Ward's Island
It's interesting that they continue to use two different names for this landmass of two former islands. Randall's and Ward's. I started out at 125th and Lex in Harlem, where a McDonald's taunted me a for a minute before I realized, decided, that I was over an hour late already and in a bad spot, and should just wait in the long line against the warehouse outside of the subway exit.
The M35 bus took me across one leg of the Triborough Bridge, which leg I'm not quite sure. After no more than ten minutes of travel and our progression through the EZ pass section of what must have been a Queens toll booth, we arrived on this underdeveloped gray and green chunk of land where the roads were chunked in asphalt. The first sign had a list of seven destinations with trailing arrows that pointed towards directions in which there were no roads. My hopes were raised somewhat when I saw that we were [apparently] heading in the direction of Ward's Island, where I expected this rugby match to be taking place.
Our first stop was the Randall's Island Psychiatric Hospital, where approximately one dozen passengers, some obviously and visibly ill, some clearly employees of the hospital, exited the premises, none of them with a facial expression that suggested happiness or eagerness. There was a woman with chemically straightened hair, a shirt that said FUCK ME, and a hunched back, whose disturbed gait looked to be unrelated to any kind of physical impairment, and an elderly black man in a powder blue button down shirt, carefully polished black wingtips, and hair like James Brown, who took the stairs with a look that straddled some line between determination and disdain. A white man with one leg and arms full of crutches shifted off with much difficulty and eyes that bespoke much experience and little love. I crossed my legs the other way and texted Doug: which stop. The bus was now notably absent of females of any shade.
Numerous passengers broke from their respective mutterings to eyeball me as I placed my iPod into my backpack surreptitiously and opened up my late model Verizon cellphone to inquire, in what I hoped was a casual whisper... "Which field, Doug, exactly. and how many stops is it." No longer a question.
When the bus made a U-turn back towards the highway I got a little jumpy and texted Doug with an increasingly urgent For real what stop this bus is the scariest and for that I had to type on Abc and not T9EN.
Still, I had to call to get a hold of him. I got of at the section of the fields that are maintained by the veterans, an inordinate number of whom lack limbs. I cut a wide angle around them and walked down the strip of broken sidewalk between the two bridges. To my left was a great red bridge that was cantilevered, elaborately buttressed, with ten foot cones that looked like Eiffel Tower miniatures holding up power cables along its upper outer edges in intervals of twenty feet. On my right side was a bridge whose upper car section was painted in chipped green and was supported at regular intervals by giant, inverted tridents made of concrete. The sky was notably grey. Later, Doug asked me if I was sure that the green bridge wasn't light blue. At the rugby fields that, was the way it looked. Not so near the psychiatric hospital...
When I passed a rusted chain link fence just beyond a NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT sign that appeared to relate to nothing in the visible landscape, three twenty-ish kids emerged from the woods opposite me. One was a girl with severe features awhose uniform and muscled calves made it clear I was headed in the right direction. Two of them boasted patchy facial hair; one of them carried a frisbee.
It turned out, though, much to my surprise, that my destination was not, in fact, the busy green patch to the right of the bridge, which blasted Barry White from an invisible set of speakers and which was littered with multi-colored triangular flags and human-sized white tents, but the much less busy and much less colorful field down the hill and next to the river...
The M35 bus took me across one leg of the Triborough Bridge, which leg I'm not quite sure. After no more than ten minutes of travel and our progression through the EZ pass section of what must have been a Queens toll booth, we arrived on this underdeveloped gray and green chunk of land where the roads were chunked in asphalt. The first sign had a list of seven destinations with trailing arrows that pointed towards directions in which there were no roads. My hopes were raised somewhat when I saw that we were [apparently] heading in the direction of Ward's Island, where I expected this rugby match to be taking place.
Our first stop was the Randall's Island Psychiatric Hospital, where approximately one dozen passengers, some obviously and visibly ill, some clearly employees of the hospital, exited the premises, none of them with a facial expression that suggested happiness or eagerness. There was a woman with chemically straightened hair, a shirt that said FUCK ME, and a hunched back, whose disturbed gait looked to be unrelated to any kind of physical impairment, and an elderly black man in a powder blue button down shirt, carefully polished black wingtips, and hair like James Brown, who took the stairs with a look that straddled some line between determination and disdain. A white man with one leg and arms full of crutches shifted off with much difficulty and eyes that bespoke much experience and little love. I crossed my legs the other way and texted Doug: which stop. The bus was now notably absent of females of any shade.
Numerous passengers broke from their respective mutterings to eyeball me as I placed my iPod into my backpack surreptitiously and opened up my late model Verizon cellphone to inquire, in what I hoped was a casual whisper... "Which field, Doug, exactly. and how many stops is it." No longer a question.
When the bus made a U-turn back towards the highway I got a little jumpy and texted Doug with an increasingly urgent For real what stop this bus is the scariest and for that I had to type on Abc and not T9EN.
Still, I had to call to get a hold of him. I got of at the section of the fields that are maintained by the veterans, an inordinate number of whom lack limbs. I cut a wide angle around them and walked down the strip of broken sidewalk between the two bridges. To my left was a great red bridge that was cantilevered, elaborately buttressed, with ten foot cones that looked like Eiffel Tower miniatures holding up power cables along its upper outer edges in intervals of twenty feet. On my right side was a bridge whose upper car section was painted in chipped green and was supported at regular intervals by giant, inverted tridents made of concrete. The sky was notably grey. Later, Doug asked me if I was sure that the green bridge wasn't light blue. At the rugby fields that, was the way it looked. Not so near the psychiatric hospital...
When I passed a rusted chain link fence just beyond a NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT sign that appeared to relate to nothing in the visible landscape, three twenty-ish kids emerged from the woods opposite me. One was a girl with severe features awhose uniform and muscled calves made it clear I was headed in the right direction. Two of them boasted patchy facial hair; one of them carried a frisbee.
It turned out, though, much to my surprise, that my destination was not, in fact, the busy green patch to the right of the bridge, which blasted Barry White from an invisible set of speakers and which was littered with multi-colored triangular flags and human-sized white tents, but the much less busy and much less colorful field down the hill and next to the river...
posted by Michael Deuser at 10:16 PM
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