face for the spark. I fought the impulse to point things out. Did she see bridges? Did she see the flat plane the roofs made stretching all the way to the river?

With some surprise, I found that I was angry, with an instinct to shake that kid till her teeth rattled. All I could do was sit there willing her head to bob up and check our progress. 

I made a sort of laugh. But it wouldn’t jar her away from her phone and into the kind of delirious rush that few cities in the world can inspire. She looked up at me, raised an eyebrow, and bowed her head back down, texting away again.

The bus scraped between the buildings and sighed its way down into Chinatown. It pulled in across from the crowded storefront bus station, blocked off by orange traffic cones. A group was already waiting to board. I got off and pushed through them, tugging my bag out of the bottom of the bus.

She shouldered her purse and stood on the curb a moment, phone to her ear, watching the cars go by.

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