i feel like i missed out on the earthquake fun. i felt nothing, whilst
walking around outside, toward Queens Plaza. the first inkling i had that
anything odd was afoot was when i noticed dozens of people standing
outside of the apartment buildings and places of business. it seemed
strange, but perfectly acceptable, for crowds to gather for no apparent
reason except that it was a beautiful, beautiful day. i did overhear
someone talking into his cell phone, saying “5.8” and “Virginia” and then
earthquake, but that bit of overheard circumstancia didn’t set off any
alarms in my head that an earthquake had struck. in fact i remember
dismissing that possibility out of hand, puzzled at where an earthquake
could realistically have hit for there to be any impact here. then i
forgot about it, not putting anything together until i got to queens
plaza. at queens plaza i saw hundreds of people standing around, and
that’s when i knew something was going on. the government office buildings
were all evacuated, with people complaining about cell phones not
working. i asked a police officer what was going on. i saw the crowds and
expected they were gathered around *something*, but the police officer
told me there had been an earthquake in Virginia, felt here, and that
“it’s really bad in Manhattan.” i looked toward Manhattan and saw the Citi
building standing there, as straight as ever, not turned 45 degrees to the
left or flipped asunder. it looked fine, as did everything else i could
see of Manhattan, but maybe she meant there were riots and looting and
pillaging and fornication in the streets. whatever she meant, i was going
to Manhattan anyway, so i expected to find out just how bad it was.

i was asked not to walk on the sidewalk outside the Department of
Education building (where the famous “Rubber Room” is, or used to be). i
didn’t flinch at the request, but noted it as an example of security
guards gone amok at any opportunity to assert their awesomeness. i guess
they feared the building would collapse under the mighty forces of this
horrendous shaking of the earth, or perhaps they expected mass suicides
from those left behind, those who refused to evacuate and found themselves
locked in, imperiled and serving at death’s pleasure.

i crossed the street, then, to where the few hundred people were standing.
Quintessentially, a bicyclist came racing into the area, spewing
obscenities and ordering everyone out of his way. “Get the FUCK outta the
bike lane!” he yelled. In response everybody laughed at him. One man said
“It’s an emergency, man,” but the bicyclists was having none of it. “No,
it’s not, it’s a BIKE LANE!”

I don’t know if he was just ignorant of the situation (he probably was)
but it seemed like pretty routine cyclist primacy being asserted at a
rather inappropriate time and place. It reminded me of a time on 34th
Street, in Manhattan, when a bicyclist raced the wrong way up the middle
of the street, causing a few cars to screech to a halt to avoid hitting
her. people standing nearby saw the near-collision and gave the asshole
bicyclist a thunderous round of applause for her douchery.

i don’t know how much success today’s “get the fuck outta my bike lane”
guy had in forcing people to get the fuck out of his way, but i fucking
hope he got wherever the fuck he was going.

coincidentally, i had been making calls from payphones along my way,
calling in to a voicemail i set up for a project in which i call
myself from payphones to report in on random thoughts. eventually i might
collect the messages and write them out, but i’d rather get it down to a
science whereby i can use the recordings as-is. at any rate, it turned out
that with the cell phones knocked out there was a lot of looking around,
people needing to find a phone but unable to do so, since most of the
payphones around Queens Plaza are gone. so there i was, unintentionally
hogging a valued resource in the closest thing we’ve had to an emergency
since the blackout of 2003.

i walked over the Queensboro Bridge, thinking to myself, is this really
where i want to be when the aftershocks come? i had flashes of faded
memory from a Richard Gere movie, the Mothman Prophecies, in which, if i
remember correctly, a bridge is destroyed. the Queensboro Bridge shakes
and rattles so much that i might not notice an 8.2 earthquake if i
happened to be on that span when it hit.

the oddest thing i saw all day was from the bridge. the Roosevelt Island
Tram was descending into the station on Roosevelt Island. a
well-dressed man with a cardboard cylinder in his left hand was standing
on top of the tram — on the roof. i had never seen this before, and the
man’s resemblance to Ben Affleck was disconcerting, but at the time i
imagined that the Tram had been stuck on account of the earthquake and
this one man either freaked out and climbed onto the roof or else he
bravely volunteered to do some kind of manual steering of the vessel to
bring it back to Roosevelt Island after the earthquake rendered it
impotent. then i considered the possibility that it really was Ben
Affleck, and this was some scene from a movie being filmed.

i snapped a few pictures, and when i looked at them later i concluded that
the man on the top of the Tram was an inspector, or engineer, or whatever,
doing some kind of work or structural assessment of the tram. in the
pictures i could see that there wer no passengers on the tram. there was
a ladder on the floor and two people who didn’t appear to be passengers.

so, my brief moment of fancy that the earthquake had somehow compromised
the Roosevelt Island Tram was quickly vanquished into the dull reality
that this was some routine activity.

it made me imagine, though, a trend that might evolve, in which people
dare each other to ride on top of the tram as it travels over the East
River. oh, sakes alive, i get a little nauseous just thinking about
that… i know that a fad in riding atop subway cars has come and gone at
times, usually ending with a brutal and messy death, but riding atop the
Tram would be a new level of daredevilry.

as i crossed the Queensboro i thought, without getting maudlin or
hyperoverreactive, about September 11, 2001, in particular the beginning
of the long walk from 34th street and 9th avenue in Manhattan to Astoria.
as i walked along 35th Street in Manhattan i looked at all the tall
buildings in teh garment district, tall and dark but seemingly human on
that day, and i remember thinking “Is all this going to be gone soon?” at
the time, with the twin towers smoldering and the smoke rising within my
view, it seemed like a reasonable question to ponder. in retrospect it
makes me chuckle, as do other events from that day, the inane remonstrance
of seemingly inevitable epic doom.

and yet the memory of that thought still pains me, for it exposes the
sincere fright and the fear of the day, and the days that followed.

today, though, i had the same thought, but from a more realistic point of
view. holy shit, i thought, what if all this really *was* gone? what if
the earthquake pulled the magic carpet from under Manhattan, sending the
towers and the trillions of dollars of concentrated wealth into the waters
of New York Harbor, the East River, and the Hudson. Mannahatta would rise
again from beneath the architectural sticks of conspicuous wealth, the
impacted nature stacked under the pavement like so many centuries of
pancakes would replenish itself, triumphing over and proving feeble the
seemingly invincible march of humanity.

i got to Manhattan and, daggumit, i found no riots, no looting, no
pandemonium or chaos. i don’t know what the police officer meant by
saying it was really bad in Manhattan, but she must have heard something
somewhere that made sense to her enough to share it with this passing
stranger.

i made a few more calls from payphones along 1st Avenue, noting that abotu
half of them don’t work, or do not work as expected, and then i walked
back over the Queensboro, opting out of a subway ride in anticipation of
cataclysmic aftershocks.