September 10, 2007

I am in love. Totally in love, head-over-heels infatuated, completely befuddled with enchantment -- that kind of love. Yes, I know it's not realistic. Yes, I know things could never work out between us. Yes, I know that this is a passing emotion, something that I will probably look back on with a certain amount of rueful regret later on...but right now, I'm in that kind of love.

I'm in love...with New York City.

Well, with Manhattan, to be exact. I never made it out of that borough, and didn't even see as much of that as I would've liked. We spent five days wandering all over a space that amounted to roughly a square mile, and we managed to walk about, oh, twenty-five miles a day in that confined area. We did a lot of the usual tourist traps: the observation deck of the Empire State Building, a boat cruise around the Statue of Liberty, gawking in Times Square, skirting through the fringe of Central Park. that sort of thing.

And I came to a startling conclusion while we were there: New York City cab drivers, for all that they get (perhaps fairly) depicted as being frighteningly aggressive, are arguably some of the smartest people on the planet. Not that any of them said this to me. No, they were almost universally quiet during our time in their vehicles, with the exception of the two who wouldn't get off their phones. But their ability to navigate the streets of the city, without injury to themselves, their passengers, their vehicles, or the throngs of pedestrians around them, must require enormous brain-power. Think about it: they've got to have a strong sense of their cab's physical boundaries, in order to not run into other vehicles on the road. (The road-stripes? Those are clearly just suggestions, in Manhattan. As far as I could tell, a "lane" was wherever the car would fit.) They've got to know where they are, and where they're going. They've got to be able to read the body language (or "vehicle-language, if you will) of the drivers around them. And they've got to keep up with the constantly-changing configuration of the crowds of pedestrians, so that they don't a) kill anyone, or b) miss the moment when someone else summons a taxi.

And that's all on top of the need to keep up with the road closures, heavy traffic, special events, construction, and all other events that restrict the flow of traffic -- plus, they have to adhere to one rule above all other: Don't Get In A Wreck!

After taking all of that into account, I'm now convinced that New York City cab drivers are capable of bending at least one, and probably two, of the laws of physics. Because I was in a few cabs that couldn't possibly have gotten me to my destination, unless the driver was able to make his vehicle occupy the same space that was already occupied by another vehicle.

But now I'm back home, where the laws of physics stay firmly in place. And that includes all laws about time -- which I have run out of, again. I'm going to have to come back later in the week with pictures. I'll try to cull it down to the really intersting ones out of the 390 photos we took -- including one picture that I'm sure shows two cabs occupying the same space at the same time.